From the Editor’s Desk: Goooal!! (Premium)

It’s tempting to try to remake yourself in January. It’s not like there’s much going on, especially if you live in the northern half of the northern hemisphere like I have my whole life. You’re stuck inside because it’s too dark and too cold. And so you ruminate on life and think of ways to improve. And then you spend some number of days or maybe weeks trying to be a better person. Or something.

This year, I’m trying something a little different, something that’s more in line with what works for me. In my experience, sudden, painful shifts in behavior rarely lead to long-term change. But I sometimes feel like I’m the only one thinking this way. We saw some friends at a niece’s birthday party over the weekend and I was surprised to discover they were observing a “dry January.” I’m not saying they’re alcoholics per se, but I feel like I can drink too much and these people drink much more, and more frequently, than I do. So this surprised me.

Maybe this type of thing is effective for some people, but I know it won’t work for me. Indeed, my reaction to “dry January” is almost viscerally negative. It’s the same reaction I have to the temporary crowds that make the gym unbearable every January. This is my thing, I think, wondering why there are no open machines. Shouldn’t you be at work or something?

OK, I’m venting a little bit, and maybe that’s another thing I need to work on. Except I’m not working on anything big, and certainly not because it’s January and that’s where our minds go. The thing is, I’m always working on something, and one of the things I’m almost always working on is me. Granted, I’m not as dedicated as one of those chiseled “never going to get old” idiots who’s convinced that he’ll be the genius who figures out that the secret to longevity is. Which I assume is being miserable all the time through some combination of specific eating, working out, and abstaining in all the things that make life special. You almost hope they do find the secret so they can be miserable forever.

No, no. That’s not healthy. Perhaps I should meditate and become a better person. Or not, because it’s January and I’m not doing that. Stay on target. Instead, I will continue doing what I do all the time, which is making what I think of as micro changes, as necessary. And what I can do this January, because it’s not necessarily specific to January, is make micro changes.

Of course, it is January. And there are certain tasks that come up in my life each month, each quarter, and, yes, God help me, each year. And that year does begin in January. So I can get over my aversion to these cold turkey-like changes that half the planet seems to be engaged in right now. And I can engage in some maintenance. Some of this personal, of course. And some of it is work-related. Process-related, perhaps.

I would look this up if I wasn’t so tired. (You mean lazy, the back of my brain suddenly nags me, annoyingly.) But at some point in the past, probably multiple times, I have described how I work. And more specifically, how I organize the computer files that constitute that work, fine-tuning as the years went by and simplifying when possible. I have written at great length about the digital decluttering work I’ve done, and how much of that is work-related. Though the biggest effort, perhaps, involved digital photos, and that makes sense because these things, these memories, are perhaps the most important thing I store digitally.

Here’s the short version.

When it comes to files related to work–be them one-off blog posts, news stories, longer form articles that may or may not be part of a series, books, podcast or video show notes, or anything else–there is new and there is old. Or, there is current work and there is archived work. This is true of email, too, when you think about it. There is email that is current and needs to be dealt with. And there is email that is read, no longer needed, or otherwise unimportant and done. Non-temporary current work, including email, needs to be where I will see it. Archived work is filed away. Sometimes I access it. Most times, I do not.

A few specifics can help make this clearer.

Again, it’s January, but it could be the start of any quarter. That’s when I go into my current work folder–creativity called, wait for it, “Work”–and do a bit of organization. This folder has a few top-level sub-folders that are obvious enough–Code, Books, and To-do (which is for current in-progress work that is not code or book-related)–plus month-based folders where I file completed work from that timeframe. For example, 2024-10, 2024-11, and 2024-12. I pin Book, To-do, and the current month folder to the navigation pane in File Explorer for convenience.

At the start of each quarter, I create the next three month-based folders–in this case, 2025-01, 2025-02, and 2025-03–and I unpin the older month folder (2024-12) and then pin the new one (2025-01).

But it is January, just in case you missed that. And each six months, not always exactly, I do a bit of cleanup. That is, it’s time to archive the old month-based folders that have piled up over the past several months. And just as I have a Work folder for, well, work, I also have an Archive folder for … well, you get the idea. In this case, whatever 2024-era folders were in Work get moved to Archive (well, Archive\Work, as I have an Archive\Personal sub-folder as well).

That’s usually it for work-related files. But it is January, I feel like I haven’t driven that point home enough yet. And so I also spent some time going through my Books, To-do, and Code folders to better organize each and perhaps remove or archive items that I’m never really going to keep working on. This is vaguely cathartic: I start many articles that never see the light of day, and I sometimes keep them in To-do for months at a time. And so this is a nice chance to blow that out and start fresh. My To-do folder was nicely reduced–and better organized with sub-folders–to start the year.

Email is oddly similar from an organizational perspective, though I do not use a folder-based system of any kind. Instead, I have a single inbox that collects email from multiple accounts, and when I respond to an email, it responds using the correct account. Email messages are dealt with in order, newest first, from the top.

There are a few possible outcomes for an email message that lands in my inbox, but all of them end with that message no longer being in my inbox. Some are answered and then archived. Some don’t need a reply, and so they are simply archived. If the message is spam or unwanted, and there’s no unsubscribe link, I block its sender and then add that message to spam. I add a lot accounts to spam, and I get an email titled “Alert: Spike in user-reported spam” from Google Workspace every other week on average, I bet, to prove it. No rest when dealing with the wicked.

The goal, in case it’s not obvious, is inbox zero. I realize that’s aspirational for most, and it certainly is for me. But I do get a curious satisfaction from having just a few emails in my inbox–ideally, they don’t extend down past the bottom of the display–and that helps me keep up with it. At the start of each month, I go through any remaining email from the previous month, just to make sure there’s nothing important I missed–those I “star”, what Outlook calls a “flag”–and the rest are archived. I don’t like having too many messages left each month, but the satisfaction of archiving them when it happens is somehow even bigger.

Usually, that’s most of it. But this year, I have a new task related to digital photos.

You may recall that I went through a mammoth digital decluttering campaign in 2023, one so massive that it continued into early 2024. There was a lot to that, and there’s always more to do. But the biggest and most significant part of that work involved me consolidating all my digital photos, including scans of previously analog photos, into a single organized collection that I then replicated in multiple online services. That work was, and remains, current through the end of 2023. But with 2024 over, it’s time to consolidate all the photos I have from last year–they’re in OneDrive, Google Photos, and Apple iCloud, plus I have specific phone backups–and then move that into the respective online collections.

I’m hoping that this work will be like riding a bike because it’s been a year, literally, and it’s not something I’ve thought about too much, other than knowing that I’d be taking on this work each January going forward. I do recall that I got really good at it. And I did, of course, archive the installers for the apps I used so I could get up and running as quickly as possible.

This is work I’ve not yet done, and won’t do until we’re in Mexico City. (We leave Saturday.) So I’ve copied the phone backups to a portable SSD, and when we get to Mexico, I’ll download the respective 2024 photo sets from each service and get started on that. I don’t expect any issues per se, this is just a single year, and recent, phone-based photos are far better organized than the many old ones I dealt with in 2023-2024. So I feel comfortable stating that my goal is to finish this work before we come home again. Mostly likely long before then.

Which raises a related issue.

We don’t have an end date for this trip, a first, though we’ll be home before the end of April given everything else that’s going on in our lives. I’ve experienced times of great productivity on previous trips to Mexico, and for the past few, I’ve tried to come up with a to-do list of things I’d like to accomplish.

My success rate is mixed, I guess. As I wrote last September in One (Premium), I’ve run into an issue in which I sometimes take on too much at once. This is common to all of us, humans aren’t good at multitasking, and when it comes to big projects–a book like Eternal Spring: Our Guide to Mexico City comes to mind for reasons I can’t quite explain, it’s a blur–I can pretty much just handle one at a time. (And sometimes not even that.) I would like to avoid being overwhelmed on this coming trip. But we’re almost certainly going to be there for three months. Surely, I can get multiple big projects done in that amount of time.

We’ll see. For now, I’m going to apply the micro change maintenance theory to the trip and see how it goes. I do of course have vague goals, and my wife and I are still trying to figure out a good schedule for completing that book. But one step forward at a time. It is January, after all, and you gotta have goals. And more manageable micro goals are what seems to work well for me.