Here I am with a group of Portland, Oregon’s InterPlay Community playing with the theme “Taking Care of Ourselves” which for me is a great antidote to technology.
A successful businessman I knew in Texas once told me. “We have to be careful owning things. Before we know it, things own us. ”He’d decided to sell one of his three houses after having just finished a repair to the porch light on his city house, and over the weekend, mending the fence at his lake house. He’d also just gotten off a call from the contractor for the Arizona house they were building. Some kind of snag had arisen there. He told me he was so poor growing up that for a brief time, his family had lived in their car. “I guess that’s how I got started on acquiring houses.”
I find the multiple decisions to ‘keep’, ‘trash,’ or ‘give away,’ to be tough and taxing, though, when I stick to the process, I re-discover lost treasures along the way and often end with a feeling of triumphant accomplishment when the projects done. It’s lucky I’ve been feeling some rewards from my household organizing lately since the warning notices I’m getting on my computer and iPhone are telling me issues of storage and retrieval are now immediate for my documents, photos, and apps as well.
So here I am, setting out to organize and cull my digital files. Would it be helpful, while focusing on a document to ask the question suggested by Marie Kondo the sweet Japanese tidy-master, “Does it bring me joy?” Given my relationship to technology, joy seems a too high bar to measure against. Maybe it’s enough to get rid of duplicates and the apps I’ve never used and didn’t even know I had. The joy will come when I can find what I’m looking for when I need it.
What tools do you use to manage your computer and phone housekeeping?
Sheila
