2023 Starts With Elimination

Something that I have been putting off for a long time is the transcription of old notebooks. I used to religiously carry around Moleskine notebooks as a supplement to my Evernote habit. Pen and paper tend to be easier to use for quick notes...

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Something that I have been putting off for a long time is the transcription of old notebooks. I used to religiously carry around Moleskine notebooks as a supplement to my Evernote habit. Pen and paper tend to be easier to use for quick notes than launching an app. But, paper is terrible for indexing your notes. There is some information in my old notebooks that hes prevented me from tossing them out. But, at the same time, there is much that was only useful for that day. I have been procrastinating the transcription for years. It's not difficult, just tedious.

Moleskines

After completing the notebooks, I will move on to transcribing old journals. That's going to be a slow process. I have almost 30 years of journals. Fortunately, I wasn't consistent about journaling every day.

Once I have extracted useful notes from the notebooks, they will be destroyed. The pages will be ripped out and shredded. As I am getting older, there is an increasing amount of cruft that is accumulating around the house. If I hope to travel in my retirement, I'll need to have nothing personal holding me back. If it is all digitized, then I can carry it digitally. My transcriptions are text based, which is great in terms of storage. It doesn't require tons of storage for thousands of pages of text. If I scanned the pages, however, it would be a problem.

It's not just my old notebooks that are taking up space. It's other things. Useful things that are no longer useful to me. Clothes that don't fit. Lunch boxes that I no longer use. Leftover materials from projects. Gifts that I don't use. Old financial records that are past their retention requirements. All of these things occupy space in my home and require constant space management. For example, we have a bunch of coffee mugs we received as seasonal gifts. Nothing matches. And, it's a struggle to find where to store them when doing dishes.

Part of me wants to sell stuff on eBay. But, I don't have the patience. And much of it won't sell. I'm just going to have to drive to the Goodwill store to donate.

I think part of the compulsion to hang on to things is a result of having grown up poor. You tend to hang on to things the might be useful in the future. Unfortunately, it also causes a lot of mental overhead. You have to track everything to avoid buying another, which you will also keep.

It's starting to be too much.

I am starting to warm up to the idea of getting rid of things once I am done with them. If needed, I can buy it again. I'm not talking about everyday things. I'm talking about things like old electronics, books, manila folders, and shoes.

It's not a New Year's Resolution that brings me to this. Like many things of late, it's an evolution. The person I am becoming no longer needs to cling to stuff.

While I am here contemplating what to eliminate, it occurs to me that I should probably think about the product life cycle when I'm about to buy something. How long am I expecting to keep it around? What will be the factor that tells me that something is no longer useful? Perhaps I should avoid buying it altogether.

Well, back to the grind.