Those of you who read all the way through my final 2025 newsletter know I mentioned not necessarily maintaining strict weekly emails going forward, but I figured I could at least start off strong on this first Tidy Tuesday of the new year. Or strong-ish, anyway, since I today's newsletter will be short and to the point.
If you read the previous post, you also saw my bird's-eye summary of what I emphasize here in Tidy Bytes:
- Small wins are the best
- Consistency over intensity
- Progress over perfection
In light of that, I've decided that I'm going to focus this year on small wins. This will be both for my own efforts and--at least generally--for the recommendations that I send to you on a semi-regular basis.
I like small wins so much, and I've written about them before, because they truly are powerful. You don't need to commit to a huge project, even if you know there's a ton of work to be done. You don't even need to have an idea about how you'll make it to your final goal, the "ideal" perfectly organized condition. All you need to do is identify one thing that would move things in the right direction, and then do it. It might only take you five minutes. Or even five seconds. But it's one tiny step towards your goal--even if you can't articulate the goal yet.
Small wins demonstrate that you have the ability to clean things up, not just make more digital messes (or even just live with what you have). Every small win is a source of motivation to do it again later--or right now, if you happen to have the time.
For my first small win, I've managed to read at least one of the backlog of articles I added to Readwise Reader, my read-later app. I've been shockingly lax in going through what I captured, and I had well over 100. Every day since January 1st, I've read one or two of the articles, highlighting the most personally interesting parts so my Readwise app will recall those passages for me from time to time, and I've even deleted a few articles without reading them at all--my priorities and interests shifted enough since I saved them that I didn't mind tossing them out.
So that's my first small win. How about you--anything you'd like to do, even on a semi-regular basis? No need for perfect every-day streaks. Just pick something that will make your digital life better, simpler, cleaner...something you can tackle in a few minutes, whenever you decide to try.
Happy data-taming!