Life :: Constant Work in Progress

This great excerpt from zenhabits.net:

• Reduce your inboxes. How many different ways does stuff come into your life? Do you have 5 different places at home or work where paper comes in and gets placed? How about email, voicemail, RSS feeds, etc.? Reduce these to simplify the overall system.
• Just have one list tool. Do you have one in your mobile device, a couple on your computer, one in your paper planner? That’s too many places to check and keep track of. Choose one and stick with it.
• Consider paper. Paper is very portable, and very simple. It is easy to use and can be adapted to your needs. You can use it at your computer and on the road, at work and at home. To me, it’s the simplest setup possible.
• Go online. I need to work on stuff from multiple locations, so a completely online setup is necessary for me. I don’t store my articles or working documents on my hard drive anymore. I use Gmail and Google Docs (and WordPress for publishing this blog), and the advantage is that it’s not only very accessible from anywhere, but easily searchable, so I don’t need to worry about filing and organizing.
• Reduce before you organize. If you have fewer things to organize, then organizing is easy. I think David’s problem is that he has way too much stuff to organize. That’s why he needs a briefcase and traveling folders and a desktop organizer and a 5-tray inbox. First of all, if he’s got a Palm Treo and a laptop, why does he need to carry around all that paper? Keep stuff on the computer instead of printing it out. Tell people to email you stuff instead of giving it to you on paper. He’s the boss! But even if that’s not possible for him, it’s possible for the rest of us. We can cut back on the amount of stuff we have, and therefore never really need to organize.
• Reduce your needs. This is related to the above point, but let me give you another example instead of just reducing your stuff: Why do people need a complicated and feature-rich program like Microsoft Word? Many different reasons, of course, but mostly because they need to format a document in a certain way, for various reasons. But the information in a document is just information — what if you could simplify how it needs to be formatted? That’s not possible for some people, but I found that it is for me, and it might be for you. Then, you wouldn’t need Word … you could use Google Docs or some other simple program. Think about your needs and see if they can be simplified — then the tools you use can be too.