What's Your Decluttering Priority?

Before you move, tweak or delete a single file, you need to ask: "Why the fuck am I doing this?" To clear the clouds and find some space to roam, you need to know what kind of user you actually are.

Photo by Rino Falstad / Unsplash

I read a lot of productivity advice (because reading it is as good as doing it, right?!?!), and most of it makes me want to close the tab immediately.

The writer is usually trying to reach a state of "digital nirvana" that I have no interest in visiting, and couldn't get to if I tried. If their destination is different from mine, following their map is just going to get me lost.

Before you move, tweak or delete a single file, you need to ask: "Why the fuck am I doing this?"

If the answer is "because I feel like I should," stop. Put the mouse down. Compulsion isn't a strategy; it’s just guilt with a user interface. To clear the clouds and find some space to roam, you need to know what kind of user you actually are.

Here are the three flight paths I see most often. Which one are you?

The Pilot

You've got better things to do than wade through this crap and would rather spend your time doing those better things; you need the dials to be accurate and the landing gear to deploy every time you hit the button. Things should work with as little fucking around as possible, which is generally how we all want aircraft to work!

✈️

It's OK to... Pick an ecosystem and stick with it. If the default, or inbuilt, stuff works for you, use it. You need to commit to that ecosystem, which might mean missing out on stuff which doesn't fit within it, or is incompatible with it, but you gain a smoother experience.

This is the default, and that's OK.

If you're reading this as a small business, you are almost certainly a Pilot, unless you work in software development.

The Sovereign

You want things to work, sure, but you're mindful that your content, your data, is someone else's profit or, indeed, surveillance. You're not really into the direction these Silicon Valley weirdos seem to be going in and want to steer clear of them as much as possible.

🏰

It's OK to... Not want to fuck with the FAANG folks. It's working a little more mindfully when picking your tools, but it doesn't have to be an inconvenience. It takes more work to set up a private cloud or find ethical software, but the peace of mind is worth the configuration time.

The Test Engineer

You like new things and had a VR headset before there was even anything to make you seasick on them. Therefore, you want to spend as little time with the basic stuff, and instead prioritise being able to integrate new things, and possibly build your own. You are happy to spend a Saturday calibrating a gizmo just to save five seconds on a Tuesday.

🔧

It's OK to... Break things, spend time tinkering to make it work, and to explore. Your setup won't be smooth, and it will require maintenance, but you are (mostly) building it yourself. That is the fun part.

At some point or another, I've been all of these - generally in the reverse order I listed them! You might have been more than one in your life too, depending on your circumstances, such as time and finances. That's OK - the point right now, is just thinking which appeals to you the most right now.