Ditching the Excess Baggage
This year I’m cutting down and ditching the excess baggage.
No, it’s not about weight. And it’s not about chocolate either.
It’s not about books even though I could fill a baggage container with those.
It’s about information.
You see, I love information. I’m fascinated by it all – the newly born (scientific research, medical advances…), the inner (philosophy, creativity…), the outer (nature, space…) and the old (ancient history, past lives…).
The ironic thing is I’m no use at all on a Trivia Night table. Few of these facts are stored in my head. I keep them in digital form. Too many Pinterest Boards, too many Twitter lists, too many email folders, too many Facebook Interest Groups, too many Feedly blog feeds to follow and far too many Evernote notebooks.
It’s got to stop. So 2015 among other things, will be the year I lose the excess information baggage and blog about how I get it done. I’ve promised to ask myself – Do I really need to remember that? Is it useful to me? Am I ever going to write a story about it? Or a blog post? And if not, it’s gone. I’ll close my eyes and pretend I never saw it and won’t be tempted to store it away “just in case”.
I guess there’s one positive in all this information clutter. After I’m gone, cleaning up the things I’ve left behind will be easy for my kids. They’ll just have to hit the delete key.
And do something about the baggage containers of books. There’ll be a lot more books by then.
One response to “Ditching the Excess Baggage”
Oh Sandy, I can so relate to this. So much clutter – both physical and virtual. I remember reading somewhere that it’s a generational things – our generation needed to hang on to information that might be useful later because we didn’t have easy access to ALL the information at our finger tips. We needed project kits and encyclopedias and articles torn from newspapers and magazines.
Now, we store all that information ‘just in case’, but when we need to know something, we go straight to Google anyway. Most of that carefully stored and curated information is never looked at again.
I’m looking forward to following your journey as you ditch the excess baggage.