Purge and Repeat
I confess I didn’t give it much thought at the time… I had reached the limit of videos you can consider “Favourites” on YouTube (I think it is 500) and decided to narrow down the collection. Some of my ‘favourites’ were time sensitive things that no longer seemed relevant. Some of them lacked the same personal significance now as when I had committed them to the domain of favouritehood. Some of the videos had been deleted or removed, either by YouTube or the users themselves. In a short period of time I went from 500 to 360.
A few days later I found myself listening to podcasts at Precision Change on everything from decluttering to strategies for ‘getting things done.’
Tonight, literally only an hour or two ago, I had a sudden urge to purge. I started a new account for MSN Messenger and then proceeded to delete a backlog of email from the Hotmail account associated with the former account. There was approximately 5 years of email to go through, mostly from newsletters and mailing lists. You don’t realise how quickly an ‘email-a-day’ type horoscope can clog up your inbox until you go through hundreds of pages of email listings.
I tried to keep as little as I could. I was surprised at how easy it was to do. I was surprised at how quickly I had got through such a large quantity of data. I started a new folder which I called “Sentimental” and put anything I wanted to keep in there. Everything else ended up in the trash. For the first time probably ever (since Hotmail send you a “Welcome” email when you first sign up) the inbox is empty. It is a strange, surreal thing. It feels more liberating than I anticipated. While it is true that this is an email account I don’t intend to use, there was something so rewarding about unsubscribing to services properly. Surely a kind of electronic ‘closure.’
Credit where credit’s due: I have to thank Mark Hurst, author of “Bit Literacy,” for his suggestions in the Precision Change podcast.
Wherever I go the mantra is essentially the same: embrace a low information diet; information will find you no matter what you do. There is no real need to create a situation where you have more information to sort through.
I also took the opportunity to close some of my duplicate Yahoo! accounts, unsubscribed from mailing lists I no longer had any interest in, and turned off email notifications from services like Facebook and YouTube. (I’m also in the process of moving all my websites over to my new host and domain registrar – a task that will result in both greater control and significant savings!)
So what is next on the agenda? Well, Facebook has really changed my concept of the word “Friend.” I have an account which is associated with hundreds of people, some of who are so dear to me they are almost family – and others who I doubt I could pick from a police lineup. I really want to revise it so it better reflects the relationships that are truly important to me.
Do YOU have any suggestions for downsizing your electronic life?
I’ve been downsizing on Twitter the last few days. I was getting so discouraged that people were “Following” me for the sole purpose of racking up literally tens of thousands of people they follow.
I quickly realised that they had no real interest in reading what I had to say, especially if I was amid 27,168+ other people, some of which I am sure feel the same. These people on Twitter even set goals of “Following 30,000 by Wednesday” making me feel like I was involuntarily participating in a game, and that I was nothing more to them.
So I’ve been going through and downsizing: blocking the users who were obviously in it for the sheer numbers (who have no interest in what I have to say), with only a couple exceptions.
I turn the shit off. Like Twitter. It’s been fun, but encroaches on my real life too much. I like getting interesting updates from my friends and sharing in their experiences… but those that used it as an IM service ruined it for me. Now that I’ll be turning off my phone tomorrow… I won’t make an effort to update all that much.
But for me… I have the two blog sites and the YT account… that’s it..
Hey John, glad you found our podcasts and got some value from them! It’s always fun to hear, and the reason I do it.
I love Twitter, but recently cut back the number of people I follow to around 50. More than that and I find myself like a rat pressing a lever to get more and more food pellets every few seconds. :)
Good work purging your digital world!