Happy Tuesday!
I'm well into the third week of being without the use of my desktop PC. It's also storming here quite a bit this week. But I happen to thoroughly enjoy storms, as long as I'm inside and dry.
I'm also finding (or I should say seeking out) aspects of being desktop-less that are enjoyable. It's true that I've had to shoe-horn my work into a set of tools that aren't as familiar and efficient, but that challenge has a little appeal to someone as nerdy as I am. I have an unexpected opportunity to explore new hardware, software, apps, and tricks that help me accomplish real work, and it's actually fun. A little. Sometimes.
I have to look for the silver lining here, right?
The positive news on the PC front is that both critical parts are currently undergoing warranty replacement, and I should have good parts in hand in a week or so. Probably not before next Tuesday, especially with the holiday this weekend, but still...I see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Since I still can't work on my big quarterly archive clean-up project, I've been searching for other ways to improve messy data. This brings us to the brief subject of today's newsletter.
Watch for the Easy Stuff
I've repeatedly encouraged Tidy Bytes readers to work towards good data habits. Fundamentally, our shared goal is to encourage behaviors that yield less data to manage rather than more, to avoid purposeless hoarding and learn to process and keep data consciously.
One of the good things about this goal is that you can move toward it in small steps. If you have only a little time to spare, or the job feels too big, or cough the computer you usually do most of your productive work on goes toes-up, you don't have to worry about making significant progress. All you have to do is notice when opportunities arise, often right in the middle of normal work. (Or bathroom breaks!)
Just do something.
Even more than that: just do something easy.
Delete one email you don't need.
Unsubscribe from one newsletter you haven't read in a while.
Clean out a couple of spam texts.
Put one evening's worth of photos into a named album so you remember the occasion.
Uninstall one app you haven't opened in months.
All of these can be accomplished on a smartphone, usually in less than one minute. They aren't too significant on their own, but remembering to do them every so often means your brain is pulling you in the right direction instead of just letting you collect data endlessly.
The more you do these small clean-up tasks, the easier it becomes to do them again. You're building good habits, reminding yourself that your data collection can shrink as easily as it can grow.
Over the last couple of weeks, I've been doing this with emails, photos, text messages, notes, articles in my read-later queue, and anything else most easily accessed from either my laptop or my phone. It's not the same as working through my huge family archive, but that's okay. I still absolutely consider it a win.
I bet all of us could find something easy to do in tiny chunks like this. If you think about your own data situation, can you think of one action you could take right now, this very minute while you're reading, that would move you in the direction of clean and orderly, organized and curated, rather than haphazard and messy (or any other stressful term you'd use)?
Experiment! Go wild! Delete two things instead of just one! It's easy to feel overwhelmed by whatever disorganized digital situation caused you to subscribe to this mailing list. But you don't have to feel that way. Little wins are still wins. Look for those opportunities.
Until next week, happy data-taming!