It can’t be that difficult eradicating useless blog feeds… so says a friend of mine the morning of my second day of simplification. I laughed nervously. I was on the verge of telling PSP Fanboy we can’t be friends anymore, expressing remorse to Gawker, and giving Joystiq the silent treatment. The hardest of all was yet to come.

…Where to start?

Having began the day with seventy eight subscriptions, I had a lot of excess on my hands. I did what any self-respecting blog-writing-test-subject would do and came up with a process!

1. Separate the reading material into three categories aptly named 1, 2, and 3 based on their importance to me and my life.
2. Eliminate everything in the (3) category.
3. Review each blog in the (2) category, piece by piece.
4. Re-categorize the blogs into (less then five) easy to understand categories.
5. Grab some tissues

Deep Breath… Step 1

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My apologies, however being a day behind, I’m attempting to catch up with two short posts about big topics I’ll muse more over on this week’s ‘Behind the Scenes’ post.  Anyway, what would you need to go Paperless?  I’m looking into how I will in fact do this, but I’d love to hear from you!  Today I just have that I plan to…

Go Paperless!

It’s that simple!  Who’s with me!  We can save the earth while simplifying down to a paperless living situation.  I’ll keep you all updated on how this goes.  A lot happened this week, and residual effects have been occuring from the past few weeks of all of this.  Check back soon!

Okay, I sadly do not really have the time to update ten social network profiles.  This blog is all about simplification, so why so many profiles?  Well, today I argue against using these to their fullest…  Yes, it’s always good to maximize at any times possible, but seriously - how much poking does it take to make a difference.

So for today, I propose ceasing major updates to Facebook, Myspace, Last.FM, Spock, and any other stray profiles I happen to have lying around.  On top of this, stripping these profiles of any unneeded information, simplifying them as much as possible.

Any thoughts?

I personally have many books with me at the moment.  You could say this is a holdover from recently graduating from college, but I say its hording.  Seriously though I have about fifteen books in a stack of ‘to read’ and about thirty in the ‘read’ pile.  This doesn’t include the boxes of books I have stored in other places.  So, I need to cut down.

Why not sell, give away, or ‘lose’ any book you’ve already read?

This is a simple post for today, but I plan to sell any book I have read recently (on ebay).  Each one that doesn’t sell will be given away BookCrossing style.  If you don’t know what Book Crossing is, check this out.  Really, I’d rather ‘release’ books this way, but I need to fund the bookcrossing effort (buy nice tags) so I’ll be selling the books at first till I make around seventy dollars, then the rest will be freed!  What do you do with your read books?  I’m interested to know what people do with books they may want for reference in the future, like Plato’s Republic, or computer manuals.

This is of course till I get a Kindle… Any kind souls out there?

Any self-respecting twenty two year old blogger will probably tell you, my morning routine consists of Twitter, Google Reader, and Thunderbird instead of Shower, Shave, and Brush Teeth.  While the first three are very important (to me), the second three should really take precedence.  So once again I go to RememberTheMilk.com.

From now on I’ll have a morning ToDo list that’ll consist of everything I need to accomplish before settling down to work.

How do you make a list like that?

This is a very good question… I don’t exactly know.  I suggest creating a simple list that consists of general tasks (and of course writing in your calendar a block of two hours devoted to ‘morning routines’).  My list will be the following:

• Bathroom Things [i.e. Shower, Teeth, etc]
• Meditate
• Work Out

Pretty easy.  After these tasks, then I’ll just move on into my daily tasks.  This type of thing isn’t for everyone, but I’m beginning to believe grounding yourself in the physical world needs to take place before delving into online-social work… The more you can do outside the better!