If there is one thing I have learned this year it is that you only have so much time in a day to accomplish all of the things you need to get done. Think of a 24 hour period as a box, and the daily tasks blocks that you are putting into the box. There are only so many blocks you can put into that box! Which means you need to take a hard look at those blocks.
Sleep. Work. Commute time. Laundry. Cooking. Cleaning. Exercise. Yard work. These are all the little blocks of life that we work on filling up our daily boxes. We telecommute so we can eliminate or reduce the commute time block. We go through drive-through to shrink the cooking block. We pay our kids to mow the lawn so we can focus on another block. Life is constantly choosing the blocks of time we focus on.
I haven’t been getting done all of the things I want to get done lately and so I spent some time this weekend reducing some of the clutter that has built up in my daily habits. Blocks of clutter that while well-meaning, were reducing the amount of space in my box.
The first thing I did was uninstall Steam from my primary computer. Steam is a multi-player gaming engine that allows one to easily download and play a number of cool games. I actually had uninstalled this over a year ago but my son asked me to install it so that he and I could play some multiplayer games together. I had not been playing it too much but a few weeks ago I started playing it again seriouslly, spending a number of hours each night “unwinding” with the game.
Now “unwinding” is a reasonable block to put in your box but in my case the block was getting too big. Steam has a new feature now where you can see how many hours you have played a game over the last two weeks and on Saturday I saw that I had been playing Steam for 25 hours over the past two weeks.
That’s a big block!
So I uninstalled that clutter. I know myself well enough to know that I have to go cold-turkey on these things. I can’t just say “From here on out I will only spend 4 hours a week unwinding on Steam.” I had to uninstall it. So I did.
After uninstalling Steam I took a look at Google Reader. Over the years I have built up an impressive number of RSS feeds that I read. I never read them all and periodically I just mark all as reader in Google whenever I feel overwhelmed by the number of unread feeds. But managing that process and reading feeds that are similar content to other feeds are again, blocks of clutter that were impacting my ability to do other things.
So I have started picking the best of the best from my reader and flushing the rest. This pruning will need to be done often as I add new feeds as time goes by. But I feel liberated by having a smaller reading list.
So now that I have reduced some of this clutter; got rid of some of the blocks of life, what will I get done? Will, this post is one thing. Exercise should be another. I’m coaching both of my kid’s soccer teams this fall, that will be something too.
Do you have clutter in your life? What are you doing to get rid of it?
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The only clutter I can think of at the moment is the extra weight and I am getting rid of that as we speak 
