Happy Tuesday, everyone!
We're getting close to the end of the first quarter of 2025, which means we've almost reached the first arbitrary milestone I scheduled for quarterly consistency goals. For a quick reminder, this was the plan that I invited everyone to participate in:
- Choose one thing to work on for each quarter of the year (Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, and so on).
- Pick a measurable goal to reach by the end of the quarter.
- Determine a measurable action that will move you toward that goal.
- Perform that action at least once per week, noting the progress you made.
- 🏆️ BONUS: Report your weekly progress to somebody else each week, or ask them to remind you. 🗨️
For the first quarter of 2025, this was my "one thing" to work on, along with the measurable goal and weekly action:
- 📋 I want to clean and organize my old archives.
- 🎯 By the end of this quarter, I will have all of my data on a triage hard drive and a file count of less than half of what I started with.
- 📅 Every week, I will work through at least 5 top-level folders from one drive and delete, sort, or deduplicate everything in those folders.
- 📈 I'll note in a simple table how many files I eliminated each time I work on my task and report to all of you how it's going in this post.
I have roughly two weeks to wrap up--if I can. Realistically, I don't think I'm going to hit the target--at least not completely. I have done well gathering everything onto a giant "triage drive," deleting quite a bit in the process. But I'm not down to my "less than half of what I started with" goal.
Doing the math on the numbers I recorded going through the process, I started with almost exactly 4.6 million files. WizTree shows that I currently have 3.77 million files remaining, meaning I've eliminated about 830k. That's not bad, but it's far short of the 2.3 million I'd need to have deleted to hit the goal.
But that's okay! The challenge I started with was to create consistency, which has been complete success. I've been making progress towards my goal almost every week. I only skipped one week due to extenuating circumstances (out-of-state travel, where I was basically doing the same project for my parents).
Here is where the old proverb (and the subject of this email) applies: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."
I've written about habits multiple times before, and in one sense, the whole 2025 consistency challenge is about exactly that: training yourself to move at least a little bit towards your goal, all the time--creating that habit.
Equally important, especially if you find yourself feeling overwhelmed, is to acknowledge the reality that you probably won't be able to move forward as fast as you want to. I've had to face that stark reality especially in the last few weeks after my false start with de-duplicating too aggressively and realizing I had to rewind a bit and apply more nuance to my process.
But you know what? I made way more progress in the last 10 weeks than I did during the 10 months before that, because I actually had a specific plan with a specific goal. That's the key.
If you feel stuck or stagnating in your own project, or unable to start in the first place, let me know! I'd love to take a few minutes and see if I can suggest a few specific and achievable next steps to help get you moving.
Next week, I'll be taking a brief look at a new option for self-hosted photo management, if that piques your interest. I still need to play with it more before I can form a reasonable opinion, but it's looking pretty good so far.
Until then, happy data-taming!