Let’s talk about ‘stuff’
Modern American life seems to be full of ‘stuff’. Little tchotchkes and chargers and adapters and flash drives and scarves and hats and creams and pastes and rewards cards and coins and remotes and keys and on and on. The amount of ‘stuff’ that permeates every aspect of life is enough to make one’s head spin. And, if you’re at all like me, every end table and dresser top seems to be a wonderful breeding ground for ever more stuff: The ‘stuff’ is remultiplying almost daily.
Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to just ‘have less stuff’. The cable is for the new vacuum and the flash drive has your tax documents and the cream is critical so that your fair Scotts-Irish skin is even slightly manageable. ‘Stuff’, it would seem, is not going away any time soon (as much as I might wish it would). ‘Stuff’ is here to stay.
The digital age has changed the dynamics of ‘stuff’ and not strictly for the better. Yes, carting an entire record collection or personal library along when moving is no longer common. At first glance it seems we have eliminated some physical stuff but often it has just been transmogrified into its digital equivalent. This ‘digital stuff’ brings with it its own headaches and miseries; Little fees pop up when you reach a certain threshold of cloud storage, different harddrives have different photos, and this computer’s software can’t read that filetype. This is just stuff of a new variety.
Don’t let your ‘stuff’ become a todo list
Looking down at my side-table, I see a bill, my laptop, a small ceramic cup, and some loose metal hardware. Every single one of these, whether I intend it to or not, implies some kind of action: The bill needs paying, emails need sending on the laptop, the ceramic cup and the loose metal hardware are both parts of ongoing projects. I often find myself looking over these things somewhat panicked, ‘right, can’t wait too long to pay that’ ‘oops, haven’t responded to that email yet’, etc. It is a bad habit and one that I’m working on breaking. I’ve let my stuff become a todo list. And this makes consciously focusing on whatever I had intended to focus on much harder. My thoughts flip to whatever my gaze falls on.
The best way I’ve found to remedy this problem is to make sure my todo list is my todo list. I can find myself paralyzed by every little object because I’m worried about the task it implies. If my eyes land on an unpaid bill I seize up. “Am I late to pay it?”, “Can I pay it now?”, “How bad is the late fee I might have incurred?”. Those are pretty serious questions all to be summoned up by shifting my glance. I find it much easier to avoid this moment of panic if I just write down “pay bill” on my todo list. I look at my list occasionally and see that I have to investigate the bill in the next few days. The moment of anxiety is averted and replaced with more certainty: “Yup, I know about that bill, I’ll get to it soon.”
The other important step is to keep my workspace free of irrelevant ‘stuff’. When I’m trying to focus, I clear away as much miscellany as I can. I work to declutter my desk (it can be challenging, being neat is definitely not my default mode). This helps me make progress on whatever I set out to work on. I’m far from perfect at it, but I’ve found it to be an improvement. I keep just the tools I need ready at hand and put everything else out of sight (sometimes even in another room for good measure!). This is effectively the idea of mise en place applied to other types of work: what works well in the chaotic arena of a professional kitchen seems to work well for my desk. Decluttering and preparing works in tandem with a todo list. I don’t worry about forgetting one of these out-of-sight objects and their implied tasks because I already have them written down: win-win.
What about focusing when surrounded by digital ‘stuff’?
This is the area I struggle with the most. The web browser is a frustrating tool. It can instantly conjure gigantic avalanches of digital ‘stuff’. It can lead you down wild rabbit-holes and conjure terrifying images onto your screen. My current strategy is, truthfully, to avoid using it when I can. I prefer working in a terminal emulator as often as possible. They’re wonderful tools that are highly programmable and mostly clutter free. They show you just what you asked for and mostly keep extraneous ‘stuff’ out of view. Terminals are quite productive and I’m a bit sad they’ve fallen so far out of favor as general ways to interact with a computer. I have some additional thoughts on the difficulties of digital stuff and why browsers might not be good tools that I’d like to write about in the future so I’ll save that for another time.
Those are my thoughts on ‘stuff’. Feel free to reach out with any reactions or to just say hey.