paring down: 1 of N
I’ve spent the last bit of the evening going over my bank statements, flinching. The amount of money I spend on foolishness is creepy. So what I’m going to do is re-introduce the daily expense sheet that I used to use to keep track of every penny I spend or earn.
It’s not that I feel the need to have that information at that level of granularity. That’s not the point. There’s an ancillary effect to having that close a lens on my spending: You guessed it. I spend less.
The other thing I’m working on is an information diet. I started thinking about the amount of attention I pay to things that really don’t effect me and it’s really quite staggering. I have a loop of activities I use to absorb time throughout the day (surely you don’t think my JOB is interesting enough to keep me occupied eh?)
It consists of monitoring the first-cut list in bloglines, the “must read” feeds. These include my “people” folder (Pascale, Stevie, Kate, Brian, Kim, Les, etc. There are about 15 of you.) Then there’s the weather, drudge, email, my statcounter stats (I get few enough hits that I know who most of them are if they’re not referred by a google search. Except a couple that puzzle me greatly, allowing my mind to wander to who I hope they might be. You perhaps? Hmm…)
So I went to bloglines and ripped out about 20 of my 215 feeds. Felt good. I can probably get rid of at least 50-75 more. But a little bit at a time I think is the right thing.
Tonight I also went around the apartment to the shelves and stacks of books collecting the dozen or so that are tied to this delightful sea change of mine and put them in the bookshelf right behind my the head of my bed (read: the end of my couch)
I also started looking at a couple stock trading sites, but my consciousness was fading a bit too quickly to glean anything terribly useful in the way of comparison from them. And last but not least (well not last, the book rearrangement was last) I looked at a few freelance programming sites. There are lots of little “job for hire” type sites where you can bid on work items that people post. If you know of any of these (or similar arrangements that aren’t necessarily programming specific) send me off a note or post a comment. I’ll certainly do what I can to collect and post what I learn.
Now I’ve got one or two emails to send that I could have bailed on, then I’m taking that Ferris book and going to bed before 11:30, instead of 2:45 for a 3rd night in a row.
Tags: UCCU