Yes, I’m seriously behind. Life happens. Or I’m being a little liberal on the whole “30 day” bit.
Day 18’s is about Less Information. The electronic variety hasn’t been a huge issue for awhile. I can’t stand a bunch of files on my desktop (it’s clutter, it’s distracting, and it’s difficult to find what you need – FILE IT!).
For my personal email, I use a service called Unroll Me. It was tedious on initial set up, but once it was done… LOVE. I will add, though, this is one service that I actually did read all the fine print. The service is free because they sell information to third parties regarding what you “roll up,” “unsubscribe” from, and “keep in inbox”. They don’t sell names or email addresses. I can live with that. I get a daily digest (that I don’t necessarily read everyday because I know it’s stuff that, for the most part, is the equivalent of junk mail. Like junk mail at home, I browse through to see if anything catches my eye then throw it away. Confession: I’m better at this electronically than at home, but that’s another post.
My work email is a little trickier. I don’t get near the volume others I know do, but I get enough that I have a good number of filters and folders. My Inbox is basically my Work-In-Progress box. In the morning, I go through it and answer anything short then figure out what’s next to be done and go from there. If I find myself repeatedly moving / archiving certain types of email that are more FYI in nature, I set up a rule to automatically take care of it. There are some things that, though they’re WIP, they don’t need to stay in my Inbox because I’m waiting for another step in the process to happen. Travel reimbursements, for example. I can’t reimburse the traveler until AFTER they’ve returned. For that reason, I have a Travel sub-folder in my Inbox. Once I’m done with any email, I delete it. Once a month or so, I archive my sent items and deleted items (I keep up to the previous 30 days). If it’s things like newsletters, they get “permanently” deleted, otherwise, it’s archived (I can’t tell you how many times that’s saved my or someone else’s tail!)
Facebook. Ah, Facebook. Honestly, I used to really only follow people on Twitter. I had my tweets automatically sent to my FB status and only occasionally checked in with folks there. Then someone went and got me hooked on a game and BOOM – sucked in. For what it’s worth, I know it’s not their fault – personal responsibility and all that good stuff. I have since quit all but ONE game and am considering dropping it too. Maybe. For my friend feed, I only recently began turning off notifications for people who I consistently find myself rolling my eyes at (basically anyone who’s EXTREME on either side – left or right, I don’t care. Life’s too short to spew hate or get worked up over a story that, as it turns out, was from a SATIRE site! Okay. Stopping now… remembering why I decided to block that in the first place.)
Items 9 and 10 on the Day 18 post are ones I’d really like to try. If you don’t want to click, it’s “Get out there and live” and “Make time for silence.” I’ve done a couple of the meditation practices from the challenge, but not a regular basis. I believe I shall make that a goal for the coming Lenten season – to set aside time for reflection, prayer, and meditation. I know I’m “supposed to” do that, but I don’t really set aside a time for it. My prayer life is more along the lines of talking to Him throughout the day. Just like any friend, I need to set aside time for just Him and me. As for getting out there and living, I think I just need to put my phone or Kindle down and notice what’s going on around me more.