Lifehack

This past week has had the theme of 'Getting Back in the Game' for me. As I've said here before I've been working at breaking obsessions and habits by replacing them with preferred ones. I've also been fiddling around with the Master Task List I created while reading David Allen's Getting Things Done. It was and still is a seedling compared to the ancient banyan tree I imagine it will become once I've followed Allen's advice to get EVERYTHING into the list. I've only got maybe 10% of my planned projects represented on it as yet.

I realized after only a day or two of working with it that I could not wait until it was complete to start using it and that creating it on the go might even help me make it more efficient as I integrated its use into my routines. But because it is still so incomplete--with only some projects represented--my use of it has been hit or miss. Most of both July and August saw it lying fallow as I stopped using for the three weeks I was at my Mom's and did not pick it back up until several days ago after stumbling onto this website that got me all motivated again.

Lifehack is a group blog on the themes of productivity, communication skills, lifestyle tips, management of time and money, and uses of technology to aid all of this. I've been browsing on it for a week now and have 'liked' it on fb to have updates in my face constantly.

The heat finally lifted in southern Oregon today. And what did I do with the sudden surge of energy and ambition the milder temps afforded me? I spent the morning and afternoon--seven hours all told--purging and rearranging files on my netbook.

I rid my hard drive of over 20G of fluff. Podcasts long ago either watched or forfeit, duplicates, old drafts... I spent the bulk of that time in the itunes library and my Ebooks library. I have barely scratched the surface of even those two area and they are as postage stamps to posters in ratio to the rest of the files awaiting similar treatment.

Altho the still unwatched podcasts might trump in gigabytes the rest of the files put together, the rest of the files are many and small and nested and rife with redundancy cloaked by different file names that can't be discovered without opening both files and comparing them side by side. The image files are especially prone to this disorder.

It is because of this chaos in my files that I have been so negligent about backing them up regularly. One of the things I am aiming to do is identify files that are probably never going to be altered again and back them up to thumbs or CD-RW or the external drive which was once my laptops hard drive. Those I still require easy access to I will keep on the netbook but in folders that I will treat as read only. That way I will be able to ignore them when it's time to back up active files.

Speaking of which, I've still not gotten all the files I want off of that laptop drive and that prevents me from wiping it and claiming all 30+ gigs on it for backup and storage so that is yet another aspect of this file management project.

My netbook drive had 220 gigs available when it was new 20 months ago. It now has 87G free. It was seeing the 65G free this morning that nudged me toward doing something about it. But even all of the file fiddling I did today duplicated every day for a week isn't going to keep that number above 50 for long if I son't start either watching or forfeiting the news pod videos I've been downloading 25% faster than I've been watching them since January. They are 200 MB a pop.