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There is nothing to be added |
Photo by Ikescorpio |
Bill MacLeod who shared this quote, during The Journey Intensive last week said, when he first heard this quote it had been a life changing moment for him. It enabled him to lighten up by stripping away. He also commented that it was like being in the zone, in the the flow,where you acknowledged your natural genius. Bill, I should say is somewhat unusual in my experience of people in the alternative healing world. He has a corporate CEO background and the solid build of a rugby front row forward. He also has a very charming manner and a great sense of humour.
As I heard the saying he quoted, a light came on for me and I wrote this saying down in my collection book (one habit I have established as part of simplifying my life.)
There are various areas of my life, where "There is nothing more to be added" needs to be applied.
What it really meant for me was that is was time to stop looking outside myself for the "magic answer", time to strip away the superfluous things.
At a practical level, there are many areas of my life that I can apply this to starting with getting my computer into a user friendly state:
- Strip away the noise from my email boxes- yes I do have more than one! I tried to have just one email box. I redirected all my outlook email to Gmail. In the process of this, my inbox became flooded with returned email as a result someone or some robot spoofing my email address to spam others with. So simplifying things can become a complicated process.
- Rationalize the social networking sites I belong to, Facebook, My Blog Log, and Blog Catalogue will be my top 3 and a new group I joined recently Personal Development Partners.
- How many forums can a girl honestly participate in, as well as make a meaningful contribution. Leo from Zen Habits recommends: Read my Haiku Productivity post on Zen Habits for more on this … basically, you have to restrict yourself … just choose the top 10 blogs that are most valuable to you, and choose like 5-6 posts to read per day. Same thing on your forum … just choose 5-6 posts to read and respond to, and mark the rest as read. You can’t read everything!
- Strip out Google reader- Marking everything as read yesterday, was a freeing feeling. Now to simplify the number of feeds. Do I delete everything and start afresh-this would save any temptation to get distracted. There is the fear of loss that I might miss out on something! On there other hand, there will be more tomorrow.
What’s you strategy for dealing with feed reader bloat?
This is such an important post! Until a decision is made to de-clutter / simplify, call it what you will, it is just so easy to convince yourself that you are efficient because you get through volumes of work. The problem is we need to be effective and not efficient.
I went through this pain barrier about 6 months ago after reading The 4 Hour Workweek. I offloaded a raft of time consuming but low profit clients and for my internet life unsubscribed from dozens of lists.
I use Bloglines and found I had 3000 unread feeds – time to ditch them. I kept them because there could be some good info in them. But I’d never get round to reading them! They’re now gone and I’ve reduced the feeds to just a few important ones that will help me rather than be “nice” to read.
I’ve also invested in a software program that once learnt is fantastic at storing different types of files/emails/links etc in one place; ie by project etc. and is easily searchable. Took a while to set up but time saved now is immense.
Good luck Suzie – the de-clutter is worth it. Mark
Hi all,
This is a very important topic indeed. Next to lack of focus, distractions had been the biggest challenge to my forward movement. As many of your readers did, I unsubscribed from many, many lists and (sensitive me) only remained on the “main” lists for a few sites.
Needless to say, I am now clearing out tons of pitches, download offers, affiliate sign up requests and even more mail from those same individuals.
Honestly, I was amazed and appalled that I was being inundated with all this mail from the main site, limited status mailings too. Also, I was angry to find that many of the lists I was on used false unsubscribe addresses or links.
I’ve got a massive amount of work ahead of me since I have
or rather, had quite a few email addresses and all of them are now exploding. There’s a lesson in there… how much do I really need to know this and how much do I really care? Clutter-control, here I come!Tray