I should know better than to 'do nothing' in what amounts to the last seven days of the year. Doing nothing allows errant thoughts to enter through the inner ear resulting in (sometimes) action being taken. Today has been a purging kind of day. Having evicted most of the physical clutter from the house since we moved in here nearly eighteen months ago, today I started work on the digital clutter. Oh yeah - that shit mounts up faster than supermarket carrier bags in the second drawer down. I repeat the exercise here simply because I figure you might get some use out of it. Actually, some of the de-cluttering was so long overdue that I've already forgotten what the hell it was:
Twitter: Been seriously thinking about shutting down that account for a couple of months now, which would leave me with only pinterest. I never really got on with twitter in a big way. I occasionally drop some 'funny as hell' statement on there and half a dozen people think I'm great for four seconds but that's about the long and the short of it. 1: I can't do anything in 140 characters. 2. I'm not really interested in what anybody else has to say in less than 140 characters. 3. Anybody pimping their wares of interest across twitter can't be that serious about their shit, right? 4. My kids think it sucks - that means everybody still on it is at least five years behind the times. My kids like to... get this... talk to each other. Sadly, I still have some day job still invested in the old network so I need to see whether I would be missed or not. Somehow I doubt it. If you found yourself un-followed today, don't take it personally. I still love you but either a) I am testing the leaving waters or b) I still love you but your tweets bore me to death and you should probably think about leaving too...
Pinterest: I kind of like this one, so for now it can stay. I like dumping shit on there that I see across the web and not having to administer it in any way. Time will tell... it's not important right now. There's been enough carnage for one day.
Email: This was a big job. Somehow, I have ended up on a lot of mailing lists ranging from publishing companies letting me know their latest releases across the board to people and things I might have once thought were a good idea. All fixed now. An empty inbox is a sexy inbox - unless of course it contains something you actually want to see - which was always kind of the point anyway, wasn't it? This tactic now also has some rules to go along with it. Time not spent dealing with nothing at all, leaves a hell of a lot more time available for creating.
AddShit: Yeah, I know it wasn't called that, but you'll notice (or maybe you won't) that I've removed the AddThis 'thing' from the bottom of each blog post. I'm sure everybody that stops by here is smart enough to paste a link into something else of their own choosing if they want to share a post. Mostly though, it occurred to me that for every post I wrote, it ended with the promotion of somebody else's brand. So I write 800 words and the last thing you see is a twitter icon... or a google icon... or an icon icon. That's about as smart and as useful as sticking my thumb in my eye after each post. So, fuck that shit.
It took me about an hour to sort all of this out but it's probably cut down what I lovingly call 'cocking about time' by a good few hours a week. The cause of this frenetic culling? I started flipping through a book called AntiFragile by Nassim Taleb which hammered home the message that as someone that wants to write books for a living, I should be writing books for a living and not getting sidetracked by emails, what other people are doing etc... I want to spend any time I do free up for myself, doing the things I love for myself - hanging out with the kids, travelling, raising ancient woodland God's from their slumber... those sorts of things. That's a very brief generalisation of it but you get the drift - and though many people have said this to me previously, maybe it was the way he said and what he was talking about at the time that clicked it into place. Good book. Go find it.