92 things

A few months ago, I wrote about things I discarded. Now, I write about things I’ve kept. I moved to Mountain View for the summer, and I only have 92 things. In hindsight, that’s still 14 things too many (the red items), but I’m happy that I got that close to living with only what I’ve needed (for my own definition of “need”). These are the things I brought, the things I bought, and the things I borrowed.

Things I brought

Luggage etc.
1. Carry-on sized suitcase
2. Hiking backpack
3. Backpack

I packed the hiking backpack inside of my carry-on, so I just had a carry-on and a backpack and was able to avoid checking in any luggage. It turns out I only use the hiking backpack for day-to-day use. I think if I had not brought the unnecessary things below, I’d have been able to pack everything into the suitcase and the smaller hiking backpack.

Clothing
4. Hoodie
5-7. Jeans x 3
8. Pants
9. Shorts
10-12. t-shirts x 3
13. Long sleeve merino wool shirt
14-16. Merino wool t-shirts x 3
17-23. Underwear x 7
24-30. Sock x 7 pairs
31. New Balance shoes

I’ve used the hoodie as my pillow, so I guess it was useful to bring, although I could have made something else into a pillow otherwise. It’s way too hot to need a hoodie in Mountain View. If I’d been living in San Francisco like last summer, a hoodie would make more sense. I’ve only used one of my pairs of jeans. Although I’ve used all the t-shirts I brought, the Merino wool shirts have been pretty amazing and I’d have been able to get through the summer just with them. I wear them about 80% of the time. The great thing about them is that they evaporate sweat away so quickly that they don’t end up with even the slightest smell until about the fifth wear (so I’ve been told; I wash them after two or three wears).

Sports gear
32. Running tights
33. Swim shorts
34. Swim goggles
35. Ultimate jersey
36. Long sleeve base layer
37. Waterproof jacket
38. Shorts
39. Ultimate disc
40. Cleats

It’s too warm here to need bottoms for running. I was never really going to swim. Also, summer in Mountain View… why did I bring a waterproof jacket? My cleats had needed replacement for a few months, so I should have just bought a new pair when I arrived here.

Electronics
41. iPhone
42. iPhone charger
43. Laptop
44. Laptop charger
45. Camera
46. Camera battery charger
47. Camera USB cable
48. Mini-dvi to VGA converter
49. Headphones

I forgot that Google has projector converters for laptops in every conference room. The iPhone has been borderline unnecessary, since I’d be charged roaming data rates down here, but I have used it a few times. Its battery is usually empty, and I use Google voice on my computer to make and receive calls. That’s backfired a couple of times, though (sorry!)

Stationery
50-52. 3 pens
53. Notebook
54. Smaller notebook

Personal care
55. Razor
56. Contact lenses
57. Small first aid kit
58. Medicine
59. Travel towel

Documents etc.
60. A folder with Visa and other documents
61. Wallet (and cards)
62. Passport
63. Pilot licence

Again, I didn’t make the time to convert my Canadian pilot licence to a US pilot licence.

Other
64. House keys
65. Water bottle
66. Monopoly Deal

Things I’ve acquired

Luggage etc.
67. A Google branded Patagonia backpack

This was given to us on the first day. I’m giving this away; let me know if you want it.

Sports gear
68. A 2nd Ultimate disc
69. New cleats
70. New running shoes

Electronics
71. FitBit

On my first day, a person in my office called out to me as I walked by and tossed a small box my direction. Inside it was a FitBit. It’s been a fun way of tracking my activity and sleep patterns.

Personal care
72. A crappy bath towel
73. A bath towel
74. Q-Tips
75. Toothpaste
76. Floss
77. Shaving gel
78. Nail clippers
79. Contact lens solution
80. First aid/athletic tape
81. Neosporin
82. Non-stick pads
83. Gauze
84. Sunscreen
85. Aleve
86. Vitamin D

I learned that I should spend more than $3 on a bath towel. Four of these things (guess which ones) wouldn’t have been needed if I didn’t fail at riding a bike.

Documents etc.
87-88. 2 library cards

Other
89. A second water bottle

My recruiter gave me a free water bottle part-way through the summer. I like that it’s metal, so I’ll get rid of my plastic water bottle.

Things I’ve borrowed

90. Laptop
91. A Lovecraft compilation from the library
92. A bike

Things I miss

I do miss some things, though! I miss my panniers and I miss my Playstation. I miss real Dominion cards and Zendo. I miss being by the beach and I miss the mountains. Those last two don’t count though, since I’d never be able to bring them anyway.

What would be on your list of 92 things?

Three rules

I’m trying to do a lot of things. So, I think I need some rules to make sure that I’m in control over what I spend my time and attention on.

Three new rules for me:

1. Ignore the notifications indicator from Google+.
2. Don’t visit news or aggregator sites (CNN, Slashdot, etc.).
3. It’s okay to do “nothing”.

The first rule is an extension of how I already do things. I try to check email on my own schedule, and I’ve minimized notifications and interruptions aside from that. The notifications from Google+ are an annoyance, but I can resolve to ignore them.

The second rule will cut down on the time I spend reading about things that don’t affect my life. I’ll hear about the important things during conversations, and then can choose to read more about those that I’m interested in.

The third rule means I will not feel pressure to do “something”. It reinforces the first two rules, but is more general. If there’s nothing pressing to take care of, and everything on my to-do list can wait until later, doing nothing may be the best choice. Of course, it won’t be literally “nothing”. I will have time to think, relax, brainstorm.

Fewer things

Two years ago, I started pruning my possessions while processing the clutter around my apartment.

Last year, I deleted my Facebook account.

In December, I saw Tron and Sam Flynn’s shipping container home. Was this possible? The internet told me: yes. I found sites dedicated to shipping container homes, simple living, and minimalism. That’s when I really started getting rid of things:

• A sombrero chip and dip platter I’d never used.
• A S’Mores maker I’d never used.
• Shampoo. I use soap instead.
• A wine rack. I never have more than one bottle at a time.
• Three old backpacks.
• A pair of rollerblades.
• Many books. I donated and recycled these.
• CD cases. I liked the art and design of some of the booklets, so I kept those.
• A futon.
• Clothing. A lot of this, I hadn’t worn in over a year.
• Chest of drawers. (I’d gotten rid of so much clothing, I needed three fewer drawers.)
• Two bookshelves and a TV stand. I replaced these with an Expedit. I’d gotten rid of so many books that this was a better fit. The Expedit was perfect: book storage, places for my consoles, TV, board games, and even a drawer unit in one of the squares. It’s the only visible storage in my apartment.
• Two bins worth of “stuff”: baseball cards, old certificates, posters, trophies (junk, basically).
• Two storage bins.
• Two shelving units.
• My 1 bedroom apartment. I moved into a bachelor apartment, because after getting rid of all this stuff, I needed much less space.

Very few of these were thrown in the garbage. I was able to donate, sell, or give away much of it. I’m still far from living out of a shipping container, but much closer than before. I’m going to start trying to get rid of one more thing each day, because there’s still a lot of excess. There’s only a small marginal cost to each item, but together, they make for a more costly and distracting experience that takes more time, attention, and space to maintain.

Make your inbox important

Email arriving in your inbox is a distraction. Distractions destroy focus, so they’d better be important. I’ve found that two changes are all it takes to end email distractions: turn off notifications, and filter.

Turn off notifications
If you’re going to be distracted, at least be distracted on a schedule that you decide. Turn off all desktop notifications, pop-up windows, and sounds and buzzing from your phone. Close the email window in your browser (that’s about the most direct notification you can receive). Check your email on your own schedule, not when you receive a new message.

Filter
Even without notifications, your mail app will show you that new mail has arrived in your inbox and when you do decide to check your email, any item in your inbox that you need to process lengthens the distraction. If you set up filters properly, you can make it very likely that email in your inbox is important. You don’t want to see that mail is waiting in your inbox only to find it’s an online billing notice, or an email about a system outage that’s happening two days from now.

Are those messages important?

Gmail lets you set up complex filters to make sure that what ends up in your inbox deserves your attention.

Donate your books

I’m filing this under “Productivity” because minimizing clutter helps you devote your time, attention, and space to things that are important to you.
Old books are common clutter items. But, where can you get rid of them in Vancouver?
Selling books is usually not worth your time, especially for very out-of-date textbooks. This only works out if you sell a textbook immediately after you are finished with it and if it’s required reading for the next term.
In Vancouver, you can recycle both hard and soft-cover books (from Vancouver recycling’s FAQ):

For soft cover books, they can go into the “mixed paper” bag or “paper products” cart for recycling. For the yellow bag, you have to be careful not to exceed the 20 kilogram (44 pound) limit as the crews lift these by hand, so you may have to do it over a number of weeks. You can also drop off the soft cover books in the mixed paper bin at our recycling depot for free.
For hardcover books, remove the paper from the hardcover and binding/glue on the spine by cutting or tearing. The paper can be recycled as mixed paper (listed above) and the covers and binding/glue will go into the garbage.

You can also donate your books. One charity that takes any type of book, including textbooks, is Reading Tree. They have collection bins all around Vancouver, and even will arrange to pick them up from your place. Find a bin near you using their bin locator.

A Reading Tree donation bin

Processing

I finished the collection phase this morning. This included items from my Google notebooks, notes on my phone, and old to-do lists. I also finished all the mental gathering (all the tasks floating around in my head). Together, these old lists, and the mental gathering steps accounted for 120 different actions that I had written down into the software I’ve decided to use for this system (discussed later in this post). At school, there was one more physical pile, mostly old papers I’d previously read and taken notes on.

I’m now processing these items. One problem is, I didn’t actually block off a bunch of time for this, so new items keep arriving while I’m still trying to set up the system meant to handle them all.

I’m actually sort of simultaneously processing and organizing: deciding what to do about each item in the in pile, and if it requires some sort of organizational step to handle it, I do that immediately (trash it, set up a new folder, store it as reference material, add it to my list of “things to do someday”, or defer it to a later date, for example). Here’s a good diagram of what’s going on.

I discovered an awesome tool for all of this. It’s called Things by CulturedCode (sorry, Mac users only). I’d already been using the mobile application on my phone, but in a very limited way. It’s a complete organizational tool is a lot of what Allen discusses in the book. There’s an inbox (where I initially dumped a lot of the material from the mental gathering step) to which you can quickly add items on the go for later processing. You can place actions into specific projects that you’ve defined. You can associate actions with specific contexts using tags (school, work, phone, waitingfor). You can defer an item in your inbox and place a reminder at a later date to consider it again. You can defer an item to a “someday” list.

Earlier today, I was asked what I liked most about the system so far. Until then, I’d barely finished the collecting phase, and what was most satisfying about the collecting phase was throwing out a lot of junk. Now, after only just starting to process and organize, I’d say the most satisfying aspect of the system is as advertised: peace of mind in knowing that the system tracks everything I need to do. If I’ve deferred an item for consideration on a later date, I’ll be reminded. If I’ve put something in the “someday” list, it will come up during the weekly review (one of the later phases). If I have a block of free time between items on my calendar, I can quickly scan the list of next actions to see if there’s something that I can do in the context that I happen to be in.

The only hole I’ve found in the system is the lack of a mechanism for organizing the stack of research articles that I’ve read. I’ll talk more about that and fill in a lot of the details left out today in the next post: organizing.

Collecting

I’m on about page 140 of David Allen’s Getting Things Done; I’ll be writing for the next few entries about my implementation of the system he describes.

There’s quite a bit of work needed to get the system started. I just began the physical collection phase of this startup. The idea is to put every piece of stuff that needs something done about it into an “in”-pile. What needs doing might range from putting the item in its proper place to paying a bill, but deciding on what actions to take for each item comes later; this stage is just collecting.

My in-pile was pretty random: a French-English dictionary (might turn into a project “Learn French”), movie passes (need to store them somewhere and actually use them), a notebook from the summer (I’d written a lot of ideas in it related to my research). Not everything could actually fit in the pile, so I used sticky notes instead for those items: “empty shelves” (I want them to not be empty), “snowboard helmet” (it needs a proper place).

There was a lot of throwing-out/recycling. I said goodbye to an old cell phone, a $4 winning lottery ticket from Manitoba, receipts for sweaters I’d bought a year ago (when have I ever returned clothing anyway), some old keys, and a lot of papers.

This was just the gathering of the physical items in my apartment that will potentially trigger actions later in the process. Tomorrow I’ll do the same with my desk at school. On top of the physical gathering, there are also the items floating around in my head about people to contact, project ideas, things to learn, places to go, incomplete tasks, and more that all need adding to this in-pile.

Allen suggested leaving about 6 hours to complete the collection phase. This seems accurate in my case.

Next: Processing (emptying the in-pile)