Jon Fox

It seems that no matter how hard I try, I often accumulate “cruft” in my life as I go. What I mean by “cruft” is junk and distractions that get in the way of what I’m trying to do. I find it very useful to periodically go through different areas of my life and clean up the “cruft”. I’ve been doing this with a lot of my online / digital self recently. Here’s a few things I’ve been doing recently to cut down on the junk:

I’ve…

• added a bunch of new filters and/or unsubscribed from a bunch of email in an effort to keep the “bacon” (basically spam you ask for) to a minimum and keep it from getting in the way of the more important/urgent email.
• gone through and attempted to condense down several email accounts into one Gmail account to give myself fewer points to check (and fewer mail clients to worry about).
• gone through my background apps (and startup apps) to cut down anything I’m not using anymore – or that just doesn’t need to run at startup.
• “cropped” my iPhone apps and my FireFox plugins.
• gone through a bunch of work related files on my computer and condensed / archived old stuff to get it out of the way.

Sometimes it’s good to cut down on all the little stuff that gets in your way. You might be surprised how much some of these little things can impact you when combined together. Now if I could just tackle my closet…