Category: Personal

We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what our adulthood would be like, to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is. How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven’t used in the past year?

via Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed.

It’s surprising how true this statement is especially when I look at myself. For the last year or so I’ve tried to simplify my life and what I own. It’s made me very aware of how much junk I have piled up around my house that I’ll never use. My desk is covered in notebooks, puzzles, toys, and other things I rarely use and don’t really belong there. The problem extends into my digital life as well with hours of video I’ll probably never watch, a feed reader that I rarely empty, and an Instapaper account full of articles I’ll never get around to reading.

Like I said above I’m trying to clean this up when I clean I try to look at everything I pick up and evaluate if I’ll ever really use it. If not I throw it away, give it away, or donate it; if I think I’ll use it I look at what I can do that will make me more likely to use it. Could I place it somewhere different? Would it be useful in some other aspect of my day? Hopefully as I get better at this it will free up more time in my day and add less mental weight to what I have to deal with during the day. Freeing me up to enjoy things more.

I’ve finally started keeping a journal again. I kept one very inconsistently during my senior year of high school up until about the time I got married. I’m not sure what inspired me to start keeping one again, but I have.  I bought a small Moleskine back in September of 2010 planing to start writing again, but as things seem to go I let it sit for a few months. I finally got started though. 

The first thing I did was copy all the entries from my old journal into my new one. This took a lot longer than it should have (2 months) because I kept getting sick of reading about myself back in highschool and would quit writing for long periods of time. This transfer lead me to realize a few things about my past self. 1 I was boring, or the stuff I wrote about back then seems pretty boring to me now. 2 I was really bad at spelling and grammar. Throughout moving my entries I had to keep myself from “updating” them to fix errors.

I finally finished the transfer on December 22 of 2010, and have been consistent in my writing since then. My memory seems to have improved some, and being able to dump a lot of my thoughts out instead of trying to remember everything at once helps. I’m really trying to get myself on a schedule of writing twice a day; some time around noon and in the evening. This has caused my to write a lot more than I thought I would, and I realized how interesting my days actually are.

Journal keeping has been a really interesting endeavor so far, and if any of you are considering starting I would suggest it. You can get a lot of helpful hints from this article from The Art of Manliness.