Taking of Stock of What You’ve Got (Digitally) (Premium)

January is an interesting time of year, when many resolve to make improvements in their lives. And I’ve done so this past month, as I often do.

But this year, I’ve also resolved to make a different kind of effort, to re-examine what I already have, from a digital standpoint. And to make sure that I’m taking full advantage of the content I’ve paid for or otherwise acquired. It’s an interesting exercise, and worth considering for yourself.

I wrote very briefly about digital decluttering at a high level back on January 1st. Since then, I’ve been working through a variety of personal improvement tasks that span both the physical and the virtual.

On the physical end, I’ve resolved to be more active each day—to mixed results so far—and to spend 2018 clearing out the boxes of crap that we moved here from Dedham. (I realize these things aren’t super-interesting to most Thurrott.com readers, so I’ll focus on the digital here.)

One of the things I did on the digital side was to spend a few days going through all of my browser bookmarks. I’ve removed the ones that are not useful, organized them better for my way of working—I exclusively use the browser’s bookmarks bar for these shortcuts—and will continue evolving on this over time.

In doing this, it occurred to me that this type of task, which you might think of as curating or organizing an existing asset, could be applied to other content too. Like many, I’ve collected a ton of digital content—various e-books and other reading material, music, videos, and so on—over the years. And much of is just sitting there, virtually, not being used. Has, in fact, never been used, in some cases.

I paid for much of this content. Or, in the case of subscriptions, I am paying for its use on an ongoing basis. Obviously, I should probably make an effort to ensure that I’m am deriving the maximum value possible from the content, paid or not, and cull away that which is not necessary.

Getting rid of clutter—of “stuff”—is a constant effort, and something I’ve written and spoken about a lot over the years. And while the advantage of switching from, say, physical books to e-books is fairly obvious, I feel that it is as important to declutter your digital content as it is to do so with physical items. Minimalism is a goal, an ongoing effort, not a destination. It’s something we’ll never be done trying to achieve.

So, what does this mean in real-world terms?

For me, it meant starting with Pocket, the “read it later” service I use daily and recommend highly. I am a voracious reader, and Pocket has emerged as one of the key ways in which I consume written content.

I love Pocket for many reasons—you can share any article, in any browser, PC or mobile to the service, and it has a great dynamic list of recommended articles to save—but my reading list filled up more quickly than I could keep up with. Worse, I had saved multiple versions of the same types of articles in many cases, whether they were tech-, diet-, wellness-, financial-, or whatever-related. I needed to clear out this list.

So I did. And it took almost the entire month of January to do so. I repeatedly scanned through my list of saved articles, eliminating near-duplicates, starting from the bottom (e.g. the past) and working my way up to the top (the present). I did this on the iPad Pro I typically use for reading, on my phone, and even on my PC, which isn’t really the ideal place for reading. In some cases, I came across things I had saved that I wanted to keep for the long-term, so these made their way into my browser bookmarks bar. (Because the Pocket reading list isn’t the right place, in my view, for archiving.) In many cases, what I had saved was either nonsense (self-help) or out-of-date, and was quickly removed.

This morning I finally achieved “zero reading list” and for the first time in years, I had nothing new to read in Pocket. That was briefly fulfilling, but the entire point of Pocket is that I always have something interesting to read. So I scanned through the service’s Recommended list and added five articles. My goal going forward is the same as it is for email: Zero inbox is unachievable, but keeping the list of unread emails—or, in this case, articles—to just a single screen is both healthy and doable.

While I was undergoing this culling of Pocket content, I began thinking about the other digital content I have. And there are three obvious examples of services for which I have paid for content and then never or rarely used it. They are Kindle (ebooks), Audible (audiobooks), and Apple (movies and TV shows).

In each case, I’m always on the hunt for inexpensive content. So if Amazon, say, has a sale on Kindle books, or whatever, I will scan through the list and perhaps buy a few low-cost items with the idea that I’ll get to them someday. This is a dubious practice, since I’ve rarely actually ever gotten to this content. As any self-help guru will eagerly tell you as if it were profound, an item on sale is not an item on sale if you don’t actually need it. That is, it’s always cheaper not to buy.

But … I did buy. So my resolution here is to do what I did with Pocket: Start in the past and scan through my content list in Kindle, Audible, and Apple movies, and make sure I actually consume that content.

The right way to do this—which is, if not unachievable, at least unlikely—is to not purchase any new content from any of these (or other) content providers until I’ve fully realized the value of the content that was already purchased. But I know I won’t be able to do this. The new Star Wars movie, or a new Stephen King book, or whatever will be released whenever it is released, and I will simply have to get it. But I will try to delay new purchases in lieu of existing content as much as possible.

I discussed this issue with my wife, and as the person who manages our finances and has always cast an evil eye on my spending, she is, of course, delighted. And we’ve resolved, together, to watch at least one of those Apple-held movies each week moving forward. To work our way through that list.

You could apply this thinking to any digital content, I’d imagine.

And it doesn’t have to be paid content: I also reevaluated the list of podcasts to which I subscribe, and while most of them are/were of some value, I just don’t have the time to listen to them all. Some culling was in order there, too. You could clear out the crap you will never listen to in your music library, whether it consists of CD rips, subscription content, or both. Reconsider the many digital content subscriptions for which you are paying each month. Apply this thinking to your email, and actively spend a month unsubscribing from mailing lists, most of which you probably never explicitly signed up for. It goes on and on.

But that’s the point: Decluttering, digital or physical, is a process. And the important bit is to take that first step, and then to keep on trying.