At my house, we have a lot of garbage can-shaped receptacles. Within a couple of steps of our kitchen sink, we have a recycling container, two containers whose contents are destined for our compost bin out back (wet and dry, respectively) and a regular old trash can. When I was growing up in the 1860′s, we didn’t have all of this recycling stuff happening, nor were we being compelled by NPR to compost our leftover jicama. We had one, big-ass container where we put the stuff we didn’t want any more.
I’m pretty comfortable with our current configuration and can make it work without too much thought, but it’s a far cry from having a single, massive container where I threw frickin’ everything. That’s because choices, as much as we love love love them, actually introduce new strains of complexity – many of which, we don’t actually need.
If I asked you to take note of a bit of information –say, an order number from Amazon or something– and that you may need to reproduce this information at some point in the future. What would you do with it?
If you’re among the efficiency dorks who usually read my junk, you’re likely to resound with things like “Save it in Evernote”, “Note it in Notational Velocity!”, “Shove it into a text file in Dropbox!”, “send an email to myself in Gmail!” or “write the information on a cocktail napkin with a crayon and import it into my Dropbox directory using my scanner before duplicating it into Notational Velocity and emailing it my Gmail account and CC’ing Evernote!”. Perhaps you see what I mean.
Heaven knows I suffer from this sort of weirdo illness. That’s why, over the last couple of weeks, I’ve decided to remove as many choices as possible when it comes to information. Each service or application I use has a specific purpose and use case. Otherwise, it gets the frickin’ chop. For example:
- Dropbox. I love it, but it’s been relegated to backing up my music and photos, holding my ebooks so I can easily read them on my iPad and moving the occasional photo or audio file from my iPhone to my computer.
- Notational Velocity + Simplenote. An awesome combination that I’ve completely stopped using in favor of Evernote.
- Flickr. I upload a photo once every couple of months, maybe. Default action with new photo: into Evernote.
(Ok, so I like Evernote. Sue me.)
The point here is that I have tried very hard to get rid of the options that crop up while I’m working. While I understand that this comes at the expense of trying out all sorts of cool apps and services, I’ve also spent good, long chunks of time dicking around with the new shiny thing and it’s gotten me nowhere. Now, my workflow looks like this:
- Need to make a note of something (anything)? Cmd+Ctrl+N puts me into a new Evernote note.
- A new task or thing I may need to do? Ctrl+Option+Cmd+Space puts me into the Omnifocus task entry box.
- Need to send an email? Ctrl+Option+Cmd+N switches to Mail.app and creates a new message (via Keyboard Maestro).
What choices can you angrily get rid of?
Photo by Femto Photography
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