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I've been meaning to put some of the principles laid out here to practice in my personal life. I've always been the guy with the cluttered desk. Though I feel n

I've been meaning to put some of the principles laid out here to practice in my personal life. I've always been the guy with the cluttered desk. Though I feel no compulsion to keep it tidy, I must admit that when I do decide to tidy it up, I feel a sense of ease and relief - like some invisible, slightly intangible burden has just been lifted off my shoulders. I think this is the feeling that people get when they simplify things and try to adhere to minimalism. It's easy enough to focus first on your digital life, like the author noted. Get rid of all the unnecessary things on your phone. Then perhaps move to your computer - tidy and organize all those random links and shortcuts on your desktop and organize all those digital photos. Then of course, applying the principles to your own life in physical reality. Automating monthly payments, getting recurring shipments of things you need (I get monthly shipments of coffee, but you could probably get things like toilet paper, soaps, etc.), tidying up your house or apartment. I believe we all heard the stories about how Steve Jobs had multiples of the same shirts/pants to simplify his decision making in the morning and free his mind. Personally, I went and got 10 pairs of the same socks and did away with most of my others (socks of various sizes, colors, lengths, etc.) - now, whenever a sock loses its pair, I can simply pair it up with another sock as they are, after all, the same. Minimalism has quite a few benefits, how you can best implement it in your own life will vary depending on your routine and lifestyle.

imglorp 7y ago
I think that sense of relief, when you clean up a work area, is tangible and has a biological explanation. As David Allen (Getting Things Done) observed, we maintain a physical memory palace in these workspaces. Each item on the workspace is a todo, an unfinished object, a project in progress, or a reference thing in case we ever need it again. The link is works both ways: either brain-to-desk or desk-to-brain. You can probably remember where in the pile a document for some project is. There is tangible stress having all that stuff in your head. The beauty of filing things away where they go, off your desk, is that you get it out of your head, trusting the system, and the stress is relieved! It doesn't really matter what system you use as long as you trust it and it gets it out of your head and off your workspace.
- duderific 7y ago
  I wonder how this maps to the number of browser tabs a person keeps open. I'm a "less than 10" guy myself. Sometimes I see someone with like 100 tabs open, and it stresses me out. I use a Chrome extension called OneTab that at the click of a button, collects your open tabs into an internal chrome extension page, from which you can reopen them if desired. As you say, I find that this gets things "out of my head" into a system I can trust, and I can switch context more easily once I have done this.
  - FillardMillmore 7y ago
    I'm also one of those people you're referring to with '100 tabs open' (well, technically, I currently have 83 tabs spread across 5 browser windows). It can be kind of stressful sometimes, but my fear of not being able to find what I was looking for should I need a page again always seems worse. Of course, I know there are native methods and browser extensions to mitigate the possibility of losing things, but old habits die hard.

imglorp 7y ago

I think that sense of relief, when you clean up a work area, is tangible and has a biological explanation. As David Allen (Getting Things Done) observed, we maintain a physical memory palace in these workspaces. Each item on the workspace is a todo, an unfinished object, a project in progress, or a reference thing in case we ever need it again. The link is works both ways: either brain-to-desk or desk-to-brain. You can probably remember where in the pile a document for some project is. There is tangible stress having all that stuff in your head. The beauty of filing things away where they go, off your desk, is that you get it out of your head, trusting the system, and the stress is relieved! It doesn't really matter what system you use as long as you trust it and it gets it out of your head and off your workspace.

duderific 7y ago
I wonder how this maps to the number of browser tabs a person keeps open. I'm a "less than 10" guy myself. Sometimes I see someone with like 100 tabs open, and it stresses me out. I use a Chrome extension called OneTab that at the click of a button, collects your open tabs into an internal chrome extension page, from which you can reopen them if desired. As you say, I find that this gets things "out of my head" into a system I can trust, and I can switch context more easily once I have done this.
- FillardMillmore 7y ago
  I'm also one of those people you're referring to with '100 tabs open' (well, technically, I currently have 83 tabs spread across 5 browser windows). It can be kind of stressful sometimes, but my fear of not being able to find what I was looking for should I need a page again always seems worse. Of course, I know there are native methods and browser extensions to mitigate the possibility of losing things, but old habits die hard.