The Kaizen Plan for Decluttering Your Computer
Lynn Johnston
Published by Open Clearing Press at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Lynn Johnston
Discover other titles by Lynn Johnston at Smashwords.com:
The Kaizen Plan for Healthy Eating
Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.
This ebook started out as a series of posts on Lynn's blog: http://www.smallstepstobigchange.com
Table of Contents
In this era of information overload, it's more important than ever to find ways of filtering and organizing the constant influx of data we receive every day. This ebook will get you started on that process using the kaizen approach of making small, consistent changes to your daily routine. You'll learn to manage your email more efficiently, get your files organized and backed up so you don't have to worry about losing anything, and improve your productivity by monitoring your online activities and eliminating timewasters.
Kaizen is a Japanese word meaning "continuous improvement" and it's used in the business world to describe the approach of accomplishing things by making a series of small, simple changes that create gradual improvement. It's the approach Japanese businesses took after World War II to remake their manufacturing industry and turn companies like Honda and Toyota into the world-renowned corporations they are today.
But the kaizen approach isn't limited to business. It can be applied to any goal or project that can be broken down into smaller steps. The biggest benefit of the kaizen approach is that it eliminates overwhelm. All you have to do is focus on one small step at a time.
A Kaizen Plan is simply a set of small but doable steps that you take, one at a time. Each step addresses some aspect of the problem you want to solve or the goal you want to achieve.
The effect of a Kaizen Plan is cumulative — each small step synergizes with the previous ones, so life gets better faster than you’d expect.
Each step in a Kaizen Plan has to fit several criteria:
Simple. A plan consisting of complicated, difficult steps is a plan that never gets executed.
Short. A change that requires you to set aside a large block of time is a change that doesn't get made. But a change that you can do in a few minutes is much easier to squeeze into your busy schedule. Most of the changes I've suggested can be done in just a few minutes each day.
Personalized. The most effective small steps are the ones that directly address your needs. Always feel free to modify any of the suggestions in this book so that they work for you, or use them as inspiration for coming up with specific changes that meet your needs.
Affirming. You shouldn't have to change your personality to change your habits.
Disclaimer: If you're a super-motivated, uber-disciplined overachiever whose life is already organized in 15 minute increments...this book isn't for you. It's for the rest of us.
How much time do you spend every day reading email? How many messages are in your inbox right now?
If you’re like me, the answers to those questions are "too much" and "several thousand." Where did all this email come from, and why haven’t I deleted it?
When I start grouping the messages into categories, I come up with these:
- Personal messages from friends and family
- Messages from discussion groups (like yahoogroups) that I subscribed to
- Advertisements and coupons from companies I’ve bought from in the past
- Newsletters on topics that interest me, like writing and gardening
- Notes that I’ve sent myself when I had a brainstorm and only had my cell phone handy
- Research for stories that I want to refer to later
- Reminders of things I need to do
Spam isn’t an issue. Gmail’s spam filter is so good that only rarely does a piece of spam get through to my inbox. The email overload I’m experiencing is the result of two basic mistakes I’ve made:
- I’ve opted in to too many things
- I’m using my inbox as a place to store reference information
The first is relatively easy to solve. All I have to do is start opting-out of the things that I don’t really need.
Newsletters: If I don’t enjoy a newsletter enough to read it the day I receive it, I’m unsubscribing.
Yahoogroups: I’m asking myself, "Is the benefit I get from being a member of this group outweighing the amount of time I waste deleting messages that aren’t relevant to me?" Most of the time the answer is no. For those few that I’m choosing to remain in, I’m creating filters to auto-sort those messages into a folder that I can read when I have time.
Ads and coupons: If I haven’t made a purchase from a company in the past month based on an ad or a coupon they’ve sent me, I’m removing myself from their mailing list.
But using my inbox as a giant unsorted file drawer–that’s a much bigger problem. A lot of the messages contain some piece of information that I think I might refer to later. A website I want to check out, an article I should read, a phone number that I might need later, info about an event that I’m considering attending, a recipe to try.
Gmail’s excellent search capability makes it easier for me to use my inbox as a dumping ground for miscellaneous information, because I can often find what I want by typing in a couple of keywords. So instead of reading each email once and deciding what to do with it, I read each email and then leave it my inbox for my future self to deal with.
But by delegating all those decisions to my future self, I’m not only allowing myself to be overwhelmed now, I’m also planning to be overwhelmed the next time I check my inbox.
What small changes can I make now that will save my future self from the distraction of an overcrowded inbox?
To start, I can establish some rules:
Correspondence from friends and family gets stored in the appropriate folder as soon as I’ve answered it.
Coupons I think I will use get printed out and put in my purse (if they’re usable offline) or filed in a Coupons folder (if they’re only usable via the company’s website).
Research goes into a folder named for the appropriate topic (Prehistory, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, etc).
Tasks I need to complete: a) if I can do the task in less than two minutes, I do it; b) if the task can’t be done immediately or has to be done at a specific time in the future, I write it down on either my to-do list or my calendar.
Story ideas get printed out and put in my story idea file, then saved in a Story Idea folder (just in case the paper file ever gets lost or damaged).
Miscellaneous information that I think I might refer to someday gets pasted into Evernote, a free personal information manager that allows you to save small bits of text and tag it with keywords for easy retrieval later.
Websites I want to check out get bookmarked in a Firefox folder called "Websites to Check Out."
If I start implementing these rules now–and maybe set aside 10 minutes a day to go through old messages and apply these new rules to the clutter–I should reach a point where all the messages in my inbox are less than 24 hours old and I can go through them all quickly, leaving me free to spend most of my email time on the important messages. My goal: spend no more than 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon on email.
How much of your email inbox is clutter? Where is that clutter coming from and what could you do to eliminate some of it?
Note from Lynn: By following the recommendations in last week’s post, I’ve reduced my incoming email by almost 70%. I’m spending less time deleting irrelevant emails and more of my online time reading and responding to the important ones.
As I mentioned in one of the comments on the Week 15 post, I’m also realizing how I’ve been using my email as a source of entertainment and a way to feel more socially connected: those timewasting emails were filling an emotional need. Now that I’ve noticed this, I’m using some of the time I’m saving for social things, like a quick phone call, card, or text to a friend or family member (replacing the false sense of social interaction with an activity that will strengthen my real social connections).
If your computer’s hard drive died today, what would you lose? Would you be able to restore all that important data: that half-written novel, the photos and video from last year’s family reunion, all the tax-related receipts you entered into Quicken this year? Or would you lose those files forever?
You hear it all the time, back up your data at least once a week. But in order to back those files up, you have to organize them well enough to be sure that you’re not missing anything important. Not the most exciting thing to think about, I know, but taking a few minutes now could save you a ton of misery later.
And I do mean misery. I learned this the hard way myself: in 2004, my hard drive crashed and I lost every poem and every short story I’d written SINCE HIGH SCHOOL. Yes, that’s roughly 20 years of writing, lost forever. Not to mention the research, outlines, and partially-written drafts of several non-fiction books that I’d been working on in bits and pieces for more than a decade.
I’d made random periodic backups throughout the years on floppy disk, but many of those disks had gotten corrupted while sitting in a box in my closet. I had a few backups on CDs too, but hadn’t realized that my CD-drive was going, and a lot of the data on those CDs was indecipherable. But even if all my backups had survived, I still would have lost files, because I didn’t have any sort of system for organizing my file folders.
I was depressed for weeks. But I learned my lesson. Of course, there are much better options for backing up data now than there were in 2004; now we have external hard drives with auto-backup software and inexpensive online storage services. At the moment I’m using an external hard drive, but of course, those can fail too, so it’s about time for me to look into online services.
I’m starting with this article from PC Magazine, Disaster-Proof Your Data, which compares a number of the online back-up services.
I’ve also set up a system for organizing my files that makes it easy for me to be sure that I’m backing up everything. Every project has its own folder, and all files related to that project (no matter what program created them) go into the appropriate folder. All project folders are located in the Public directory of my computer, so when I back up every Friday, all I have to do is copy the contents of the Public folder to my external drive and everything gets backed up at once.
When I write, I save everything to a thumb drive that has all my writing project folders on it. At the end of the writing day, the contents of the thumb drive gets saved to the Public folder. So those very important drafts and research notes are saved in three locations: the thumb drive, the computer’s hard drive, and the external hard drive. Adding an online backup service means I will have a fourth backup of those precious files. Even if our house burns down, my manuscripts-in-progress will be safe.
The added benefit of having my files organized by project means that I no longer lose files because I’ve named them poorly or have saved them multiple times in different directories. The files I’m merely archiving for future reference (like my tax-related spreadsheets from 2008) are not making it hard for me to find the files that I need today. I can find the contract for my latest release, the research notes for my current work-in-progress, my grocery list, and last year’s tax return (with associated worksheets and scanned receipts) in a few seconds.
Is your computer clogged with old files you don’t need anymore? Can you find all the files you do need, and do you have a system in place for backing them up? What small steps could you take this week to keep your data safe and make it easier to access?
Note From Lynn: I often have multiple versions of a story in different files, because sometimes I will delete something and then later want to put it back into the draft. One of the ways that I keep it all organized is by how I name the file. The first draft of my story is in a file named:
Title-ver A-date
Example: Branded-ver A-042311
When I open the file each day to work on it, I save it with the new date at the end, so that I will be able to go back to any day’s work.
After the rough draft is complete, I save it as version B:
Branded-ver B-042611
I edit this version, and when I’ve fixed everything I can, I rename it as version C and send it out to my critique partners.
It gets renamed as version D when I revise it based on my critique partners’ comments.
So while I do have a ton of files in the folder named "Branded," I always know which one is the most recent, and in what order they were created. The great thing about naming files this way is that even if you keep every file you ever create in one folder, all the ones related to a single story will be grouped together and in sequence.
And yes, this file naming system is also the result of a bad experience, where I started editing a novel and realized about 100 pages in that I was not editing the most current draft. Boy was I annoyed when I realized that I was going to have to transfer all those changes to the correct draft and then go back and re-edit those 100 pages.
Now that we’ve decluttered our email accounts and our computer hard drives, I’d like to focus on a different type of virtual clutter — the clutter we create in our daily schedules when we get sucked into wasting time on the Internet.
Don’t panic, I’m not advocating that we give up our Internet connections! But I am suggesting that a close examination of how we spend time online might make it easier to cut the timewasters while keeping the meaningful stuff AND having more free time offline for the things that make life worth living.
Take Facebook, for example…think about the time you’ve spent there this week. How much of that time was spent communicating with people you care about? How much was spent reading and possibly responding to trivial comments made by people you barely know or have never met?
Or Twitter. Out of all the people you follow, how many of their tweets contained useful (i.e. educational or actionable) information? How much was idle chatter, gossip, or random musings?
Or blogs. How many blogs do you follow? How many of them do you actually read when they’re updated? How many do you skim and stop reading halfway through a post? How many are in your reader because you feel you ought to read them?
Don’t forget games. They can be a great way to unwind, but they’re also a great way to lose track of time and stay up late. When’s the last time you meant to play for a few minutes and ended up rushing to meet a deadline as a result?
There’s nothing wrong with spending a few minutes making small talk with strangers, reading a few extra blog posts for sheer entertainment or surfing the web to relax. As long as your Internet fun isn’t eating up time that you’d planned to spend on productive activities.
How do you separate productive online time from entertainment time? The first step is to track the time you’re spending online by activity so that you know which ones are productive and which ones are taking up time without benefitting you in some way. You could start keeping a log by hand, making a note everytime you visit a new site and what you’re doing there. But I bet you won’t.
Luckily, there are programs that will track your internet usage for you. RescueTime offers a free version of their software, which records how much time you spend on individual websites and give you a detailed report. At the end of the day, you can see exactly how you spent your time online, and ask yourself: "Did those 17 minutes on Twitter make me smarter, make me happier, or get me closer to one of my goals? Did those 43 minutes spent playing Angry Birds help me relax, or did they add stress to my life by eating up time I needed to do something more important?"
Once you’ve identified the timewasters, you can make a small change or two to minimize or eliminate them:
Make a list of productive online activities: The facts you need to research for that story-in-progress, the bill you need to pay, the work-related emails you need to answer: put them all on your list and check them off before you let yourself have any unstructured time online.
Set a timer: Decide how much time out of your day is reasonable to spend on random web surfing, reading blogs for fun, etc. Set aside that much time in your schedule, and walk away from the computer when your timer goes off.
Reduce or eliminate temptation: When you’re not using the computer, turn it off. When you’re using the computer to do work that can be done offline, turn the modem off. If your task requires access to certain websites, install a browser plugin like LeechBlock that will allow you to temporarily block all web access except to those sites you must use for the task.
Use the fun stuff as a reward: Maybe you let yourself Stumble for five minutes every hour of productive activity, or for half an hour after you’ve crossed off the three most important tasks on your list.
I suspect that my first couple days of looking at my online time are going to be embarrassing–I’m easily distracted and I often spend more time on the net that I intend to. But unless I’m willing to take a close look at how I’m using my time, I’ll never get to the point where I can look back on my day and feel like it was well-spent.
How much time do you spend online? How much of that time is productive? How much of that time is entertainment? How much of that entertainment could you give up without lowering the quality of your life?
Note from Lynn: A strange thing happened as I used RescueTime to track how I spend my day at the computer. I thought I’d be depressed when I looked at my first report, but in fact, I was pleasantly surprised. Turns out I’m spending less time doing unproductive things than I thought. What’s more, I’m finding that knowing RescueTime is recording what I do on the computer is actually motivating. I look forward to seeing my report at the end of the day. It tells me how much time I spent writing, how much time I spent reading email, and how much time I spent at every single website I visited.
Also, I can rank each activity by whether it’s unproductive or productive, and Rescue Time gives me a score based on how much time I spend doing productive vs unproductive things. Making that productivity number go up is also motivating.
If I leave the computer to start a load of laundry, water the garden, eat lunch, etc., Rescue Time asks me what I was doing when I get back and lets me enter those activities too. My productivity score includes EVERYTHING I do in a day, not just the things I do at the computer.
I thought I’d be installing this software and using it for a few weeks for tracking as I changed some of my online habits, but it’s such a great motivational tool that I’m making it a permanent part of my daily routine.
Now that you've started organizing your virtual life, I encourage you to take the process further. What other things do you do online? Which ones are meaningful and which ones are ways to kill time? What small changes could you make in what you do or the way you do them that would free up more time or help you get more done?
Lynn Johnston blogs about how to take control of your life 10 minutes at a time using the kaizen approach: http://www.smallstepstobigchange.com
Each week, readers of her blog receive a small, simple step they can use to improve some area of their lives.
She's also the author of The Kaizen Plan for Healthy Eating, which describes a gentle, stress-free process to eases you into eating more nutritious foods.
Connect with Lynn:
Email: kaizenlynn@gmail.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/TheKaizenPlan