Petrospective

Fighting insomnia, tip #318: Dump your thoughts

Keep on reading if the following sounds familiar: you go to bed but cannot fall asleep because your brain is buzzing with thoughts, plans and reminders (“It’s so-and-so’s birthday on Wednesday, and I still haven’t bought a gift!”, “don’t forget to pick up dry cleaning tomorrow”, “it would be great to end world hunger, I should look into it in the morning” etc etc).

After struggling with this nuisance for some time, I found a solution: write those thoughts down and your brain will let go of them, as if by magic. This technique was mentioned in “Getting Things Done” as a way to capture to-do items and clear your mind in order to be able to focus better. Only in our case it’s not about focusing, but more about stopping your brain from running in circles, trying to tell you to not forget something that it deems important (that’s what it feels like in my head, anyway)

Question from the audience: how do you take notes without waking up your partner or turning on the light and destroying the “I-am-trying- to-fall-asleep” mood? 
Answer: use your iPhone/BlackBerry/whatever. Find an app that lets you quickly type in notes. Then you can review them in the morning and delete useless ones. My personal favorite is called “Things” for iPhone - it literally takes 2 seconds to start writing stuff down after grabbing the phone from the night table.

Oh, and by the way, the voices in your head will not be pleased if you try to cheat and write those “action items” down on a piece of paper in the dark in a completely illegible chicken scratch - your brain might chase its tail every once in a while, but it’s not stupid, you know.

Project Unclutter Home 2009: The Pondering

I’d love to live in a clutter-free home. Ever since moving into a smaller apartment slightly more than a year ago and dragging a bunch of useless stuff along with us, we haven’t actually gone through and cleaned a lot of those old things out. It’s very friggin’ frustrating. Let me list some of the items that are kicking around our home, just to give you a taste: unassembled DVD stand; bar chairs, still wrapped from the move last August; a couple of boxes of old electronics that I haven’t used in more than 4 years; scattered magazines that nobody cared to read in months. Don’t ask me why this hasn’t been thrown out - if I knew, I wouldn’t be writing this ;-)

Well, enough is enough. All of this crap needs to go before 2009 is out.

But as soon as you make that kind of a mental commitment, doubt starts creeping in. Below is the list of issues that I’m grappling with when it comes to removing clutter from our house:

Issue 1: It’s an Everest

My biggest issue with this project is that it seems monumental, akin to climbing a really large mountain. If you stop to comprehend the perceived enormity of the task ahead, your resolve shrinks back and starts whimpering. If we’ve been living with this situation for the last year, it can surely wait for another couple of months, can’t it? Please?

So far, the best advice I found is “do it in 15 minute intervals, don’t try to do it all at once” (Good read here: http://www.wikihow.com/Remove-Clutter-From-Your-Home). Stretching out the process seems like a good idea, as long as it’s not for too long. Another important point here is to have some kind of a temporary staging area where items that require further action (donating, selling, special disposal methods) could be placed in the meantime. (Akin to “inboxes” and various other folders in a GTD system).

Additional benefit is that you can feel accomplished every time you clean out just one closet or room, without having to deprive yourself of positive feelings until the whole thing is done. The might just be the key to tackling this psychological barrier.

Issue 2: Lack of system

Crap will undoubtedly come back. The saddest thing that can happen is that you spend all of that effort cleaning out old stuff  just to see the house start filling with junk in a couple of months.

The basic idea here seems to be that “Everything needs a place”. That’s easy to find for things like books, for example. But there are a lot of items that don’t seem to fall into clearly-defined categories, and they end up roaming around, taking up various horizontal spaces and unclaimed cabinets around the house.

I’m thinking of a two-pronged attack here: 1. Categorize things better as we go through them; and 2. Do a better job of dedicating space for various things, including having one “misc” storage space for things that defy labeling.

The other important point here, brought up in a couple different articles (http://www.ehow.com/how_116784_unclutter-home.html) that I’ve glanced through: keeping things in order should become a habit. Again, that looks like another Everest, which is immediately off-putting. I’d say that “making it easy to keep a habit of staying organized” is the key there. We’ll see how that works out.

Issue 3: Reluctance to part with crap

You know it, I know it: we grow attached to things, which really gets in the way when you need to throw something out. Here is one solution that I’ve been trying out recently: When you are digging through old stuff, looking for potential disposal victims, suppress your memories, try to be indifferent to things that you encounter. Something like “that’s just a piece of plastic”, or “look how ugly and broken this is” might work for you. One article (http://bottomlinesecrets.com/article.html?sid=E031002S6A&article_id=22345) suggested taking pictures of stuff that you cherish and throwing out the physical objects, because most of the time you really only care about the memory (this means that you might need to find a way to file your pictures efficiently in order to not clutter your photo collection. It never ends. Sigh.) And you know what, if taking pictures makes it easy to get rid of old useless junk, I’m all for it - after all, storage space on digital cameras and hard drives is cheap and abundant ;-)

My personal bottom line here is this: “I’m fed up with crap”. And that feeling is now much stronger than feelings of attachment to most physical objects that I haven’t touched in a year or more. Good riddance.

Issue 4: What’s the best way to get rid of things?

This one has stumped me for a while. For example: Should we carelessly dump old electronics into garbage? That doesn’t feel right, but I have yet to find a good way around it. Enlisting help from one of the junk-hauling services might be in order. This part will need to be investigated further, and I’ll try to report on my findings.

I’m also considering selling or giving away our it-might-still-be-useful-to-somebody items. I’ve started by asking friends and family, but might have to resort to craigslist, ebay or Twitter and Facebook. We’ll see.

Bottom line

The biggest thing for me was to overcome the psychological “this is Everest” barrier. Once the task ceases to seem insurmountable, the rest should be relatively easily manageable. That’s the hope, at least.