Keeping Myself Busy

I’ve been keeping myself busy lately, the idea being to sulk as little as possible about the girl who didn’t want me. So I’m hardly at home and when I finally get there I’m continuing the big reorg operation, currently focusing on sorting the piles of mail accumulated over more than 2 years.

I’m trying to reduce clutter. I found out that the less things I have at home, the happier I am to be in it. That’s why I’m throwing away a lot of (mostly unused) possessions. But for some things it’s hard to find a place. For example, I have a lot of “souvenirs” (ticket stubs, newspaper clips, pictures) I would like to keep. So I think I’m going to get a nice box and put them all inside, pretty much unsorted.

The same goes for my computers – I’m deleting old files I’ve been keeping around for years, some without any good reason. And just like the physical equivalents, sometimes I don’t know where to put things – in which folder should I place old pictures? Unfinished poems and stories? All kinds of digital souvenirs like email attachments I got? What about the emails themselves? It’s not always easy to sort them out. And in the computer I can’t just throw them in a virtual box (folder) unsorted – that’s where they started in the first place.

When it comes to task management, I started using Gmail’s dead simple Tasks window (here’s how it works). Along with Google Calendar’s SMS reminders (they’re free, by the way) I plan evenings and weekends full of activities. I really want to get to the day when the task list is empty but some of the tasks are scheduled for months ahead, so it might take a while.