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Comment by yoo1I | Hacker News Reader

> which means piling five categories of material possessions

Life is a series of boxes. Be it Scrum or Marie-Kondo-ing or dieting or GTD or cleaning your house.

If you feel you're not in relaxed control of your life, produce a handful (and not more) "boxes" (metaphorical or real) that have sufficiently sharply defined edges, and sort your things into them. If the boxes become large, subdivide, but keep the edges sharp.

Revisit your boxes on regular intervals.

That way you don't have to think about things that you don't need to think about right now and have enough space to tend to the things which don't yet or maybe don't at all fit in boxes.

You're welcome, I would like to have my book-deal now.

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ok how would you handle information? I mean like work, entertainment, etc

To reiterate: I think work, depending on the kind of work you are doing, is covered by scrum/GTD:

Break down projects into buckets of tasks and make sure that each task item has sharp edges, then regularly review and put enough effort into it that you can start trusting yourself or your team to do this diligently. So that you can focus on the inevitable portions of your work that doesn't fit neatly into boxes.

But I am not entirely sure if that's really what you're asking ? Are you referring to the organization of reference information ?

I would recommend an Information Diet.

If you would permit me, here is my experience with the book

https://chadkohalyk.com/2012/09/04/the-information-diet/

and the results:

https://chadkohalyk.com/2012/09/30/breaking-fast/

(I am not to be self-promotiony or anything... the conservation of attention, time and _things_ are just topics that I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about. I am not trying to sell a book or anything. I don't even have ads on my site. Just trying to be helpful)

BTW interesting blog. Added to my rss.

Thank you!

What I do is, and I realize most people aren't interested in something like this, is I periodically delete 90% of my mp3s. I do this for a couple of reasons: the tedium of having a billion mp3s I don't listen to (and schlepping them around, navigating among them, etc), and the way it pushes me into discovering new music.

I do the same for photos. Really nice photos, I keep, and so I've got a nicely curated set of pictures from the last several years. Maybe a couple hundred. Thousands more, taken, gone!

Everything passes, of course. I just make it a little more intentional.

There is a lot of joy to be had looking through really old photos of things you have mostly forgotten. Deleting them seems both pointless and wasteful, why not just move them to a cloud backup so you can ignore them for 10 years?

Oh, I have a few ancient photos. Just a few, though.

There's a joy in freeing myself from ever having to think about that stuff again, too. There's absolutely no cognitive burden, no cloud password to remember, no junk cropping up from time to time, none of it, because the stuff's just gone.

I've gotten old family photos handed to me from time to time, like from generations ago. I didn't know these people, didn't know anyone who knew them. It was just stuff. They could've been anyone. Why keep that stuff? Why make someone else haul it around? No one's going to care, and when I realized that, I stopped caring about most of it, too.

I decide consciously what would be right for me. Those decisions need to be realistic.

Example: I want to do a lot of sport in my spare time, so I can only play a little music and read almost no books. I'm fine with that.

Then I check which emotions come up when doing or not doing something, or when consuming media and information. I think about what those emotions do for me, if they help me on the way I chose to go or not.

Example: Somedays getting up and reading the news or HN makes me a bit miserable, so I close the tab and look at the table doing nothing instead to get back in my good mood.

I try to counter and unlearn emotions which I don't consider useful, and reinforce others. That works best by forming routines.

Those routines need to updated, some more often, some not. There is no formula that fits everyone.

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