On My Minimalism

So my birthday is coming up.  My daughter recently observed to my wife that I am a minimalist.  My wife agreed, and as such, said I'm incredibly difficult to buy gifts for. I thought I would look into this a little more. I found some great thoughts on this website, unfortunately after a great bit of thought, they then immediately went to things you could buy.  An excerpt:

Minimalists want to keep clutter to a minimum so that they can better enjoy their lives. They know that if their home and schedule are cluttered with things they don’t love and need, they are sacrificing space and time for the things they do love and need. 

People who practice minimalism are often looking for ways to simplify their lives. They want to be surrounded by things that they absolutely love…ONLY what they absolutely love.  

For minimalists, it’s about priorities. If you know a minimalist enough to know what their priorities are, start there. You should be able to come up with some appropriate, and very much appreciated, gifts for the minimalists in your life. 

Minimalists aren’t necessarily opposed to receiving more things for their home, but it’s best to ask. After all, minimalists definitely want to keep clutter to a minimum. If you aren’t a minimalist, but you want to buy something for a friend or family member who is, you must consider their lifestyle. You could buy them something that makes their life easier. Or maybe something that makes their life more enjoyable. To do this, you need to know their hobbies and interests, as well as their needs. 

So.. what do I love? Getting away. Vacations and long weekends. Why? We spent time together, we play together, we eat together, we worry less. We're not constantly looking at an overflowing to do list or trying to get our daughter to finish her responsibilities. We explore, we discover, we are surrounded by a clean environment (apartment and rental car).  We're not creating clutter, we clean as we go, and the only new stuff that comes into our living space is stuff we bring back, not unwanted clutter like old papers or unwanted mail. In general, we have less.

We are surrounded by art, landscaping, things that are complete. Rather than piles upon piles of incomplete. And if something does need help, usually a quick phone call and someone else comes and takes care of it. Everything is quieter. The pantry is simpler. And did I mention there's no mail? Even the time in the car is better. It's not our own traffic in our way, and we're not in a hurry to get somewhere on a schedule. Instead, it's just our journey towards whatever we're going to explore, or back to homebase to regroup and prepare for the next adventure.

What do I hate? So many things unfinished. So many demands on my time. So many things stacked in piles in progress because that's the best place to put them.  Some of this is the limitations of our small house and limited storage, some of it is the nature of too much stuff but some of it is just the way we process things in progress, like my giant pile of books to read. On vacation, I'll only have one or two, or I'll just have my Kindle, I won't have the massive pile like is currently on my nightstand.

And then there's the anxiety of the world intruding on our lives. School, work, the rest of the world. Social media.

What is a gift? Less things unfinished. Less clutter. More things accomplished, cleaned up, put away, checked off the list. More time together, more exploration, more discovery. Simplicity. Things getting better. Piles getting smaller. To do lists getting shorter. Fresh air, singing, happy, silly, being present. Eating on the patio.

When we're on vacation, it's a break from the pressures of this world. Of what the future holds.  Bills that will come due, the living arrangements for our son in the future, especially after we die. Our estranged relationships with extended family. There are people who take care of things, whether something needs repainting, something needs weeding, etc.

Does this actually yield gift ideas? Not so much. And really, isn't quite a bit of this within my control? Isn't there ways I could reframe things so that I'm not being so selfish with my time, that I'm not wasting time on things that don't help piles to get smaller, being present, not filling my time, and so on? Yes.

So how does this help someone who wants to get gifts for people who are impossible to shop for?  It's probably the following:

• Shared Experiences - exploration and discovery, chances to experience new things. The gift of time.
   
• Indulgences - the opportunity to treat yo' friends - food, artwork, new landscaping, treatments for the mind and body
   
• Help - someone else to share the load when it comes to tackling the never-ending list: painters, landscapers, housekeeping, consultation with financial advisors or life coaches or job advisors and resume writers, baby-sitting, errand-running, coach/trainer/dietician for weight loss
   
• Elimination - identifying anything that the recipient feels is a responsibility placed on them that's not really their responsibility. If it can be discarded, that's one thing. But it's something the minimalist feels strongly about, then may not simply be eliminated, it may need to be addressed (see "help").   Is there physical stuff that's causing the minimalist anxiety... can it be eliminated or stored elsewhere?
   
• Technology - like help, is there some device that will take over a task or make a task easier? I know in our house, all the Alexa-enabled stuff and the RoboVac are good examples of this.   

I would like to thank my family for making me think about this question -- and (and this is huge) for letting me have the space to retype my handwritten notes from earlier today, turn them into a blog post, and reflect on my own participation in improving things, because a lot of this has aspects that I can address on my own and treat myself to more simplicity. 

Mail Call

I've been saying for a long time now that I'd pay the post office to deliver mail less frequently to my house, if I could just subscribe to some once-a-week delivery service for $48/year, it would be totally worth it.  Nothing urgent, valuable or time-sensitive comes in the mail. That's what email is for.   Of course, I'd still like to get packages.

Processing all the junk mail, obscuring our name and address, sorting, recycling, it's a pain and takes time.  I've tried just letting it pile up on the counter, but that's not without its own annoyances. 

I've found a compromise. Through the USPS' website, you can - for free - do short-term mail holds.  I tried one a few weeks ago. It was confusing...

* Starts On should be the day they start holding, right?  They still delivered mail that day.
* Ends On - is that the last day they hold mail, or the first day they start delivering normally again?  Not quite sure.
* I still got the daily emails telling me what mail was queued
* We got at least one notice from Amazon saying that a package couldn't be delivered (though it ultimately way)
* We got a notice from the post office saying we needed to come to the post office to pick up a package (we didn't; it was delivered)

I've also started unsubscribing from mail at the source where possible (a local realtor was really confused about us demanding to stop receiving his newsprint newsletter) and refusing obvious junk mail.  (No, SiriusXM, the 14th offer you send won't be the one that gets us to sign up.)

But just having the mail delivered less often is great.  It doesn't clutter up the house and we're still able to dispatch it to the recycling bin quickly. It does mean regularly going to their website to start a new mail hold and it does mean to expect some packages won't arrive as quickly as expected, but it's just one less source of incoming clutter. 

And that makes me happy.

Spring Cleaning: Evernote @unclutterer

Evernote's premise is great. You put stuff into it, it remembers it. Search for it later and there it is.

Kind of like your own private Google. Especially if you use one of the paid versions which allows you to share stuff across lots of devices and search inside handwriting and PDFs.

What kinds of stuff? Photos, handwritten notes, audio recordings, forwarded emails, files and more.

Our family uses it a lot, kind of like a virtual filing cabinet. However, it can get unruly. So, my goal is to review stuff in Evernote once a year. It may mean nothing more than a quick glance, but it has allowed me to clean up some stuff and to delete other stuff.

My two-step process will help you to keep your Evernote tidy - ready to learn a manageable habit?

Step 1: Find all unreviewed notes. 

 Search for "-tag:*reviewed*"
Do this step every time you start.  Tag everything you find with "zzz - not yet reviewed"

What this search does: Looks for any items that do not contain a tag containing the word "reviewed" (for our purposes, we assume that the word doesn't appear in any tags outside of the ones we're going to use)

Step 2: Review 5 notes

Go to your tags selection and click on zzz - not yet reviewed tag to see all the notes.  Look at 5 or so. If...

...they're no longer useful: DELETE

...they're useful: tag with today's date, like this: "zzz - reviewed - 2018-02-24"

This is also a good time to update, combine with other notes, reach out to others if there's outstanding issues you need assistance with.  This should only take a few minutes each time you sit down to do it and you'll appreciate seeing things re-surface that at one time you felt were important enough to store in long-term digital memory.

Eventually, you'll have a list of tags holding items that have been reviewed and after a year has passed, you can start to review them, replacing the old "reviewed" tab with one with the new date.

Not using Evernote?

Here's my referral link.  Click that and sign up and they'll give you a free trial of the paid product (and give me credit towards my next payment).  Even if you move to the free product at the end of the trial period, I think you'll find Evernote to be a handy tool to helping you keep track of all the digital stuff in your life.

In a day....

Rome wasn't built in a day, neither was it destroyed in a day.

Same with my clutter. I spent some good time yesterday dealing with some clutter. I pulled a bunch of stuff from the bedroom to the dining room table and then went through it as best I could. There was stuff to recycle, donate, trash and keep. But, I wasn't able to completely sort - it was just overwhelming.

But, it was a good effort, chipping away. What I took back upstairs to the bedroom was much less than I took down. I have a plan of attack:

(1) Regularly revisit the remainder, continuing to chip away.
(2) Aggressively prevent new clutter from making it into the bedroom.

This feels good, this feels right, this feels like progress.

Feed Sift

Five things I wanted to share.

-1-

Words Are Hooks, Words Are Levers - Another good reminder that words mean things, better if we agree on what. (Seth Godin)

-2-

The Last Stand of Walter White - A looong look at Bryan Cranston and his role on Breaking Bad and his life before, during and after. (GQ)

-3-

LEGO Brooklyn: Artist Recreates Borough with Plastic Blocks - man, to have that kind of time and that many Legos... dang. (Web Urbanist)

-4-

Five Ways to Do What You Want When You Want - a great skimmable reminder that we do have control over the chaos of our lives and that we can easily optimize and improve things. (Unclutterer)

-5-

Freeze and Explode by Cassettes Won't Listen (h/t Zen Musings)

Shot

Anyone who's read this blog for any length of time knows that I desire a simpler life than the one I have.  There are many parts I cannot change, but one area I can change is clutter.  There was a time when I thought I was going to be single my whole life.  I had often wondered if I could make do with a van and a gym membership.  But I had a cat and I still believed I'd find someone, so I opted against that lifestyle.  Plus, it would have been harder back then - phones were big, clunky with limited batteries and you couldn't watch TV on them.  Wireless data plans and cell phone charging were hard to come by and there were far fewer 24-hour Wal*Marts where you could park overnight to have access to a bathroom.  

Anyhow, back to my point... uncluttering... I don't know why, but the other day the thought popped into my head "If there was a fire, what would I grab?"  Certainly, the family and the cat, but what kinds of stuff would I grab?  There's a tall dresser in our room that has a few of Lori's collectibles and then a bunch of mine: a few wooden train cars and a who bunch of shot glasses.

I used to collect them when I went on trips.  Now, to look at them, I just shake my head and wonder what was I thinking.  Here's a bunch of simple pieces of glass with something painted on them, made in China and then horrendously marked up.  

This comic ("How to Learn About Someone by Examining Their Possessions," Basic Instructions, 2013-02-28) didn't help.  Well, maybe it did.  

How sad is this?

My latest organization attempt is to carry four (4!!!!) calendars with me.  On paper.  Perhaps not the model of simplicity, or perhaps precisely the model of simplicity (in that it's not complicated and technologically cumbersome).

In time, I will probably figure out a way to improve the process, but right now, I'm going to live with this because it seems to be working.

They are:

* My current work week (although it has changed quite a bit since then so I may need to re-print) - this helps me throughout the day to know where I need to go next and who I'll be meeting with next

* My blog post plans - I didn't blog enough in February, so I'm trying to be more intentional in March

* The current month for our family stuff - I felt like I was often surprised by events and so I decided I wanted to be more informed and possibly even be more responsible or do more leading and planning of stuff.

* The current month - when I might be able to get to the big to do items around the house - Remember the Milk is great for those daily repeatable tasks, but I found that I was just getting them done each day and never getting to the big projects.  So, I pulled the large projects out onto a list on our bulletin board in the kitchen and then tried to place some of them on the calendar where I might be able to get to them.  There's definitely more items then good potential dates, so it may help me plan a more reasonable list for April.

13. Ten Things Fail Jameses for the Day #JanBlogaDay

Today we've been issued the topic Top Ten. We don't get much more than a common theme to go from. Sometimes that can be challenging, other times it's quite easy. I convinced my wife to participate and it's been really interesting to see what she commits to screen in a long-form post. She's the queen of Facebook (every post generates enough comments and likes to be its own forum) but I love the insight that comes from the longer thoughts.

So I've been thinking about Top Ten today. I like lists. Lists are my thing. Before I even knew what the topic was, I was making a list. The past few nights I (and the whole family) have been blessed with good sleep. But then last night, we weren't. Rachel and I made poor choices (me staying up too late, her waking up in the middle of the night and choosing to camp out by the supply cabinet eating snacks and reading books), Ben had a period of wakefulness and Lori just didn't sleep well with lots of tossing and turning. So what I was thinking about in my head was how I would react today. I've had a lot of days lately with negativity and I thought it was just how things were, but these past few days, yesterday in particular, showed me just how valuable a great night's sleep can really be.

So if the only difference between yesterday and today was the quality of sleep (and the disappointing near miss by the Seahawks), here's what I need to be cognizant of today:

1. Interruption Frustration - I learned about this from the free therapy I get by attending Rachel's Neurobehavioral consults. This is when you're so engrossed in something that interruptions are seismic, cataclysmic. She and I both suffer from this. I've learned to endure them silently, giving my attention to the interruption while inside what's going on isn't so pretty. Rachel lets the inside out and it can be scary. For her, we've learned to ease into things that will be a disruption. For me, I've learned to remain calm. My ability to shift gears into the interruption is far improved with a good night's sleep.

Tactic/Response: Anticipate interruptions and mentally prepare for them, do not allow myself to become so engrossed that it's difficult to temporarily surface and shift gears.

2. Plan Disruption - that's happening at this exact moment. I had a plan to work on this post and now I'm being asked to do something else as a member of this household and not a selfish person focusing only on myself.

Tactic/Response: Reprioritize. Put the laptop back on top of the printer and walk away. This post can wait. A child needs tickling. Lori's still on the clock her job needs her somewhere else at the moment. At minimum, prepare to multitask.

3. Overstimulation - I can over-stimulated by too much noise especially when I'm trying to think.

Tactic/Response: Be involved in the noise-making if necessary. Eliminate unnecessary noise (fans, music, cat meowing) where possible. (Don't worry, not eliminating the cat, just figuring out why he's meowing and stop him.)  Take a break if the noise is too distracting and can't be eliminated (like a child's TV show.. those are only 22 minutes long anyhow.)

4. Financial Anxiety - It's bill-paying day. The finances are a bit touchy and complicated at the moment.

Tactic/Response: Remind myself that there's nothing to be anxious about and much to celebrate - Lori and I are on the same page to a greater degree than we have ever been before, we've spent the week reducing costs and setting some goals in a way we never have been before. We're making progress, we have a plan.

Free Therapy

It's been quite fascinating learning about our children's diagnose, a kind of free therapy. for instance, i learned that autistic children sometimes make use of a weighted blanket at dinner or sleep time - that it's comforting and heko them feel secure. So i've lately been adding extra blankets on the bed (this doesn't work in the summer) and been sleeping far more soudly. Or when in a meeting with our daughter's neurobehavioralist, he asks "Who lived in a house with boxes?" my wife quickly raises her hand, remembering the constant moving around they did when she as growing up. Or when he asks "Who uses lists as a coping mechanism?" and we both quickly raise our hands. Even though the sessions are about her and how she's doing at home or school, he will often drop these massive nuggets that are just so helpful to us. Like how Lori and I have different levels of tolerance for clutter. Lori's coping mechanism is to spread things out - it allows her to survey and know where things are. Mine is to consolidate into action piles.

And it makes sense because when it's time to attack an action pile, then I spread it out so that I can survey it, which at work manifests itself in two interesting ways - a box-lid of stuff i'm working through and the extreme measure of sometimes completely ignoring a thread in email if there starts to be too many people talking all at once - I have to wait until I can set aside some time to go through all of them (sometimes printing out all the emails) and synthesize a summary of everything I know and don't know so that I can go and get the gaps filled in and understand what needs to be done next. It is a coping mechanism that has really served me well in most case, except when the matter is more urgent and I'm begging to be able to step back and be left alone to look at the bigger picture and understand all the players. That must be a bit of aensory overload.

But this has all been beneficial to us - Lori's adopted some new techniques that has allowed her to spread things out a little less (file folders, etc.) and I've learned to be more careful about how I move piles of things (coupons, receipts, recipes) to protect the sanctity of their arrangement and relationship to one another. Mid-week, the dining room table is often Grand Central for stuff in and out - from mail to clean laundry - so we're always looking for space to work and so these realizations about each other have just made that all the more harmonious.

I know he prefers to work with children, but man, if we could send the children to a friend's house and then have him come over and just hang out with us for a few hours we'd learn so much about our own quirks and coping mechanisms and brains. But for now, we'll just have to be content with being alert and observant and picking up every lttle nugget that falls our way.

Simplifying Google Reader

Another area that I've been feeling is overwhelming is Google Reader.  So I began cutting it back.  Still, there are 184 links.  That's too many.  I was going to make a list, but I'm not still done paring, and if they are ones I'm not interested in following anymore, why would you want a list of them?

Though I will note that I dropped Inhabitat. While the architectural stuff is interesting, I know enough to know that their posts are sometimes wildly inaccurate, sometimes written by people who have no clue what they're writing about - like the tour of 15th. Ave Tea & Coffee that was actually posted months after it became a Starbucks and dang if those people at Inhabitat don't scream (not cry) wolf at least once a month. Talk about alarmist to the point of "Shut up shut up shut up SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!" Geez. I don't need that kind of stress in my life.

I have found now that I'm no longer running The Sift, I'm not feeling compelled to watch the links so closely for content that might be useful to that site. It's allowed me to be a lot more picky about what I bother to read, it's allowed me to skim much quicker, and it's meant if I don't bother to look at Google Reader for a day or two (or three) that I have to be all that worried about the avalanche that awaits me.

Blog Overload

Does anyone really need more than one blog? I don't think so. I maintained several, but really to what end? One had outlived its original intent and two others were half-baked attempts to make money. But I lacked the time and effort and money necessary to invest in their success, so they simply became drains on my time, distractions from the other things I wanted to do. So near the end of last month, I closed them down. I didn't delete them, the traffic will still earn me a few pennies a month. But I won't actively maintain them and probably not produce new content for them.

This blog, too, will not keep up last year's experiment of a post-a-day. Again, to what end? I'll post when I have something truly worth sharing. And I won't look for it to make money or bring me fame. I will own it, it will not own me. (Like I mentioned on 12/31, I had already begun pre-populating, so the pace of one-a-day will continue for a few more days, but it's no longer a goal I'm aiming for.)

Goodbyes to:

• Federal Way Graffiti
• 100 Calories
• The Sift

tvjames x blog and dad2be will remain, although dad2be's been pretty dormant for some time now.

Things

As with all new years, it provides the opportunity for new starts, new beginnings, new attempts to better ourselves (yes, you know where I'm going with this), new goals for oneself, the dreaded new year's resolutions.

After years of varying participation from the not-really-hipster not-really-ironic mostly-just-idiotic "I resolve to have no resolutions" to a full-out multi-point plan with a number of objectives.

But you know what? Even those are just things. I have too many things. Phsyical, mental, it's all clutter. So, for this year, I'm going to have a simple motto:

Simplify.

That's it.  That's the entire deal.   What does that mean in practice?   I'm letting most of my magazine subscriptions lapse.  I haven't been able to keep up anyway.   I'll go through my wardrobe - I don't need this many clothes.   I'm going to stop getting new books from the library - I own plenty I still need to read.  I'm going to unsubscribe like stuff like crazy.  I'm going to take a long, hard look at my social media usage.  And my Google Reader subscriptions.  And my blogging.  And my Remember the Milk tasks.  And on and on and on.   I'll volunteer less.

Maybe.

Because that last paragraph?  That's crazy.  That is absolutely the antithesis of Simplify.  And that's how it starts.  Take a great idea and ruin it with complexity.
No.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Simplify.


Certainly, some things are non-negotiable.  God, family, work, friends.  Can't really (and wouldn't want to) reduce those experiences.  But simplification elsewhere may free up more time for those experiences that truly matter.  (Composed 11/26 at 10:20 pm.)

Not of Macy's Quality

I'll always have a special place in my heart for Macy's.  They did, afterall, employ Santa Claus.  The other day in my walk through Tukwila, I noticed this:

Right there on Southcenter Pkwy., surrounded by retail, is Macy's Logistics and Operations Center.  You can see it here on this map:


View Larger Map

It's such a disconnect from what you think of when you think of Macy's.  At the very least, you think a pretty decent retailer.  But then what's this?  For reasons that boggle my mind (I'm weird like that), they think this is good enough.  A bunch of busted-up old trailer trucks left out to rot, backed up against Southcenter Parkway and a completely strip of dirt and weeds and mangled trees devoid of any sort of effort whatsoever to make it look nice.

Now... Tukwila doesn't win awards for urban planning or visual appeal, but why on earth would Macy's want to proudly advertise that this mess right in the heart of retail is theirs?

If they aren't interested in cleaning it up and no one from the city is asking them to, you'd think someone would realize maybe they ought to remove the sign and operate anonymously.

It's Not That Simple (A Work and Life-Related Post)

A few thoughts have recently stuck with me in a big way.  The first is something Lindsey Talerico picked up at ideation, the weird notion that we've turned poverty into an industry - does my salary depend on someone else's poverty?  The second is just my own desire to simplify, to be more focused, to have less distractions, less clutter in my life.

The first is an interesting bit - in Matthew (26:11) were hear Jesus quoted with the familiar phrase "The poor you will always have with you but you will not always have me."  So, organizations like mine that try to make the world a better place for children will probably always have a reason to exist, I know many of us who work there desire to put ourselves out of a job. But at the same time, I travel each day to an office building, take the stairs to the third floor, go to my desk, drop my laptop in the dock, press power, grab my coffee cup and stroll to the coffee maker.  I'm really far removed from the "real work" - the boots on the ground, those who are working *with* people in communities where there is great need, to help them plan for self-sustainable futures where some of the current problems - water, food security, education, health are enjoyed by the inhabitants when we leave.  The model is a little bit complicated because it's not a hand-out.  We're not in the business of socialism or Robin Hoodism.  We don't ask donors in the United States to give because they're rich so we can skim some off the top before handing money over to poor people somewhere "out there."  We don't build wells and roads and then say "Good luck with that."  We go into a community and ask if we can help.  If the community is willing, we produce a plan together that allows us to leave after a certain period of time and the community is better off and stays better off.   We bring expertise from having done this process many times in the past several decades, but it's not us alone going in and telling people who to do, it's us going in, partnering with people and helping them to improve the quality of their own lives.  Which means programs specific to that community, to address the issues they face.  In simplest terms, we don't drill for water and build a pump.  We help them buy a pump, we make sure they're trained on how to maintain the pump and have a plan to continue to maintain the pump and afford replacement parts after we leave.  *Then* we drill for water.  So, yeah, it is complicated.  

So we look at programs that simply focus on a single aspect, like water, and yearn for the simplicity of their value proposition. 

And then we go "but our process, our methodology is different, more involved, more complicated."

And then we tell our constituents that it's more difficult.  And then we turn around and do complicated stuff in the office.  You might say complexity is the norm.  We say "trust us, we know what we're doing" but then we say "but it's really complicated."   Sometimes we then try to explain the entire process, sometimes we talk about pieces of it.  And it takes a long time before you feel like you have a good understanding of how your piece of the puzzle fits into the grander picture.

I read an article recently about the advice Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook had received from Steve Jobs: "That's focused on building as high quality and good things as you are. How to keep an organization focused, right, when I think the tendency for larger companies is to try to fray and go into all these different areas."

I certainly know in my work and home life that I could stand to be a little more focused.  I'm working on it.  I'm thinking that it might be my "theme" for next year.  I'll certainly work at simplifying before then, but I'm toying around with the idea of how to make that into a mission for my life for next year.

I think if I could have lunch with the boss, I'd suggest we need that approach for work as well - that we all need to look at what we're doing and wonder if we'd made it overly complex.  If we slowed down and really looked carefully at everything we were doing, could we reach the same ends more efficiently?  Is there any areas where we've lost focus?  What if, from the top, we heard the message "Make things simpler."?  

I know this isn't specific to our workplace, I've heard it from others who have come from other places and I've experienced it myself in my past jobs as well.  It often feels like it's the problem that's causing so many problems in government these days as well.  

I recently read a quote -- I'm getting it wrong now (because I'm looking on Google to attribute it and coming up empty) but it was something like "All great civilizations operate on the edge of chaos."  That feels like it sums things up for me in my personal life as well.  At the same time, I'm looking at my daughter and the Amazon wish list she's building, people are starting to ask me for gift ideas for me and I'm looking at all the stuff I'm having trouble maintaining as it is.  

I recently took stock of all the things I was trying to juggle and created a "meta" list to keep track of how on top of them I was.  It's harder than I thought.   So now I'm toying with the idea of creating a theme or mission for myself next year of "Simplicity" and then looking at all the ways that I might make that happen.  

How about you?  How's your focus?  

Meta

I had to start a list to keep track of all the things I'm trying to keep track of.  It turns out that it's harder to stay on top of everything than I thought.  

Reading: when did I last pick up the magazine I'm currently reading?  I have a massive stack of unread magazines.  I'm going let many of the subscriptions lapse.  Once I'm caught up (ha) I'll think about resubscribing.

Reading: when did I last pick up the book I'm currently reading?  I have a massive list of books I want to read, so if I want to learn and grow, I need to regularly be making progress.

Email: when did I last get my personal email up-to-date?  It gets out of hand quickly.

Quicken: when did I last reconcile spending and check for new bills to pay?

Run: when did I last run?  Now, I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 220 miles left to run.  I'm ahead of schedule, but barely.  And it's been difficult to fit it in lately.

Calendar: when did I actually look at the calendar to make sure I'm keeping up on all of the larger things, like preparing for events and holidays and stuff?

Laundry: laundry is one of the things I do to help around the house.  If I don't keep up with it, it piles up quickly.

Cat: I feel guilty about how little time we spent with our pets in the past few years, especially now that most of the cats have passed away (or in the case of the dog, placed in a new home).  It became habit to keep the pets all confined to the downstairs so that the upstairs stayed cat-hair- and cat-mess-free.  But then if we were only downstairs to watch TV while we exercised, the pets got very little attention.  So this is to remind me to make sure that the cat gets some attention, whether it's spending time sitting on the couch while watching TV, or letting him up (since he's not messy) from time-to-time to be around us.

Prayer: when I hear of prayer requests, I place them on my prayer list.  There was a while there where I neglected it, only to revisit and find prayers requests for babies-on-the-way only to realize those were now babies who were here.  So this reminds me to regularly pray for a few requests and then move them to the bottom.

Bible Study: it's at our house, but then I kept not doing the reading and being disrupted by children during the video.  So this is supposed to help me to do more study during the week and watch the video ahead of time.

Google Reader: keeping up with all the stuff that I find interesting and want to keep current on.

Remember the Milk: this is what makes it meta.  When I use RTM, it keeps me current on all the stuff I need to do.  When things get busy, I ignore it for a day or two.  I found that if I can get it updated the night before, I'm much more likely to use it the next day to get the important stuff done.

So now as long as I look at this meta-list frequently, I can easily see the area most in need of attention.  We'll see how useful this is in the long-run.  (Though the really long-run actually needs to consider simplification.)

Odds and Ends 93

1. LAST PERSON BLOGGING -- I Need to Get Paid For This

2. INHABIT -- Yunak Evleri Is a 5-Star Hotel Built Into Ancient Caves - including photo gallery. wild. I want to go to there.

3. MASHABLE -- 3 Things Brands Must Do to Reach Millennials Online

4. UNCLUTTERER -- Pursuing the Life You Desire

5. LIFEHACKER -- Drag and Drop Files Into Chrome to Upload Them Faster - small but brilliant tip

6. CLICKER -- The World is Watching: The State of Online Videos

7. CHOW DOWN SEATTLE -- Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars - these look good.

8. LOSE IT! BLOG -- Lose It! 3.5 Available in App Store - some great updates, including the ability to share foods and recipes (and lots more)

9. CNET NEWS -- Blockbuster laughed at Netflix partnership offer

10. ENGADGET -- Chevy Volt starts shipping to customers, most of whom forgot they ordered one last decade

Odds and Ends 88

1. LAST PERSON BLOGGING -- Spinach (and Allrecipes) to the Rescue!

2. USA TODAY -- Hotel managers find room at the inn for needy families - via Kevin

3. ENGADGET -- Racing Green Endurance team completes its 16,000 mile, electric Pan-American trip

4. SETH GODIN -- Where Do Ideas Come From? - awesome

5. SEATTLE TRANSIT BLOG -- Redundancy - trains did great in the snow, but the argument is that that's not enough.

6. FRANK CHIMERO -- Content - via Amy

7. UNCLUTTER -- Identifying Bad Processes

8. LIFEHACKER -- Start a Meal Exchange to Save Money and Enjoy More Homemade Meals - Lori does this. It's very cool.

9. INHABIT -- Coca-Cola Working On Solar AC System for Truck Fleet

10. VIDEO -- Bouncing Ben

Getting It All Done

It's pretty obvious that whenever I go on vacation, I don't simply enjoy it. I analyze why I'm enjoying it (defeating the purpose?) to see if there's anything I can learn from it to make my home life more vacation-like.

One of the things that has really resonated with me over the years is the reset. I've tried to incorporate some of that into my own life. Whether it's trying to leave work with a clean desk each night (and eliminating the types of things that cause it to get messy in the first place - goodbye, hand-written notes, hello, Evernote!), or trying to put some things back to a standby state at home, it's been helpful at keeping me blissful and relaxed.

However, it's difficult. There's not always time to do it, there's more things that ought to be reset than I have time to reset, and sometimes, I have to choose between getting something done and spending time with my family. (Happy to say family usually wins.)

And then it dawned on me. There's a bigger problem here. And it's not just in my house, but it's a national problem... not enough people are employing maids, housekeepers or home managers. Instead, they're trying to do it all themselves. And so less gets done, and the unemployment rate stays high.

Right now, I know we couldn't cut out enough to afford to hire someone full-time, but when we were both working outside the home full-time, we did enjoy the services of a housekeeper who came every other week for a few hours and it was totally worth it. Now, granted, in some cases her idea of a reset was different from ours (we fought for months on where the canisters went in the kitchen until she finally relented), but on the days she came, we were downright excited during the drive home, knowing when we got home, there'd be nothing to do but kick back, relax, and enjoy the finer things in life. (Those things being 'not dishes' and 'not laundry' and 'not tidying.')

Working for a non-profit where we're trying to raise money to help children get food or water or access to medicine or education, it seems like it's bordering on heresy to even think of having someone come in and help us. But, really, is it any different than paying someone else to build a fence or fix a plumbing leak? At the end of the day, how much is our time worth and can someone else do the work cheaper or faster or more efficiently, leaving more time for family? (Or, failing that, can someone else get all the work done that's being neglected?)

An interesting thing to think about.

The Elusivity of Simplicity

We're away for the weekend. Again, I'm marveling at the simplification.

As much as I enjoy it, it is also a bummer because I know it won't last. I know that once I return home, things will return to their normal, cluttered, frustrating life. I know it's something that's lived somewhat in a vacuum.

I know, by design, a vacation isn't real life. It's a break from it. We're in a furnished home and there are other family members helping to entertain the children.

But I desire more vacation in my real life. So, I'm trying to learn what I can to take back to my real life.

Practical:

* Need to add more storage to laundry room.
* Need to purchase far more plastic storage bins. Things in plastic storage bins (with lids!) don't stray too far from where they belong because they have a place to go back to. Not junk bins as much of our plastic is, but specific, labeled plastic bins where stuff goes.
* Less. Less. Less. Whatever. Just less.
* Less furniture in a room. Especially drawers where stuff can be shoved and forgotten about.

Less Practical:

* Build clothing storage into the massive crawlspace under our house. Store more of my clothes there. Bring up clothes in smaller batches as needed.
* Throw out a lot more stuff. Stuff is a nice word for it.

Just thinking about going home makes me anxious. I hate all the clutter in our house.

Odds and Ends 84

1. LAST PERSON BLOGGING -- Updates

2. INHABIT -- Inhabit's Top Green Car Picks from the LA Auto Show

3. CROSSCUT -- Seattle schools could use some of what Kalamazoo has (yes, you read right)

4. SETH GODIN -- Our normal approach is useless here

5. FURTHER DISPATCHES -- To quote a friend: “Yay! I can finally talk about it!”

6. UNCLUTTERER -- Identifying non-physical clutter

7. ENGADGET -- FCC, Justice Department look to prevent Comcast from hogging NBC's online video all for itself

8. SEATTLE TRANSIT BLOG -- A Glimpse of a More Sustainable Seattle

9. I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER -- Cats vs. Dogs: An Infographic

10. MASHABLE -- Why the “Dumbphone” Market Is Still Ripe for Innovation