Reality Upgrade

I have been trying to get my life organized for quite some time now, and some how I have never quite seemed to make it happen. The ultimate goal, of course, is to make my life a little more mobile. The last time I moved I filled an entire Uhaul, but when my roommate Lili moved to Kurdistan, she did it with only a few suitcases.

Jealous? Me? Noooo….

In any case, I have recently been inspired by this post over at Zenhabits.com, and I am going to be using the technique mentioned there of organizing by starting from a clean slate. I am putting (almost) everything I own into cardboard boxes, and taking things out of them as I use them. Sometime in December (to make sure I make it through a change of seasons) I will give away or throw out anything that is left in the box.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to come as close as I can to only having 100 things. 100 is a somewhat arbitrary number, but it seems like a good starting place.

In other news, here is some great advice on how to keep an organized office in a very, very small space, which is another goal of mine.

I’ll keep you posted here on the progress of my organizational quest, and feel free to share your comments!

This is a fascinating article from the Washington Post about hoarding. It is the story of a man (Michael S. Rosenwald) who’s extreme hoarding was beginning to ruin his marriage, so he went on a quest to understand why he feels compelled to hoard.

It is a rather long article, and is more of an autobiographical tale than a scientific study, but it is interesting to see the world from the point of view of someone who has a hard time getting rid of stuff. As he mentions in the article, we see people who are buried in their possessions on television, but it is rare to see it from the inside. Enjoy!

Jonas out.

Once upon a time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I opened a Yahoo email account. I quickly used it to sign up for every imaginable website, and it quickly go to the point where I would receive several hundred emails a day, most of which blasted right through the wimpy spam filter Yahoo had back then.

When I got one of the first Gmail accounts, I vowed that I would only give out that account name to my close friends, and would therefor avoid spam.

Fast forward to today, and even in that nice pristine Gmail account, I get easily 10-20 emails a day, all of which are to some degree important. For instance, I can’t very well block all emails from Amazon, or I might not get the confirmation email when I buy something.

My email box was quickly filling up, and I was not sure what to do about it. I tried using filters to sort mail into individual folders, but became excessive quickly.

It was then that I found this great article about email organization from Lifehacker. I put it into place, and my email box is once again a pristine space where the only emails are ones I haven’t read yet.

So check it out, maybe it will help you as much as it did me.