One of the hardest skills for me has been to curate the content I’ve created and acquired in my life. Specifically I mean the proactive habit of removing and deleting content. It’s easy to pull back the content you have visible to the public, but there’s also the libraries of content stored at home on phones, computers, paper stacks, journals.
It really has been a habit, particularly difficult to grow and exercise with any kind of frequency. I know I’m common in having a love for projects, interests, gadgets and wanting to be resourceful and helpful to others. This type of personal means you acquire tools or materials and everything else that comes with skillbuilding over an extended period of time.
Without being a bore to a reader, if you happen to come across this, I wanted to give a little advice to about curating your life that I am learning and have learned. Yes some of what I have here has stuck.
Delete emails, don’t keep them
Deleting emails feels better than keeping them. But there’s a big upside that most people don’t think of until it’s too late. Having a zero inbox makes it SO much easier to move your email provider whenever you like with no concern. As somebody who likes privacy and making good choices of providers, I don’t want to have a second thought about moving hosting plans, emails. If I find out my email provider is selling my data, I want to leave, that day and take my money or my data elsewhere. Plus everything I keep means the provider is keeping it and it’s an operational security risk. Always.
My recommendation, if you’re able, is to set a filter to remove unread messages that are older than 2-weeks. If you haven’t even opened it, it’s probably not something you’ll want to address. At the very least we know it falls under less urgency. More importantly, in regards to behavior and habit, if you know your unread email will go away, you’ll realize maybe some things ARE urgent. Addressing small things and getting on with your life is, well a great way to gain peace of mind.
I don’t really want to go into the process of deleting emails, but just know it helps to have means to handle the emails you don’t want to delete just so the main deletion process can be easier. There will be exceptions, probably. So plan on what to do with exceptions and plan on going back through the “keep for now” list a few more times and see if you can get to zero.
Images and Galleries
This one is really hard for me. I have 20 years of photos backed up. During those periods I’ve taken lots of photos and sometimes not so many. But honestly most of my photos can go away. I could probably delete 90% of them and still be quite happy. Make folders for every year that your photos go back to. Then inside those folders, make a photo for each month. You may be able to stop there, but you can also inside the ‘month’ folders create sub-folders for events where maybe a lot more photos were taken. If I shot 1000 wedding photos on May 3, 2018. Maybe inside the 2018 / May subfolder, I would have one called ‘Mary’s Wedding 05032018’ If creating these subfolders seems like a pain, you can use this utility (Windows only sorry!) called Text2Folders. That utility isn’t necessary. You can just create a starter folder set for each month of a year and copy paste them into year folders.
This one is really hard for me. I have 20 years of photos backed up. During those periods I’ve taken lots of photos and sometimes not so many. But honestly most of my photos can go away. I could probably delete 90% of them and still be quite happy. Make folders for every year that your photos go back to. Then inside those folders, make a photo for each month. You may be able to stop there, but you can also inside the ‘month’ folders create sub-folders for events where maybe a lot more photos were taken. If I shot 1000 wedding photos on May 3, 2018. Maybe inside the 2018 / May subfolder, I would have one called ‘Mary’s Wedding 05032018’ If creating these subfolders seems like a pain, you can use this utility (Windows only sorry!) called Text2Folders. That utility isn’t necessary. You can just create a starter folder set for each month of a year and copy paste them into year folders.
Videos
This is also a difficult one. Video is so huge and time consuming. They take a long time to create so the inclination is to keep all the archive footage. Also family videos, capturing those moments in time that can never be recreated, very hard to part with. Here is where you want to holster up your guns.
- Video is only good when it can be watched. Personal videos for family enjoyment, they need to be somewhere accessible in your home by you and others. On a server, on a NAS device, on a USB drive connected to your router or some other cloud accessible to family’s devices or TV. Heck your TV might even have a port you can plug a flash drive and watch the best 50 family videos. If relatives come over, why not be able to transform your TV into a playlist or slideshow loop.
- You may recreate a video you edited or pull footage from it down the road into another compilation. Odds are you won’t. And if you keep all your footage, well I suspect you plan to be an exceedingly good archivist with a lot of money for storage media and strategy for the long term.
Client and other Project Work
I do all sorts of digital work and I use software planning tools to help me with my real-world work. I may have CAD drawings for furniture builds, spreadsheets for sports coaching. Keeping them isn’t a bad idea. This is an area different to everyone. I have a storage device with a folder called ‘Projects’ and in there each client or project name has a folder. And in there I have the various documents. I’ve returned to probably 10% of those projects where I utilized old files. Some of that curation was for portfolio purposes. Unless there are images perfect for your portfolios, look at old client work and if those relationships will no longer include utilizing old files, get rid of them or commit to modifying them for use. Life moves on. You’re no longer the person you were 6 years ago. And except for logos, you probably aren’t going to use that old work. You might. But if you don’t really think it through and just blindly keep everything you could be storing gigabytes that will just be a time-sink later on. Pare it down if at all possible.
Paperwork
This one is hard because it keeps coming in. And paper that enters my home or office doesn’t seem to get any more special now than the paper was 20 years ago. Lots of junk lots of redundancy. Some important things. And the same stacks reappear on the surfaces I would prefer to have open to other things. So what should you scan and keep? Probably not much. Old photos of course and maybe your kid’s artwork that help show the evolution of his interest and skill and human development. Scan the things that are heart warming, or better yet, display them.
I have a problem of keeping old journals. They are mostly garbage. Much of journaling and drafting aren’t really fit to keep. Less than 10% probably. Old ideas can make you cringe. Some have little salient nuggets of ideas that will draw you back in hoping you can complete next time around. I’ve moved onto a new set of notebooks I’ll eventually reveal, so my plan is to copy any old notes, hopefully with dates into the new notebooks and discard all the old random ones. I don’t need 18 old notebooks. they don’t make me happy, and I certainly don’t want to move them to my next home wherever that may be.
You will keep files. And I want to give one major tip on this one. If you are in a position to get a file cabinet or box for your paperwork. Get one that fits legal size paperwork. The most important documents in your life, some of them are legal size and those should fit. You can get file boxes that can be oriented two ways. You can get elongated plastic folios. You can get cabinet drawer partitions that will handle this for you. You won’t turn back once you figure out once you use that setup.
All the things
The hardest for everyone. The things we own are always in flux. Ideally you have things coming in and going out. But I want to tell you something you may not have thought of. Possessions have additional costs above what you paid for them. Some are worth more than anything. But all have a hidden cost of removal. The possessions you have take up space in your mind. Project artifacts, junk in boxes everything in your field of view is an additional cost to your mind and body. Selling objects takes time and effort. Trashing objects takes effort as well. A coffee mug that is $14 can cost you an additional $5 once you’ve driven it to the thrift store drop-off.
There are way better people than me who can tell you how to discard and organize your possessions. Just know that you are different year after year. Be honest about the projects you want to do eventually. And be careful when you buy into possession redundancy. A lot of tech expires. Many materials degrade over time. Possessions can turn on you. You love them until you don’t. You think they are important until you feel embarrassed you wasted your money having never used them. Owning something for some people is really a relief. You finally recovered that bit of nostalgia. You have the best object in that category of objects that caught your eye. You aspire to be something where no other object will suffice. But again being honest with yourself, what amount of freedom have you lost with all your possessions in tow? What sort of missed opportunities? What mindshare or distraction have these things taken or created? What future burden are you putting on others when it’s time to move. Don’t be the old man or woman whose spouse, children or friends have to be enlisted to root through belongings that serve zero purpose.
Lastly, possessions always add up because ideas always want to be built upon. That TV needs a soundbar. That toy needs a playset. That bike needs a repair kit and a box of replacement parts.
Funny enough it is so easy to acquire things at so little cost. There are constractor quality tools you can get used or even new now for 1/10th the cost. I know several people who have no space in their workshop to build because of all the wonderful second-hand tools that came into their lives at little cost and zero friction.
Diligence is the name of the game here. Are you the type of person who can schedule curation and purge. Can you get help in developing a system to handle these things. Can you find other ways to be happy and have peace of mind than owning another thing or keeping another copy? There is a way to do better for yourself. Think of the future, think of being light and mobile and having all your faculties available, without subsystems of your mind running all the time around the things you own.