Time to Purge

At every family function the cameras come out to take dozens of pictures we’ll never look at again. An hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.

We create more content than we’ll ever consume and get lost in the noise. Without intent and focus, volume rushes in to take the place of quality.

I’m the King of taking on too much. It’s not that I lack the ability to say No, but that ability is overwhelmed by knowing so many interesting people, doing fascinating things, and having a seemingly endless stream of exciting and/or screwy things I want to try.

If every single thing I was currently doing or working on disappeared, with all the other stuff I want to do but lack the time I’d be just as busy as I am now.

To compound the problem, connecting people and ideas in new ways is both a strength and a pleasure of mine. Having a million things going on leads to serendipity I wouldn’t otherwise have. Of course, it also leads to more things I want to do. Rinse, drown, repeat.

So it’s time to purge.

In the next week I’m going to gut my RSS feed, and sort out just what combination of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ makes sense.

I’m going to get medieval on my project list and see what things I need to drop or rearrange.

I’m going to carve out time for some things that have suffered horribly – working out, reading, writing, drawing, and learning guitar.

I’m going to get back to just a few daily and weekly tasks to keep focused.

Part of this daily post writing project (I’m now 3 behind, I think) is to shake things up and help force me to reevaluate my time and how I spend it. I’m sure I’ll get all jammed up again eventually, but that’s just part of the process.

For right now I just need to get back down to doing a few things well rather than killing myself trying to do dozens of things half-way. It’s going to be painful to get there, but worth it when I do.