Month: February 2018

Digital Declutter – January

Happy Valentines, everybody! 

I was thinking it was time to give you an update about how my digital declutter is going. 

It’s taken me a while to post this January status, due to my head playing up again.  When my headaches gets bad, I tend to cut down on my computer time, as hanging around the computer makes it worse.  Which means I pretty much haven’t been on my computer, since… yep, you’ve guessed it, since last time you heard from me.

I had all these elaborate plans for showing you pictures of before and after for each bullet below… but for the sake of getting this post out there, I’m going to take a cue from John and Barb, at Decluttering the stuff and just write it all out.

      • E-mails – I’ve got a ton of emails to go through (thousands of emails) as I have a bunch of e-mail backup files (more on this later). For now however I’m just going to be digging into one of my everyday accounts, my main account. I started out with 2065, and are now at 1630. That’s 2065 minus 1630 = 435 e-mails decluttered.

     

      • Bookmarks – Deleting bookmarks turned out to be a bit of a pain –
        I started out with almost 3000 bookmarks! I chipped away at it a little every day, and after a good week I was down on the 1200 level – and then – a hiccup!
        Something went wrong with a synchronization between iCloud, Google and Internet Explorer.. and suddenly I had 3332 bookmarks in my Favourites folder. Noooooo!!! Guess who had to start over 😦
        Thankfully I remembered some of the major deletes, so within a short time I was down to a more manageable number to chip away at.Today I’ve got 1375 bookmarks sitting nicely in my Favourites folder. So I guess that makes 3000 minus 1375 = 1625 bookmarks decluttered  (decluttered twice.. mind you 😉 )

     

I have to admit, it’s been kinda fun cleaning up old bookmarks. It’s been fun, because the bookmarks shows where my interest and focus has been. I’ve been roaming through topics like cars, IT user equipment, minimalist wallets, DIY sheds, house stuff (for when I was building my house), travel, golf ++ just to mention a few. It’s almost like looking at old photos.. it takes you down memory line 😉

So here you have it – total decluttered =2060 digital “items”

When life gets in the way of.. well.. life!

We have all had this happen to us. We plan things and then things just don’t always go according to plan.

Most of the time we humans operate with a resemblance of a plan in our head. A plan that might or might not stretch a bit into the future. You know, stuff like;  a project at work that has to be done by a date, things you need to do at at home, things that involve family or friends. Just plans or intentions in general, for what we’ll be doing the next week, two weeks, month or year.

You start out OK, you get your project underway, you have half of the week behind you and then suddenly life gets in the way of… life… and all your well intended plans goes slightly awry!

Somebody in the neighborhood pops by, asking if you could look after their dog for a couple of days, to avoid the dog being all alone. Your mum suddenly needs to be picket up at the airport. Out of the blue, your neighbor needs your help – cause their bathroom floor is overflowing with water. It snows and you need to clear all the walkways. A person in your Condominium Association wants you to take a look at the building insurance, because he thinks its to expensive – and this “small” request gives you three weeks of work getting new offers, hosting a group meeting, writing up the differences between the offers, sending out emails and currently waiting for the votes to come in on what we want to do…  And the list goes on!

Yeah.. all these little extras definitely threw a wrench into my plans… the dog however, such a cutie 😉

 

When life knocks you off your track, there is not much you can do, but to wait until things calm down, and then start from where you left off 😉

Since I have very limited time I can sit by the PC (before my headaches gets bad), I had to put my blog and my digital projects on hold, while all the insurance stuff was going on.

Now however, I hope I can get a bit back into it!

John and Barb over at Decluttering the Stuff  are already knee deep in their digital decluttering, and are running rings around me 😉 But hey, watch out, cause I will catch up 😉

See you around!