Blog, Decluttered

A little while ago I mentioned how much I enjoyed The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. Believe me when I say that I've been restraining myself by not blogging constantly about how much I enjoyed my initial burst of tidying and how my family adopted their own subtle changes after I cleared out bags and bags worth of stuff.

Recently, I was asked to review 10-Minute Digital Declutter by S.J. Scott and Barrie Davenport. While the idea of spending days- weeks, months- decluttering my digital life does not appeal to me, I was so inspired by their book that I spent the equivalent of half a day (or more) over the last three days clearing out email and purging and organizing my hard drive and cloud files. I will go so far as to say that it was fun, but I might be a special case.

What wasn't fun? Finally clearing out this blog. That took far longer than the email project because it required a lot more thought and hands on activity. When I got rid of my old Gmail account last year, I didn't realize that would also purge a number of photos from this blog. I had some on my hard drive, but I groaned whenever I thought of adding them in.

A tidy space makes everything easier

As far as I'm concerned, what's really attracting people to the tidying trend is that it will free you up not only your time and space but also mental energy, all of which you can then turn to whatever it is that really drives you. Inspired by that thought, I plunged in last night and this morning, and the result is that I cleared out about 90(!) posts and that everything that remains has a photo. I sincerely apologize to any author whose posts I had to delete, but I suspect most of them won't notice; a lot of them were time-sensitive and therefore not relevant more than a week after it was posted. I will happily host guest posts for anyone whose content was deleted.

But overall, I'm happy with what's on the blog now, and getting rid of some extraneous posts allows me to highlight some content that I'm genuinely interested in. My goal for 2016 is to make this blog more fully reflect who I am as a writer, so expect more blog hops, more interviews and more thoughts on pop culture. Who knows...I might even write a tidying post after all.