A bit of Housekeeping first. Well no, actually first is a bit of planning to get the priorities in the right order. Housekeeping is one of the priorities but definitely in quadrant 2 of the Eisenhower Matrix (see the previous post on “getting ahead of your own curve”). So I’m going to plan the housekeeping. It doesn’t need to be frequent but it does need to be on the calendar.
Having dealt with the planning and prioritising we can get on with the matter at hand. Today is going to be Blog Post Housekeeping Day; Looking through drafts, picking out ones that are almost complete, working out if they are still relevant or can be discarded to the “bin and gone”.
Why is it worth doing? Despite the best of intentions when starting off, stuff is always getting left behind, incomplete, orphaned, forgotten. Mostly it doesn’t matter (most things don’t) and while accepting that is important to our sanity, there is a benefit to pulling out the best of the rest and salvaging useful bits from the debris we leave in the wake of our busy lives.
In this case it’s pulling out ideas that stand the test of time and turning them into meaningful output (or at least putting them into a shortlist for further review and attention).
There are currently 15 drafts in this WordPress account in varying degrees of completeness vs 73 published posts. That would be 2 weeks of output if I went back to daily posts (or enough for the 3 months at my current post rate!) without the need for any more soul searching for ideas. Even if I pick out 2 or 3 it’s going to more than pay back the half hour to skim through them.
The same is true for much of our digital lives, stopping to review folders of files and pulling out potentially useful things, or flicking through the last months auto-uploaded photos and tagging key memories to return to later is really worth the time. Far more rewarding than yet another scan down that Facebook newsfeed.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t complete the process. That’s not the goal.
Housekeeping is like house cleaning, potentially endless with diminishing returns, but if you never do it, you will ultimately get overwhelmed in the shit you’ve left behind you.
You may also find that taking the time to look back over things can also help to refocus your forward direction as well.
Always more to come, just probably not tomorrow.
Donovan.