Quashing Clutter

One of the benefits to putting life on 'pause' is that it provides an opportunity to reflect on what's working (and conversely not working) in life-as-it-is, and therefore to subsequently redirect the future trajectory. After I began working for EDN in January 1997, I kept all my old magazine subscriptions from the Intel days active (and subsequently appended to the list with additional subscriptions), for two primary reasons:

a) competitive research ;-), and
b) alternative information sources, as I ramped up to speed on the various technologies I'd be covering in my 'beat'. I've never been particularly shy about referencing writeups I found interesting and useful, regardless of which publishing company's banner they appeared under.

I'd dog-ear relevant pages of magazine issues as I perused them and, periodically, I'd process the publication stack, ripping out articles, adding them to a categorized Excel database, and archiving them in appropriate folders within my voluminous lateral file for future reference.

My Dad was diagnosed with ALS (i.e. Lou Gehrig's Disease) in October of 2002, and by January of 2004 his condition had become significantly debilitating. Various aspects of his living situation (I'm being intentionally vague) necessitated that I make regular and lengthy visits to care for him in Florida. There just wasn't enough time or energy for me to maintain life-as-it-had-previously-been in California on top of my added caregiver responsibilities. So the magazine stack started to grow. And grow.

Even though Dad passed away in February of last year, I was subsequently so backlogged with other personal and professional 'to-dos' that I didn't tackle the stack until this past summer. You can probably imagine how lofty it, containing 2.5 years' worth of publications, had become. My dread at the thought of how much time and energy the data entry process would take prompted me to revisit whether or not this particular aspect of my job routine even made sense anymore. Ultimately, I discovered it didn't make sense, although I had to fight hard against the momentum of no-change in order to reach this conclusion.

Those of you looking at my situation from the outside probably see it more clearly than I, caught up in habit energy, did. I'm (arguably ) more proficient in the technologies I cover than I was nearly 10 years ago, so the necessity of intense research has lessened. And, when I do need to learn more about a given topic, I can leverage the fact that most publications nowadays replicate much if not all of their print content online. Who needs a paper archive when you've got Google? Apparently not me, in the previous 2.5 years. So why did I think I needed it going foward?

Continued with 'Squashing Spam'….