Validate Your Life

Analysis of Discarding and Keeping

1. Pain Potentially Consequential of Discarding Clutter
   1. Cost to Repurchase something I discard — Repurchasing something I discard rarely happens.  Additionally, the cost of storing and transporting something is probably equivalent the cost of repurchasing but discarding it doesn’t have any of the psychological baggage effects.  TRUE!
   2. Time to refind the item to repurchase if feel need it after discarding the item.  – This is probably equivalent to finding the item amongst heaps of clutter, but true some items cannot be found but some items that discard, you don’t want to ever find again!
   3. Fear of discarding something unpleasant will cause me to repeat that unpleasant experience.  — This is the “vacuum” idea that if I discard the flyers from Los Angeles rubbish apartments, or psychology meetings, or the like, I will then repeat those to “fill the void” of that negative space.  This idea is that if I keep the unpleasant reminder, it won’t happen again.  To some extent this may be true, but it would be very painful to keep and so many unpleasant reminders that you dont’ get away from the spaces that caused the unpleasantness and make pleasant memories.
   4. Erroneous thought that discarding something may discard a “part of me”.  – This is unlikely because I put so much scrutiny into discarding items and it is illogical because some random book doesn’t define my identity.  True!
2. Pain Consequential of Keeping Clutter
   1. Physically trapped — can’t move as easily
   2. COST — cost of storage of keeping clutter and the cost of moving vans or even cars of moving clutter is abominable and gross.
   3. Overwhelm — massive stress simply from keeping track of all the clutter and sorting it and storing it and transporting it! It’s a massive headache and overwhelming source of pain!
   4. Doubt Self — Yes, keeping so many clutter belongings does cause self-doubt because you start to become uncertain if those past bits of rubbish are “me”, when of course they are not. If I pick up a book that turns out to be absolute rubbish, I am not that book.
   5. Anxiety and stress of keeping all the stuff.
   6. My digital files go neglected — THIS IS THE BIGGEST Incentive for eliminating clutter.  I live in my computer.  I’ve written a ton and I study and take tons of notes and almost everything is digital for me. If I have a ton of material space clutter, my digital files naturally (because of their being a constant amount of time in the universe) go

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Welcome back to the Productivity and Organizational Progress (POP) Suite. Today we’re talking about Email Organization.

Here’s my two cents on email productivity.

THEGoogle’s Recommendations for IMAP Settings”> source for clarity on [Gmail] A video demo has already been done.

A solid GTD must be simple, intuitive, and not add to clutter in your life! MANY GTD apps actually increase clutter because of the multiple annoying, superfluous, patheticall useles check boxes and extra options for each tasks (Omnifocus does the extra clutter method perfect, so don’t use that). Things has the speed and extensibility to get a LOT organized quickly but it still has all the geeky awesome GTD features to shift around tasks automatically and structure them via tags. If you’ve used mailtags, you’ll feel at home with Things, but it’s far better than Mailtags. It’s definitely an exceptional program where you aren’t locked into “contexts” but have the freedom to tag based on context or whatever you choose. While omnifocus is rigid and annoying, Things offers dynamic flexibility with tags. I tried Actiontastic, Omnifocus, and others, and this definitely takes the entire cake. Nothing is better than Devonthink for file structuring and truly limitless database organization of todos, but nothing is better than things for Task management. Together you’ll have the most potent gtd system possible. But Actiontastic is great, simple, and intuitive (and free) as well.

But starting off low-tech is best! It may be tedious, but you’ll discover patterns and trends of how you structure them enabling you to fully customize a GTD app later on so it works for you instead of you working for it. One example is “watcings”, “listenings”, and “readings”. No GTD app has those categories (yet, I may try to craft one!) and I wouldn’t have had awareness that I like to structure things that way without that knowledge gained from doing low-tech GTD. You learn very useful knick-knacks of your own organizational sysytem very quickly from doing low-tech first.

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Welcome back to the Productivity and Organizational Progress (POP) Suite. Today we’re talking about electronic organization.

We’re jumping straight to the nitty gritty here. In today’s age, “paper-based organization” is an incredibly small percentage of the organization management we conduct; mostly all of it is electronic.

I think the best first step in structuring and organizing your electronic management first starts with “contexts” of electronic. By “context” in e-management we do not mean “store”, “house”, “office”, etc, but rather applications! Just capture all your contexts for these types of information

Rss Feeds
Email
Web Bookmarks
New Notes
New Tasks
Projects
Reference Files

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Welcome back to the Productivity and Organizational Progress (POP) Suite. Today we’re talking about just an overview of notes that sparked a lot these organizationally productive practices.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of where the “REAL” organization needs to occur and delve into sub-topics like email, I think we could use a little insight from our friend Merlin Mann.

This guy is chock full of invaluable, priceless tips on Mac-based organization. In fact I, and many others, likely consider him THE mac-based productivity/organizational guru.
Here’s some notes I took on his Google Speech.

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Welcome back to the Productivity and Organizational Progress (POP) Suite. Today we’re talking about Approaches to Organization.

First off, time for a little reminiscence…High school and elementary, oddly enough, carried the most structured time in my life. Towards the end of high school and definitely in college my sense of “To-dos” “What I was committed to getting done” and “organizers for getting those things done” deteriorated. I erroneously misperceived that I was simply required of less (far from the truth, I had greater, more demanding, and more copious demands) so I stopped thinking I needed to keep track of things I was trying to get done. Wow. Bad move. Horrible move. Do you have any idea how much your anxiety levels, your very physiology, alter and drastically change when you decide to operate under the delusion that “I don’t have that much going on, I can keep it all in my mind!” I can assure you from experience, you get pretty stressed. And someone consistently stressed does things differently; they eat too much or too little (never in balance), have over-excercise or never have an established exercise routine (no balance), they over-communicate or never communicate about their position (again, no balance). Get my drift. You lose balance of all kind when you’re consistently stressed, and storing your entire life’s to-dos, plans, projects, and lists in your head quite swiftly mutates you into a hyper-stressed wreck. Therefore, not having a capturing device for your to-dos and choosing to store them in your head, destroys and annihilates all successful balance in life. And balance is a prerequisite for success, so don’t plan on being successful without balance, and don’t plan on having balance without zero stress, and don’t plan on having zero stress without a solid organization capturing system!!

So, you see why we’re gathered here today to learn more about Productivity Organizational Progress: success, balance, and zero-stress! Onward!

This section of the POP Suite focuses on methods of productivity and organization and different approaches.

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[2)Some solutions people have have just so much absence of logic and lack of practicality imbedded in them it's hilarious.] Cont…

I’m seriously thinking of submitting “Stupidest Productivity Ideas” to some kind of segment for the Jay Leno Show. I hear people rave and talk about how these “productivity systems” work so magically well, when they’re really wrought with stupidity and inefficiency. One of my favorites of this category is Google Notebooks.

Laughing at other methods. Here’s a “genius” method I’ve seen people raving over. What is with it with these people? I just start laughing at how much infuriation they create for themselves (and I’ve experienced it by trying out their system with my own tasks) with such idiotic systems! Here’s a brainbuster: loading all your tasks and projects into numerous Google notebooks. Why this works: it doesnt’. Why this doesn’t work: Endless reasons, but some important ones are: What do you do when you don’t have internet access, genius? All of your tasks and projects are inaccessible. Never a state you should ever want to come across. Secondly, the loading delays: waiting and extra 5 seconds while google loads information for EVERY task I update? I don’t think so, mabye if I was an 80 year-old grandmother who liked watching the “colors pop up” on the computer. Productivity needs to be electricity-like fast and google notebooks doesn’t cut it. Finally, advertisements. Period. What kind of moron delights in seeing countless advertisements when he’s trying to go into a zen-like mode of organization and productivity? There you have it, I dub “google notebooks for productivity” “mind-bogglingly dumb” because of Inaccessibility, Loading delays, and Distracting advertisements.

But it astonishes me how someone could not only deem such a “mind-bogglingly dumb” system not only “efficient” (when it’s anything but) but worthy of sharing with others. I couldn’t believe when that the author of that productivity post actually thought he was helping people providing obtuse methods.

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