(pear, get it?)
Tonight was a particularly rough evening – I found out that my tool of a banker, after dragging his feet on my mortgage quest for the last two months, decided that an appraiser will show up tomorrow afternoon. I’m not big on taking off work (a recurring theme, you’ll notice), so I’ve been toiling away this evening in an attempt to make the property presentable.
While this was absolutely exhausting, it was also enlightening and inspiring –
The old cliche ‘the things you own end up owning you’ really started to sink in.
It occurred to me that every product you purchase, given enough time, is just another piece of waste.
I started to become a big fan and devoted reader of /r/minimalism
I started to see how hard it was to throw away even insignificant items – especially little pieces of hardware that I ‘might need’ in the future – And Boxes. Oh boy do I love to horde boxes. because yknow, I might need to send it back to the manufacturer some day.
No, I wont. A good example of this is my broken Keurig coffee maker – I have the box in pristine condition and it sits on the shelf right next to the coffee maker that broke 2 months into owning it (a fairly common occurence, from what i’ve heard). I need to throw it out, and in the future, I need to try to acquire less stuff.
This will help my checkbook, but in reality it all comes down to my ability to clear out the clutter of my mind and just relax.
An empty counter, empty floors, moderately empty shelves – I find that these are almost as conducive to my ability to relax as would be an empty schedule.
So today’s tip? Own less shit. It isnt fulfilling anyway.
Sure, they’re not terminator-style humanoids, in all likelyhood, they’re not even visible. But they’re out there. Just biding their time. Watching us.
waiting.
But until the inevitable uprising and revolution, they work at our beck and call. I have quite a few robots working for me, and you should too.
Most of my robots are of the personal finance variety – I’ve trained some of them move funds around automatically, some of them email me when events occur (The really high-profile robots have access to my personal cell and they text me).
(Alerts and scheduled transfers for my CC and online bank – The text messaging aspect is accomplished by using tendigitnumber@vtext.com as the email address – there are similar systems for the other carriers.)
Some of my robots back up my PC automatically, on the fly, without me ever having to think about it. (Synchronicity and DropBox)
One robot alerts me on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays that I need to shave, and another alerts me on Thursday evenings to take out the trash, as the trash man cometh on Friday.
(Recurring Gmail or Exchange calendar events)
I have one robot gather posts from my favorite websites and stick em all together to save me time. So I can procrastinate more effectively.
(Google Reader or Bloglines – I’ve used them both)
I had some incredibly tedious and time consuming data entry work, moving data from one CMS to a completely incompatible system – We’re talking 1 minute or more per record and over 200 records. Just repetitive CTRL-C/ CTRL-V stuff. Absolutely mind numbing work that’s easy to get off-track on. I trained a robot to do this data entry for me. It took a bit longer, but there was no looming deadline, and I was able to go watch TV and have a beer while my robot tirelessly toiled away in front of a terminal. (I used a combination of Microsoft Excel and AutoHotKey to accomplish this. I’ll do a full article on AutoHotKey later)
Lets kick this bad boy off, shall we?
So I’ve started this thing, essentially as an outlet for my stress and frustration with my life, job, et cetera. I find that I’m ridiculously stressed out, to the point of being unpleasant and ‘on edge’ constantly. I dont dig this. My friends dont dig this. My girl doesnt dig this.
I’m actively looking for REAL solutions to this problem, and I hope to find them over time. I’ll report back on my progress and any truly good tips I come across.
And if I find nothing, atleast I’ll have made a legitimate effort. And maybe entertained some of you along the way. Or not. Whatever.
Sincerely, Stressman.