• sites with a narrow specialty make material more discoverable, and thereby more useful to someone trying to find it. people find my photos through the google (why such interest in druid hill park? and fleas?), but are even more likely to come to flickr or picassa looking for images. a link tagged on del.icio.us contributes to a global pool of information on a given topic.
• i get the advantage of code from real programmers instead of my own stumbling efforts.
• i don’t have to maintain anything.
• popular services attract many people with many ideas and needs, leading to features i wouldn’t have thought of or would never have gotten around to implementing. (geotagging photos on flickr, for example.)
• it’s far more satisfying to complain about someone else when something breaks.

it hasn’t even meant giving up control. services that want to be used have to allow exportation of data to standard formats, making it easy to switch from one service to another if needed, or to go back to your own creation. i could pretty quickly write a script to make my own links page from my del.icio.us rss backup or generate my own photo gallery from the backup of my flickr photos and their metadata. it’s easy to go back if 1999 ever calls you.

my goal has been to find services which can be automatically backed up by a cron job on my always-on computer (the account at my hosting company). as a result, when i make a spreadsheet on google docs or post a photo to flickr, i know it will soon make its way into ~/backups/ and my own backup system for my files. (do i have to link here again?)

i’ve made a list of tasks, services i use for them, and backup methods for those services. some are personal tasks (tracking todo items), and some are methods of sharing information (videos on youtube). privacy controls allow many to be used for both (a calendar which reminds you of your dentist appointment and helps arrange a meeting with other people). it’s a rather exhaustive list, but i’d welcome your suggestions of other services you use or any answers you have to the questions in the comments.

task	service	backup method	comments
address book management	? (not: plaxo, google contacts)	?	i can’t understand why no one has filled this obvious need. it seems like a natural: make a site where i can record all my contact information (address, phone numbers, etc.) and the same information for people i know. as other people join the site, they can request to connect to me, and i decide how much information to share with them. as i update my phone number, they get a note that it’s been changed in their address books. run it on open standards so it can interoperate with similar sites. let it connect to my email service for “insert joe’s email address in cc:” and to my documents service for “insert joe’s mailing address in this letter”. let me export my address book to various formats and print a copy. plaxo had the right idea, then developed it halfway and made something that doesn’t seem useful in any real way. i don’t know why google still hasn’t done something with their anemic contacts system. why has no one made a reasonable online address book? or is one hiding somewhere?
articles	wordpress?	mysqldump? (i’ve never used wordpress.)	see notes below.
audio cataloging	mp3tunes? what else?	?	mp3tunes is a pretty good idea and a surprisingly good implementation, offering support for mp3, ogg, flac, etc., tools for organizing files by albums, a good browser-based player, and methods for downloading various slices of your collection, syncing them to a digital audio player, etc. if it had anyone but michael robertson behind it, i might be seriously interested. also, its syncing program is gui-only and can’t be run from cron. i’d love to have something like this which lets me organize my collection online, especially if i could share selected files with the world (ones for which i own the copyright). does anyone know of any similar offerings?
book cataloging	librarything	a www::mechanize script to grab /export-csv	a handy way to keep a list of books i want to read.
bookmarking	delicious	wget download of https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all
document editing	google docs	the google docs download python script	painful after vi or emacs, but great for sharing documents, both for viewing and collaboration in editing.
email	gmail	offlineimap	i would prefer one-way syncing, and was using isync (mbsync), but have found that offlineimap runs anywhere, with less fuss. ((btw, a handy tip: i found offlineimap’s two-way syncing helpful in an unexpected way. i have a corporate email address with a certain company and am supposed to read email sent there. unfortunately, they won’t just forward email to my real address because the competition might steal our tps cover sheet design or something. i can’t have gmail fetch it because they only allow imap access, not pop3. i was having getmail fetch and forward mail to my real address, but found another solution in the fact that offlineimap can not only sync an imap account to a local maildir collection, but can also sync two imap accounts to each other. i have the webmail system at the company file everything into a folder named (just as an example) “forcesourge” and have offlineimap sync it with a “forcesourge” label in gmail. this works great because of the way gmail treats labels as imap folders. any new mail at the company is mirrored in my “forcesourge” label collection in gmail, and when i delete a message or remove the label from it there, the message is deleted on the company’s server. a cron job keeps it all together, and i don’t have to bother with checking another mail account.))
financial accounting	mint	download through browser (non-automated)	i just download my transactions file each month after balancing my accounts.
goal tracking	43things	n/a	don’t feel the need for a backup of this.
graphing data	google chart api?	n/a
photo ar chiving	flickr	offlickr	offlickr does a thorough job of grabbing metadata, from comments and dates to sets and collections.
scheduling	google calendar	wget downloads of the .ics files for each of my calendars.
score archiving	mutopia?	a recursive fetch of everything with my name?	it could be convenient to let the good folks at mutopia keep my scores up-to-date with the latest lilypond versions. it could take care off all but the few not worth adding to such a noble project.
todo management	toodledo	wget download of my rss file
video storage	youtube	?	youtube’s a good place for sharing video for quick viewing, but is it a place for storing high-quality video? i assume they throw the original files away once they’ve converted them to .flv. does anyone have a recommendation of a place for storing full-sized videos while sharing small flash versions?

i hope there’s something useful in there.

i want to ask one last bit of advice, concerning my personal website. aside from offering bits of news about what’s happening with me to far-away friends, it’s been a place to stick things i want to keep which may be useful to other people (musical scores, hatt-baby videos, etc.). it’s the public side of my home directory. with the moves described above, a lot of this is no longer necessary. i don’t need photos here and on flickr. i don’t need scores here and on mutopia.

when i strip away everything that can be as well or better-hosted elsewhere, all that’s left are articles like this one, so i’m thinking of turning jeffcovey.net into a hub for my material spread around the web, leaving just the articles here. i’m thinking of wordpress for this. yes? pros/cons? alternatives?

i’d like to start using something new right away and gradually migrate my old material. how would you do this? my first thought is to make a cms-run new.jeffcovey.net so the links to jeffcovey.net continue to work, adding 301 redirects as i move things off jeffcovey.net, and finally resetting dns to point jeffcovey.net to the new site when finished. any better ideas?

thanks for reading! i hope you found something useful in this and are putting the ever-expanding world of online services to much better use than i am.

i’m sitting in shelter #92 in patapso state park on a glorious cool spring day. the sunlight makes the leaves glow as the breeze tosses them, and the pair of does grazing the hillside next to us have finally wandered off. the picnic remains are back in the trunk, and glenn sits across from me, reading the paper.

it’s a simple outing, but, until recently, one that would have been hard for me to take. at the very least, i would have been sitting here anxious about getting home, instead of committed and engaged in being here. the woods would have been wasted on a mind full of all the work left undone.

the culprit, as i’ve gradually realized this year, is the computer. last year, i would have brought my laptop with me. i would have done what i could here, then hurried home and put it online. for my day in the city saturday, i would have broken my back lugging it onto the light rail, where i would have brought it out of suspension to get 15 minutes with it before i had to close it down to take it over to the subway, repeating the process all across the day. last year, i either had my fingers on my laptop, or i wasn’t working.

the problem is that a computer, especially the big computer we call the internet, is infinite. i can turn on a computer at 7:00 am, and it instantly becomes 11:30 pm, and i’m looking back on a day of youtube and wikipedia and chasing this which reminds me of that which makes you stop and wonder whatever became of those and what was i doing and why does my back ache? enough days like that, and you’re looking back on a life of wandering the electronic sinai.

i was spending long hours each day glued to a screen and brief, almost guilty ones in the physical world. the world is better and healthier, and i’ve worked for the last few months to flip the time i spend in each. i’d like to share some of the ideas and tools in my arsenal and invite your suggestions and your own experience.

how to live without a computer

millions of people today still go through lives untouched by lcd screens and laser mice, and all the bachs and shakespeares of history did reasonably good work without them, so it must be possible. is it preferable? i hit techno burnout recently and took a nine-day no-computer break to recover. what i noticed most by midweek was that the days had become much longer. they expanded and opened to me as they hadn’t for years, until they reached a natural length i’d forgotten they held, and there was plenty of time to be spontaneous, cook a good meal, listen to some music, sit on the deck awhile. reminded of what i was missing, it was painful to go back to staring at the screen and waiting for a webpage to load or an overloaded machine to start responding again. i’d like to spend as many days as i can with no computers in them.

how can a person enjoy the undeniable advantages of computers without getting sucked down the time drain? what are the ways and means of a neo-luddite life? i’ve identified two strategies. i’ll call them computer agnosticism and computer freedom.

computer agnosticism

computer agnosticism is disbelief in the doctrine of the one true computer. for a long time, my laptop was the only computer i used. it had all my files and was configured just as i wanted. it’s still my most comfortable workplace, but now any reasonably new net-connected computer is as good as any other. this gives two advantages. first, i can step out of the house anytime or travel to another city with worrying that something i’ll need is left behind. everything’s available wherever i can get online. secondly, trusting the world to provide a computer for me means getting a situation that is workable but not overly pleasant. i can sit with my laptop forever. if i’m stuck with illegible fonts, an unfavored operating system, an uncomfortable chair, and a room of boisterous library or hotel patrons, i’ll do what i need to do and get out of there. libraries are especially good, with a timer counting down and the next person on the waiting list hovering in the background.

online services are the key here. here are some tools i like for making any computer “my computer”:

toodledo

when i began implementing the ideas in getting things done, i wrote my own gtd script for managing my projects and todos. over the following years, i regularly enhanced and refined it. by the end, it had a powerful, good-looking interface for manipulating tasks. tasks could be scripts in different languages, launching complex repetitive jobs with a couple of keystrokes. it handled repeating and scheduled tasks. it attached and detached screen sessions associated with various categories of work so jobs could continue in the background while i was off to something else. it integrated with a scriptable window manager and switched to a different virtual desktop each time i moved to another work category. it managed time devoted to different projects, work categories, and other things to do, counting down remaining time on a taskbar and changing the color of all the windows when i should do something else or take a break. it was beautiful.

surprisingly, it was not only efficient, but effective. i really did get a lot of good work done through it and accomplished things that otherwise would have stalled. so why did i let it go? it was a fine way to work on my computer, but i no longer wanted to be tied to my computer. it was still the right answer, but the question changed.

i looked at several online todo list/project management applications and settled on toodledo as the most open and flexible. the development team frequently extends and bugfixes it, and i’m generally happy with it as long as i actually do the tasks on my lists instead of tweaking and pushing them around (not toodledo’s fault). one dealmaking feature was the ability to print a pocketmod-style todo list, so wherever i’m working, i can print my current open tasks, stick them in my pocket, and walk away from computers for as long as i like with a clear conscience.

gmail

the no-brainer replacement for mutt + procmail + postfix. the spam filtering alone makes it a winner. the interface is great, and when i’m on my laptop, imap and mutt let me burn through my email even more quickly.

google calendar

for a time, i synchronized this with the datebook on my palm pda. since i can’t do that from any available computer, i now print a one-month calendar on one side of a sheet of paper and a ten-day agenda on the other (the agenda includes my notes about events, addresses of places to be, etc.).

google docs

a pattern seems to be forming. this is another winner for google and the home of my spreadsheets and the documents i need to share with others.

del.icio.us

the firefox extension lets me use bookmarks as i normally would at home and have them available anywhere.

linode

(or any hosting service with shell access. linode is terrific, and i’ve been hearing good things about “nearly free speech“).

an always-online linux box gives me a way to connect to other servers as needed and otherwise fills any gaps left by web-based services. unison keeps everything up-to-date so that changes i make online appear on the laptop, and vice versa.

computer freedom

so now i can roam the world freely, treating computing as a public service, like water fountains or buses. that’s a big relief to my mind and my backpack-unladen spine. can i go all the way? what could enable someone who works online to spend days together completely free from computers?

some of my answers:

cron

when i moved my recurring tasks to toodledo, i looked at each and asked, “does this really need me to be present and active?”, and was amazed that 95% of the time, the answer was no. it can take some sideways thinking, but even tasks that “clearly” have to be done by you in person can be automated with a different approach and a bit of perl. i enthusiastically expanded the role of my crontab on my always-online computer, and now i just check the resulting email messages to see that all went well. any changes made to my files are pulled down by “unison -batch” cron jobs on my laptop when i’m not looking.

rss has been a lifesaver for getting out of news-checking quicksand (remember when you went to your favorite sites to see what was new? repeatedly? all day long?). i stick my google reader feeds into “monthly”, “bi-weekly”, and “weekly” folders and check them only when their time comes. for sites without feeds, a netstiff cron job lets me forget them and alerts me to anything new once a week. hpodder downloads my podcasts so they’re just there when my mp3 player runs dry.

non-instant messaging

irssi + bitlbee + screen running on my always-online machine let me engage in irc and instant messaging services on my own schedule. instead of letting them interrupt me, i just attach the screen once a day (or week) to see what’s new.

paper

let me say that again:

paper!

this is remarkable technology, flexible, portable, and widely available. as with cron, it may take a new way of thinking, but how many of the things you do on the computer could be done on paper? how many could be 95% completed on paper so that when you go online, you just have to transfer the results or execute the last steps of a paper-outlined plan? is an offline day stealing from your boss, or are you even more productive when you print your work the day before and worth it with a pen? which accomplishes more — 45 minutes work on paper + 15 minutes bringing the computer up-to-date, or two and half hours on the same task online, with side trips to check email and rearrange your netflix queue? which leaves you refreshed and ready for work the next day?

this article is an example of paper-based computer work. i’m writing it in an old college composition book, much more portable than my electronic notebook. how it will get online is discussed in the next section.

while on the topic, i should add my plug for the famous moleskine notebooks. they’re pricey, but are things of beauty, simple and elegant and a joy to write in. they fit right in a pocket, and with my toodledo list and google calendar in the expanding back pocket, one makes a fine pda (ppa?).

vpas

the virtual personal assistant marketplace is flourishing, and online helpers can help keep you offline. they can be useful on both ends: before fleeing the net, you can hand over a list of online chores. when you connect again, you can send what you did offline for processing. this article is an example. when i’m done, i’ll tear the pages from the notebook, scan them to a pdf, and email it to an assistant to type into a reply to me. a little editing and formatting, and it will be ready to post. lather, rinse, repeat, and you have an invisible staff working alongside you all your offline days. you’re taking full advantage of the net and full advantage of that table in the park, putting out more work and pulling in more fresh air.

tim ferriss discusses the details of working with a vpa. i’ve been happy with onassist.com.

phone-based services

sooner or later on a non-digital day, there’s a moment of temptation to boot the laptop just to check the weather report before leaving the house or to get directions to the coffee shop. and since you’ve sat and waited for it to come on, you may as well make it worthwhile by checking out that site you saw on a billboard. and though you definitely weren’t going to check your email today, you’re so curious to see how mike replied to… wow, you never expected him to say that. how are you and connie going to fit that into your schedule? it’s going to be on your mind all day now…

phone-based services can give you the limited information you need without exposing you to the danger of spoiling your free day with full net access. i hope they continue, and don’t fall in the face of web-capable phones. three i use regularly:

goog411 (1-800-466-4411)

goog411 provides the aural equivalent of google’s stripped-down webpage look. it’s simple and powerful and lets you quickly get the address of a business, then connects you to them to ask directions or how late they’re open. i hope google adds support for residential listings.

tellme (1-800-555-8355)

provides news on various topics. i use it to get the weather report, to decide how to dress for the day.

jott

this one’s for putting information in instead getting it out. i have it linked to my toodledo and google calendar accounts so i can call to add an item to my todo list or put an event on my calendar. it’s a good way to save some typing, though their voice recognition leaves a lot to be desired. they should license whatever google uses for goog411.

conclusion

for someone professing to write about computer-free living, i’ve spent a lot of time discussing computer-based software and services. i have two excuses:

first, many of these tools provide ways of letting work pile up out of sight and mind. email piles up in your inbox as long as you like while gmail sends replies with your phone number and the request that people call you if it’s urgent (and grandcentral separates the wheat from the subsequent chaff). articles wait in your rss reader until the time you’ve dedicated for them. just keep that laptop safely tucked away (a remote shelf in the basement works well), and life becomes less interrupted.

second, and even better, are the tools that run unattended. cron jobs run even when you’ve forgotten about them, and vpas have pleasant surprises waiting when you get around to logging in again. jott’s added a reminder to check out a wine festival next fall. services like these uphold the promise of computer automation and let you get on with real life in the real world.

there’s another solution, of course — to drop the halfway measures and just go cold turkey forever. maybe it’s worth stopping by the park office to see if they have any jobs for the summer.

— Thoreau

for the past six months, i’ve almost entirely let my car sit in front of the house and gotten around by buses and trains. so far, there hasn’t been a single occasion on which i had to use the car, but i use it once every week or two to keep it healthy. whether i’ll keep it remains open to consideration. ^[1]

the disadvantages of relying on public transportation are obvious. for those thinking about doing it more often in order to save money, the environment, or sanity, i’d like to offer the lighter side of it with this selection of random thoughts:

footnotes

1. (i got rid of it for good on 09/06/2005.)

it’s now trivial for people to pass the things they don’t want to people who can use them. my first great experience with this was through craigslist. i’ve been looking forward for a long time for them to add a baltimore section, and they finally did this year. i subscribed to several of their classified ad sections, and have found all kinds of things through them. glenn and i now sit on the futon i found free through one person, which sits on the frame i found through another. i’m typing this on the beautiful computer desk someone gave us.

craigs can be a source of bargains, too; glenn got a year-old $100 microwave for $15, and i got a year-old $80 vacuum cleaner for the same. it can even be a source of revenue; the vacuum cleaner came with an unused $10 coffee maker (retail: $30) which i sold on amazon for $25.

but the really exciting aspect of this is the transfer of free stuff. this is a terrifically important change. in the past, so many things sat around unused or went to the landfill just because people didn’t know anyone who could use them. now, there’s freecycle, which is devoted solely to the transfer of items without cost. in each city that has a freecycle group, people post what the have or what they want, and others reply to say they want it or can give it. usually, the person who wants it comes and picks it up, so the giver gets rid of the clutter with even less effort than dragging it to the curbside or hauling it to the dump.

the social network expands. before, we could ask the handful of people we knew, and word-of-mouth might or might not bring a reply. now, we just spend a minute or two typing an email, and the word goes to hundreds. (1,212 members currently in baltimore. 6,403 in portland!)

several months of watching the craigslist ads has made it clear that all or almost all household items can be had for free or for very little cost if you just wait a while. if you can sleep on a mattress on the floor for a couple of months, someone will inevitably have a bed she wants hauled away. if you can live with a fan for part of the summer, someone will have a nearly-new air conditioner to sell at 1/2 price. if you can cook on the gas range this fall, someone will give you a microwave this winter. i’m learning just to make do and wait and watch.

from each according to his surplus, to each according to his need. and nothing thrown away!

i think elaine saint james fills an important need, but i’ll hasten to add that i’m not a part of her target audience. at the time that i became interested in voluntary simplicity and read “simplify your life”, it was a useful read (and a warning about unfulfilling lifestyles to avoid), but much of it wasn’t applicable to my situation. i’d just finished college, and was earning $500-$600 a month; i didn’t have to worry about selling my extra house.

i agree that i would like to see books/lectures/programs about frugality targeted toward those who have a real need to be frugal. i live in the inner city in baltimore, and have many neighbors for whom the idea of having money in the bank is unimaginably foreign. when i go out for a walk, i pass piles of garbage everywhere, and i see what people are eating; they’re buying junk food every day at the wildly overpriced liquor store on the corner instead of walking a few blocks in the other direction where there’s a safeway with fruits and vegetables dirt cheap. and they all have to have their radios and the latest cds and designer tennis shoes.

i look at this and sometimes wonder if someone offering ymoyl-style workshops in the community couldn’t do more to turn things around (assuming people are willing to listen) than any amount of government funding.

but i don’t discount those who want to preach to yuppies. after all, they’re the ones with money and marketable skills. if they can cut back to a reasonable lifestyle, they have the option of investing both money and time into the community. if they continue to earn the same salary, but only need 1/3 of it, they have the option to spend the rest helping others. and if they can reach the point of not needing to work, they have the option of giving as much time as they want.

let’s not discount them because they have the misfortune of having been suckered into a rather screwy view of the world. they have the potential of being a great resource, and i’m all for reaching out to them. i’m sure there are those who pick up the books and pretend to follow saint james’s ideas to be fashionable, just as they take their yoga and aroma therapy classes and past-life psychotherapy sessions not out of any real interest, but because buffy’s doing it, too. but there are also those with whom the message will resonate, and they make the books more than worthwhile.

last winter, i checked living the simple life, another of elaine st. james’s books, out of the library. it had a bibliography in the back which i photocopied before i returned the book, and i’ve read a couple of the recommended books. one of them was clutter control by jeff campbell. i followed his excellent advice, and have moved my house to a more livable state (though i still have more i want to do).

one phrase which i believe i picked up from living the simple life is “one plate, one fork, one spoon”, meaning simply that you don’t need more than one of each. the dining room was a real disaster before i started; dan had collected coffee mugs, and they were all over. the only one that meant anything to me was the one which he gave me on valentine’s day, so it was kept out while the others went into boxes and into the spare bedroom. ^[1] there were many glasses of all sizes sitting on the shelf gathering dust, even though i only used a couple of them. in the drawers of the cabinets, there were huge stacks of plates, dozens of knives and forks, and more mugs and glasses. there were things i never used, like glass butter holders and egg toppers. the drawers were so heavy that i only opened them reluctantly.

into boxes it all went, and up to the storage room. now i just keep three (in case of guests) of each frequently-used item in the drawers. if i decide to throw a banquet (highly unlikely), i can just get what i need out of the boxes. in the meantime, it’s not in my way. the drawers open and shut easily, but i usually don’t even need to open them; i use my one plate, my one fork, and my one spoon, then wash them and put them back in the dish drainer. the next time i need them, they’re right there in the open. the sink is empty; it used to be filled with dishes when i had the option of grabbing another plate from the drawer instead of washing the one.

in the dhammapada, the first words of shakyamuni buddha are:

we are what we think.
all that we are arises with our thoughts.
with our thoughts we make the world.

if you’re susceptible to influence as i am, what you think is in part a result of what you see. if you see disorder and confusion, garbage and waste, these things become a part of your thinking and a part of you. a clean and orderly and simple home is an important aid to a happier life.

footnotes

1. i would love to simply get rid of a lot of the things around here (like two of the three woks), but unfortunately, they don’t belong to me, so they’ll have to sit in (well-labeled) boxes until dan’s sister decides what she wants to do with them.

giving away/selling the stuff you don’t use is the best thing to do with it; it doesn’t do anyone any good in storage, and someone could be using it. i realized this about my collection of books which were sitting on the shelf un-reread, so i packed them up and donated them to the library down the street. if i need one of them again, i can go check it out. in the meantime, it’s available to anyone who wants it.

but it wasn’t just that andover was taking a lot of my time, it’s that i had a number of other small jobs hanging around as well. i still had a lot of students at the laurel school of music, so i had to go there (an hour round-trip drive) twice a week. i was still getting called to come and help people with their computers. i still had to drive to umbc each week (40 minute round-trip) to teach my two students, if either of them showed up. i still had to update webpages and write the bcgs newsletter. it was just too much to move into a closer-to-full-time situation with andover while still carrying all the other baggage. i could have gone back to my stay-up-all-night ways of college days, but that’s a losing game.

i wasn’t doing myself or anyone else any good by trying to do it all, so i cut back. this is a little scary when you’re used to having many disparate sources of income; you worry about putting all your eggs into one employer’s basket. i convinced myself it was necessary, and i did some hacking away at my job list and stopped accepting new jobs. i’ll still do work for people who have employed me for years (especially if it’s work i can do from home), but when someone new calls and wants me to come over to his house and figure out why his digital camera isn’t working, i tell him i don’t do that anymore. i’ve turned down some of the old people, also. for example, one lady has had me drive out to her house three times in as many years because windows keeps crashing on her and it doesn’t dawn on her that there’s nothing anyone can do to fix closed code. the pay is all right, but the drive is interminable. ^[1] so, when she called again a few weeks ago, i just apologized and said i couldn’t do it. one part of me worries about burning bridges, but the more rational part realizes that i have enough skills that i’ll have no problem finding more work if i need it. (in a world in which people are amazed when you change the image on their root window, it’s hard for even a quasi-geek to stay unemployed.)

my biggest reason for turning down a job is that it involves leaving the house. at first, i thought leaving each day to go to a job would be a good incentive to get out and enjoy the fresh air, meet people, etc. in practice, it meant getting dressed in uncomfortable clothes, spending time in traffic to get to a workplace, walking just from the car to a building, and sitting down and working. i’m much happier leaving the house because i’m going to do something i want to do. i’d rather just go out and take a walk and say hello to my neighbors. if i’m driving somewhere, i’d rather it was to meet friends or to take my laptop to the state park and work at a picnic table.

so things are falling into a better place in terms of work. if they keep moving in a good direction, i’ll have more time for things i want to do, like writing these notes.

footnotes

1. in your money or your life, joe dominguez and vicki robin point out that to really understand what you’re earning from a job, you have to subtract from your payment all of the expenses that are required in order for you to do the job. in the instance of me driving out to the county to play with doze, that would include:

1. the gas to get me there
2. the wear and tear on my car
3. the cost of keeping two wardrobes, one that i wear at home and one that i wear to job sites
4. the cost of eating somewhere on the way back if it’s late and i don’t want to wait to get home and cook
5. and perhaps the largest item of all: how much money could i be making in the time that i’m driving? if it takes me an hour to get there, i spend an hour there, and i spend an hour driving back, i would have made three times the money if i’d stayed home and worked instead.

calculated this way, i’m actually paying someone a huge amount for the privilege of doing work i don’t like.

a couple of years ago, i heard a story on npr about people involved with a “voluntary simplicity movement”. the goals they’d set for themselves — slowing down, cleaning out all the physical and mental clutter, taking the time to be a better friend and neighbor — appealed to me. i poked around yahoo!, and found the simple living network. (yahoo! now has a whole section on simplicity; hopefully, i’ll find time to look through it all.) i looked through their collection of books, and decided to buy simplify your life (100 ways to slow down & enjoy the things that really matter) by elaine st. james. i found a lot of practical advice in it which i began applying to my own life. i’ve since gone on to read other books on the subject, and i’d like to use this space to relate some of my experiences and thoughts about my efforts at uncluttering.