You know you didn't really need something when...

you don't miss it at all and you have to think back to a time when you had it.

Such was the case for:

• The compact DVD player which was slightly flaky. I have a PVR that plays DVDs also so the player was redundant.
• The P&S digital camera which was redundant because my phone camera does the job now.
• The old cooking utensils, old crockery and old cutlery, which were redundant because I had bought new ones but hadn't put them to use.
• The set of glass tumblers which I hardly ever used. I have a few other glasses anyway.
• Old RCA connector AV cables which weren't needed by any equipment I have.

Freecycle is great for giving things away.

No more analogue time

My bedside travel alarm clock, bought from Ikea for $1 years ago, ticked its last the other day. So it went into the e-waste, one less item I own. I've just realised that now there are no more analogue timepieces in this household, working or not. No handed-down-from-grandfather clocks or watches, no alarm clocks with bells on top (still shown in computer icons, what an anachronism), no roosters. 😀

It won't be replaced. Currently I'm using an old phone as an alarm. I've also revived an old clock radio (clock part formerly split-flap, now digital) to wake me up with music. For travel the smartphone does this and more.

Marie Kondo book arrived

A few weeks ago, my bank offered a limited number of free copies of Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up for signing up for a housing finance newsletter. I won a copy and after a few weeks expected delay the paperback landed in my mailbox.

Marie's method is very severe, it requires you to decide what to keep rather than what to throw out. I'm not sure I'm ready at this stage for such an austere approach; I mean, is my toothbrush supposed to bring me joy? I see it as just a useful object that I would have to replace if it broke. But I will see what bits of wisdom I can glean from the book. Stay tuned.

Only one PC left

In the past I collected too many old PCs rather than see them thrown out by friends and acquaintances. They were a useful source of spares and if my main workhorse broke down I could have deployed one as a spare. But they took up too much space and they also consumed more power than modern computers. Now that access to the Internet has broadened to tablets and even mobile phones, and most services that I use are in the cloud, it's not as pressing a task to wait for the repair of my workhorse if it should break down. Virtual Machines have also allowed me to run separate OSes on a single machine.

I actually recycled or gave away most of the old tower PCs last year, but this last one I was asked to dispose of as a favour. I found that the motherboard on it had failed, so I advertised it in Freecycle. A teenage hobbyist took it away.

So now I have just the workhorse, a small NUC that I use as a desktop, a couple of Raspberry Pis, various tablets, a chromebook, a notebooks and mobile phones. There are more wireless clients of my router than wired clients now.

Last of the one sided paper

A while ago I took my old documents, mostly statements, invoices, receipts, tax returns, reports, etc. scanned them to PDF files, and pulled out all the one side blank paper for printing off articles I want to read. Today I used up the last of the one sided paper. From now on I will either use two sided paper, one sided paper donated to me, or not print but read electronically. I get little physical mail these days so the incoming stream is small. This is a milestone of my campaign towards paperlessness.

PS 1: I shred the read documents in the office shredder, in case you are wondering. No way I'm going to put documents with sensitive information in the paper recycling bin.

PS 2: I still keep the last 6 years for tax reasons. See next PS.

PS 3: To be precise, there will still be a small stream of one sided paper as documents that no longer need to be retained become available to recycle. Also real estate agents put flyers in my mailbox despite the No Junk Mail sticker so that provides about one sheet per week.

My micro-resolutions

Recently I read an article on procrastination that explained that a sure-fire way to beat procrastination is to take a concrete first step.

In this season of resolutions for the new year, I realised why it is most people fail in their good intentions: the goal is not specific and/or progress is not measurable.

Combining the two ideas, I realised I had been beating procrastination all along by making micro-resolutions. They are my calendar entries. I enter everything I need to remember to do in calendar. So to start a task I put the first step into the calendar. Say I want to plan a trip to New Caledonia. The initial entry might be: Look up month-by-month climate to find best time to visit.

I have some ground rules on calendar entries. The task must be specific. I am allowed to prepone entries; if I can do a task ahead of time, I do it. I am allowed to postpone entries if something more urgent intervenes. I am not allowed to delete an entry until it's done. And preferably instead of deleting an entry, I edit it to make an upcoming task. So in the last example, once I have noted the best months, I would change the task to read: Look up ticket prices.

Calendar is the most important app on my smartphone. I'd rather give up email before calendar.

New Year, new start

I've closed an email account that was seldom used. It annoyed me because the mailbox receives Spanish spam from the time in 2009 when I travelled to Galicia and the hotel's address book was stolen.

I've also migrated a blog from one domain to another, anticipating terminating the first domain.