One of the things I tried to do during my sabbatical last week was to simplify my life. Specifically, I worked on improving what I call my signal-to-noise ratio. Now that I have been retired for about 9 months, and now that I have turned 58 years old, I am asking “what do I want to do when I grow up?” I am also wondering about what I should do. I don’t torment myself trying to answer these questions, but I do spend some time on them and I do want to answer them. The problem is that there seems to be a lot of noise in my mind that keeps me from having the clarity I need to have to work through this.
So, I spent a bit of time last week looking at things that I considered to be noise and eliminated some of them. A couple of them may surprise you:
- Resigned as a blogger and expert for Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine, because I let it evolve into becoming more of a distraction to me than an outlet I enjoyed. I still have tremendous respect for publisher Hal Goldstein and for the magazine’s bloggers and experts, but somewhere along the way I lost my enthusiasm for writing articles for them. I think part of this is that gadgets just do not interest me as much as they did. Oh, I still love gadgets, and will continue to buy them until I croak, but I just do not have the passion for them that I did. Hence, I had come to look at blogging for the Smartphone magazine as just another task that I had to do, and one that I no longer particularly enjoyed. Hence, my decision.
- Boxed up all of my “spare devices” for selling: my Palm TX, my T-Mobile Dash, and a Motorola v220 cellphone. I use my BlackBerry Curve and my Dell x51v and the others are just superfluous to me. I don’t want to see them go to waste, so I will sell them. (By the way, if you are interested in buying any of these, you can shoot an email to me.)
These are not major simplifications, but they have made me feel some better about my life: they reduced some of the noise. I have a lot more simplifying to do, but I made a start.
It turns out that I really did not need the sabbatical to make these simplifications. I could have done them at any time, just as you can make simplifications in your life without having to go on sabbatical. Oh, having “quiet time” does help, but it is not essential. What is essential is putting the action “Simplify” on your ToDo list (or Project list).
What about you? Any simplifications you have made that you suggest the rest of us make as well?
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Mmm hmmm. “Noise” is a definite issue. The other one is figuring out what I want to be when I grow up. I wish I’d spent more time thinking about that *before* I grew up, or at least before I got to my present age. I don’t think it’s too late to do so even now, but my options seem much more limited in many ways now, and I don’t have as much energy as I used to have then.
You are so right that the options do not seem to be as abundant as when we were younger. And the energy problem is significant. I too wish I had spent the time thinking about this, and doing something about it, when I had more options and more energy.
Here are some quick thoughts -
Simplifying my life seems to hold a connection to lowering stress – at least in my mind. So, based on that connection I am looking at ways to keep my stress in check while keeping a balance between my responsibilities and recreation. What’s interesting – this ratio changes with age.
So what have I done to simplify my life? Exercise is a big part. I make sure to allow at least an hour each night for down-time. When I am taking online college classes over the winter months, I cut-down my RSS feeds to a select few (re-balancing). I am also re-learning how to ‘play’ again, thanks to my 10 year old.
Out of time – I have a meeting to go too
Here are some quick thoughts -
Simplifying my life seems to hold a connection to lowering stress – at least in my mind. So, based on that connection I am looking at ways to keep my stress in check while keeping a balance between my responsibilities and recreation. What’s interesting – this ratio changes with age.
So what have I done to simplify my life? Exercise is a big part. I make sure to allow at least an hour each night for down-time. When I am taking online college classes over the winter months, I cut-down my RSS feeds to a select few (re-balancing). I am also re-learning how to ‘play’ again, thanks to my 10 year old.
Out of time – I have a meeting to go too
Thanks twm. I find that I have to periodically prune my RSS feeds, too. I trimmed out CrunchGear yesterday. Lifehacker has so many stories that are not of interest to me that I get tempted every once in a while to trim them out, too … but then they have a story that seems worth all the worthless ones and I decide to hang on. I sure do hate the noise, though.
Amazing how much we can learn from our kids when we open our minds to doing so, isn’t it?