Declutter those bytes

Before Netflix turned her into a show, Marie Kondo wrote an excellent book on tidying up. Her philosophy of “get rid of everything that does not spark joy” changed our apartment for the better. We donated, sold, and threw out so many things we kept because we felt like we had to. Don’t like how you look in that shirt? Goodbye shirt. Hate looking at that weird sculpture your aunt gave you for your wedding? Goodbye sculpture.

We now surround ourselves only with things we love. Everything we own and everything we want to buy needs to pass the test of “does this really make me happy?”

We can do the same with our digital posessions. My projects directory was a graveyard of ideas I stopped working on years ago. I was never going back to them, so I deleted a few, along with their repositories on GitHub. Their nagging voices in the back of my head are gone and I can focus on the projects I care about, like this newsletter. It felt refreshing, so I kept doing the same on all my devices.

Close those tabs you are never going to read. Remove the projects you no longer want to do from your todo-list. Take the books you are never going to read off of your reading list. Disable auto-renewal for the domains you will never do anything with.

Don’t allow those bytes to make you feel bad. If you limit your digital life to things that make you happy, you free your mind up for the projects that matter to you. Get some space in your brain to focus on finishing something this year.