Monday, June 10, 2019

'DE'Clutter for a happier 'You'

It was last week when I saw the signs of my laptop going to crash soon. I rushed to the IT department and they suggested - I need to get the laptop formatted. So they asked me to take a backup of my work on company's cloud and come back in the morning.

This looked easy at the beginning. All I had to do was Ctrl A followed by Ctrl C, copy all the folders and Ctrl V on cloud drive. But I paused. I looked at the size of data. It was more than 30 GB. It was first time in 4 years, I was taking a back-up, it had to be huge. But then, a thought crossed my mind - Do I have to copy all the data? Is it all worth it? I looked at the folder structure. It was all in a mess. When I started 4 years back, it was all organized but over the years, it just blew up! Sigh! I stared at my D:drive. I wondered how come all these years I never thought of sorting this content mess. What had kept me away? I took a deep breath and started. One by one, opening the folders, browsing through the files and deleting the major junk I had religiously kept because of the rational - that one day, it might come handy. All the while, I smiled. I had forgot of so many things I had on my laptop for future reading, reference purposes and what not. Things that didn't make sense now. During this exercise, I tried to stick to a consulting approach we often use in rationalization projects - Discard, Merge, Renew, New. I dumped the files which had become obscure. I merged the content of files which made more sense and had one reference for one topic. I kept aside the files which I have to work upon now. And also noted few topics for my future work. This entire exercise lasted for 3 -4 hours. And it felt so good at the end. In the end, I barely took 7 GB of backup. I might not have worked that day in office. I just did this one exercise but no regrets.

That day, I felt happy internally and a sense of satisfaction engulfed me. The following weekend, I and my partner cleaned our room and cupboards, took out the things we no longer use including dozen of clothes. We gave away all of it. And now we have more space in our room. The vibes have changed and we both feel good about it.

This entire gamut of events left a positive impact on me. As I think again, I realize we don't often take a break to de-clutter: declutter our places where we live, declutter our electronic gadgets and declutter our mind. And so, in all the madness we live in, all the things we pile up for long obstructs our view of reality. It is good to sort out things. There is no need to carry the burden of everything all the time. We need to learn to let go old things and thoughts, and move on, make a room for new. This will help us to grow! I look forward to take this exercise frequently ( at least twice annually).

 I would love to hear your thoughts and experience related to decluttering the mess. Please share them in the comment section below.