Decluttering – My relentless effort so far and tips!

I have been consciously trying to optimize and enhance the way I work/live – both professionally and personally.

One of the things which proved to be an eye-opener for me is the fact that clutter (digital, physical, mental and any form for that matter) plays an important role in bringing down one’s over all productivity due to various reasons.

Below are forms of clutter in my life and how I have been tackling them lately (again, the below are specific to me and not many people might have them in their life):

- Digital Clutter in the form of over-flowing mails: I have a separate huge blog post saved in the drafts at the time of this writing. While I really want to spend quality time explaining to you on how to manage your inbox (in a different blog post later) , I would like you to be aware of the ill-effects of overflowing mails. While this may not be a problem for many of us, it did prove to be a huge productivity sucker in my case.

Mail inbox, both personal and official, are the easiest to become cluttered. You can blame that on technology for having brought this kind of ease in delivering information.

The ill-effects of digital clutter is that, applications such as email clients become a burden over a period of time, rather than being a tool which enhances your professional and personal life.

Solution: First of all, do a clean up once to archive and delete all your old mails which are older than 2 months.

Second, unsubscribe from newsletters and mail groups which you haven’t been reading for the past 1 month.

Third, Set rules to sort your mails into different folders (or flag them accordingly) to enable you to process the least important ones quickly. When you clear the least important ones quickly, it has 2 advantages – one, you gain immediate confidence due to the fact that you cleared a bulk of your mails real quick. Two, you have cleared the least important ones, so you do not procrastinate reading the important ones by going back to the least important ones (you have none now).

Fourth, you don’t have to read every line in mails which are the obvious BAU (Business-As-Usual) mails and mails in which you are copied as a part of the group. You can right away mark them as read.

Fifth, you don’t have to respond to a mail using a mail. Some conversations are easily solved by picking up the phone and using your chat software.

Lastly, use a different email account for subscribing to newsletters and for registering at different websites.

- Digital Clutter in the form of a crowded PC Desktop: I bet this a problem for most of us. Desktops have become a convenient way to access the most important files, folders and applications. But it has also become the most convenient place to dump most of the temporaraly files, folders and application shortcuts. To some extent, the application developers are responsible for this confusion.

Though some may argue that dumping as much they want in the desktop enhances productivity, I always believe that it is a source for confusion, iritation and worry for many. Simple analogy is a usual physical desk of yours. Given a choice for your physical desk, how many of your would choose to have a clean and empty desk as against a crowded desk with all the documents spread on it. Thats the same case for the PC Desktop.

Solution: First step: Start to clean up your existing desktop. Create a folder called Desktop2 and dump all the files and folders into it. This is the most quickest way to clear the clutter. Then delete all the unwanted application shortcuts. If you haven’t clicked on a shortcut in the past 1 month, then there is a slim chance that you would do that now.

Then make sure you create one or two folders to store the temporaray files and folders that you may access very often.

Next step is to make sure you are consicious about not saving folders in the desktop directly. Make sure you save them in the one of the folders you have in your desktop.

I usually have one folder in which I dump all my files and two text files – contacts.txt and to-do.txt.

- Digital Clutter in the form of SMS: I hope, at least off late, agree with me on this. I receive on a average at least 20 SMS advertisements. Some times, even more. And on top of that, I also receive at least 10 more SMSs because I have subscribed with my bank, shop or some online service (Google, Twitter, etc.) to receive them.

SMS becomes a problem over a period of time, especially if you have a phone which does not allow you to easily delete your SMSs. For example, my low-end Nokia phone allows me to very painfully delete SMS on at a time.

Solution: First of all, unsubscribe your self from all the services where you had chosen to receive the SMSs. Second, block the unwanted sms by calling your phone operator and asking them to block numbers which are spamming your sms inbox. Third, if you have a more sophisticated phone, then you may install a free sms spam filter software. Fourth, don’t ever disclose your phone number any website or in the back of your cheques or other physical forms. The second one (cheques) is the most common place for spammers to pickup your numbers.

- Digital and/or Physical Clutter in the form of multiple sources of Information: I have had this problem of thousands of news articles from hundreds of RSS sources cluttering my RSS News Reader (I use Google Reader).

That apart, you would have subscribed for a newsletter from lots of news sites. This especially does dual harm. Not only does it clutter your inbox, but also forms a part of information clutter.

Another more common form of clutter is multiple magazines and newspapers. They tend to easly clutter your living room and tables.

Solution: If you have been reading news from a particular site, then you are not going to read them any time in future. You go ahead and remove them from your RSS news reader and/or from your list of favorites.

Unsubscribe yourself from all the newsletters that haven’t read for the past 1 month. Again, your wouldn’t be reading them anytime in future.

Lastly, try to stay with one particular website and/or newspaper and/or magazine and see if you are able to read/consume every bit of information in it. Most probably, that should be good enough for you to know. Also, remember, most of the news sites and papers repeat the same news. So if you have read it here, then you wouldn’t want to be reading it in a different from to finally realize that you just wasted your time.

- Digital Clutter in the form of social networking: No No.. I am not saying not go on Facebook! Social networking is required and sometimes encouraged… especially in these days where life has become hectic and our chances of physically networking has become slim.

But what I am saying is that, you don’t have to be network with the same friends in multiple different sites such as facebook, myface, orkut, twitter, etc.

Again, this may not apply for everyone, but it did apply for me . I had and still have a major problem consolidating so many different social networking platforms.

As of today, I am available on Facebook (relatively active), Twitter and LinkedIn.

Solution: Consolidate. Try to join the social networking site where most of your friends/colleagues are. Invite them to join your social networking site/group.

If you still have to leave a status message in 2/3 different sites where your friends are divided, then try using a software which can do this in one shot. For example, I leave my status in Facebook and Twitter in one shot using TweetDeck.

- Digital Clutter in the form of multiple email accounts: I had around 7 to 8 different personal email accounts with different providers. Again, this may not be the case with everyone.

As of today, I have 2 active accounts and 2 more less active ones as backup.

Solution: No big deal again. Just consolidate your multiple accounts into 2 email accounts. One is for your real communication with family, friends and colleagues. Second one is for subscribing to newsletters (if you absolutely need to do that) and using them to register at different sites. Usually you don’t have to worry about consolidating your multiple email accounts. If you don’t access them for some days/months, your account automatically gets disabled and your mails cleared ).

- Physical Clutter in the form of bank and credit card statements: I receive so many statements, from Banks especially, that I had lost interest in reading them entirely. Since, I realized that some of these letters are important, I use to conveniently stack them away at multiple places – my home desk, side tables, office bag, etc.

Over a period of time, you realize that you have so much clutter everywhere because of these statements.

Solution: Go green! Now a days, banks give you an option of going green by choosing to receive statements in your email inbox (of course, banks want to cut down the cost by saving paper and shipping charges). Just go with this option. Receiving statements in your mail is very convenient and reduces your physical clutter a lot.

Don’t procrastinate processing these statement: Reading them immediately and either tear them upfront and file them if you really them. Filing them is better than stacking them away in different places without even removing it from the envelope.

To be continued.. (I have so much to write but I can’t wait to share this with you immediately. Will keep updating this post).

Getting back to blogging!

I am trying to get back to my blogging. Has been a long time since i have updated my blog. Especially after my recent travel to US, I never had a chance to update anything here.

And I can understand why folks are finding it hard to blog and are moving to other forms of expressions such as facebook and twitter.. its quick and easy and on the fly (doing it from any where). I myself have been at least updating my facebook status weekly. But never had the motivation to come down here and post anything lengthy.

But again I miss this blogging lengthier posts… and i guess i still love blogging as compared to facebook, orkut and twitter .

GoodReads.com – Nice site for book lovers

I just enrolled myself in this site.

Very nice site to share your views on books with like minded readers.

Visit the site to know more about it!

I just wrote a very short review of a not so great book – “The Davinci Code” in this site.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
The storyline is unique, interesting and fast moving. Its gets slow though later in the book.

View all my reviews.

Back again after yet another brief break

And this time my break was due to my travel to US. I had good fun this time around as I had taken my wife and kid along with me. Also I had rented out a car which really helped me going around places.

Some reasoning I have been procastinating blogging.. though I have this passion for blogging.

I am determined to continue blogging like before.

Mac mini server farm :)

Wow!! I dint know there are server farms that use Mac Mini. 

Refer to the photo in the article in AppleInsider on why Mac Minis are here to stay.

Each one of those small boxes is a cute Mac Mini PC from Apple. Really surprising to know what people could do with such a small mac.

Even more surprising, from this article, is that information that Las Vegas alone uses atleast 10,000 mac minis in its various hotels and casinos and mostly for video surveillance.

For instance, here in Las Vegas, I know there are at least 10,000 Mac minis running in the different hotels and casinos on the strip,” said Brian Stucki, who owns and operates the Mac mini colocation service. “Many are used for video security points. Certain casino companies use Mac minis in each of the slot islands on a casino floor to manage the backend. I know of one nationwide salon franchise that uses two Mac minis for each one of their stores.”

Blackberry Storm – My thoughts

I had been waiting to publish this post on Storm ever since its user guide had leaked on the net and lots of post started appearing on in the blogosphere. And now news is out that Verizon Wireless is launching it.

I think, the phone looks amazing and I have seen the video of the Storm in action (look at the video at the end of this post) and its impressive.

My personal take is, Verizon+Storm is going to be more successful at the enterprise level (and that really matters) because of Blackberry’s reputation and acceptance in businesses across the world. I think many agree with me.

One of the biggest concerns with using smart phones (which are naturally glued with a camera – phone manufacturers never care about folks who don’t need a camera) nowadays is that we need to carry them to our offices and camera phones a big NO NO. But what I came to know from one of the person in my office (not very sure if thats true) is that the camera on the Storm (and other blackberry devices) can be controlled from a central location. Wow!.. organizations are going to be OK with that and i am double OK with that too. I can’t do that with iPhone today.

Talking about Storm and iPhone, here is an article comparing both.

And on an separate note, it seems that Blackberry is also launching an AppStore.. heard of app store some where.. .. thats what everyone is launching nowadays.. Apple iPhone, Google Android, et al.

Alright, enjoy the video..

Update: Oct 29, 2008
Check out this post in GigaOM – Why BlackBerry Storm Is An iPhone (and G-1) Killer. Reiterates my thoughts.

How many of you know about Knol (Google’s Wikipedia)?

I knew about this site many months back. In spite of this being a Google site/service, it never was compelling enough to be remembered/revisited.

You can check – Introduction to Knol – to know more about it.

Interesting Read – Similarities of current economic crisis to the crisis of 1870s

I found this article an interesting read (The Real Great Depression).

Though many claim that the current economic crisis is the biggest one after The Great Depression of 1929, most of us mistake the current economic scenario to be same as The Great Depression (that includes me – or maybe just me ).

Then I came across this article which explains this misunderstanding and also gives some interesting insight on an other great crisis of the 1870s which in many ways, as the article proves, is similar to the existing one.

I found this article interesting. What is also interesting is the point that author makes about the shift in economic power from Europe to America (eventually leading it to its current state) and also hints that the same might happen again and that the power may shift to countries like India and China .

Isn’t everything coming together.. what say.. Abdul Kalam and other great minds in the recent past claimed that India would become a superpower in the next 20-30 years. That would be great.. isn’t it …

How to get information on Hardware, Software, Driver versions, environment variable and other useful information about your Windows PC?

Its very simple.. from [windows]+R (Run – Utility), start the application “msinfo32″.

Msinfo32 gives you every bit of information about your PC in this one place.

I used it for getting driver version of the Nvdia graphics chipset on my HP Pavilion Notebook.

Nokia’s answer to iPhone – Tube

I am happy to see the detailed video review of Nokia’s Tube (5800 XpressMusic) in Engadget.

Like everyone, i have been a loyal Nokia fan for years and off late, my skepticism on Nokia’s smartphones was also clarified after I bought a Nokia E61. My E61 has been the best phone ever I had got till date. And Symbian s60 is the best OS ever.

Looking at the videos, I am sure Nokia’s Tube will be a huge success, if not for touchscreen, but at least for the features packed in it and for usability sake.

You may refer to this link to read through the specifications of this phone.