Un-bloat My Life

Many months ago I blogged about clearing my Windows desktop. This has largely been done. Items that survived the cut are what I use on a daily basis. I have also stopped launching programs that served no functional purposes.

In another previous post, I indicated an interest in applying the same principle to my life. This ambitious project has commenced and some progress has been made. One example is eating, which I mentioned in the last post. Although eating is an essential part of anyone's life, usually only a small part of that actually contributes to satisfying one's hunger -- the rest is about satisfying the taste buds or a psychological reaction to the value of the food being consumed. To me the latter parts are not that important so I paid less attention to them. I call these unimportant things "bloat", and there is no better time to remove bloat when I barely have enough time to keep up with uni work. And by keep up I mean 100% on top of taught materials.

It is very important to distinguish removing bloat and removing distractions. The latter could potentially include everything not directly related to my studies. This is not what I'm trying to get rid of. I still have a life outside of uni work, thank you. Rather I seek to track down activities that I don't really want or need to do, things that I do because I can (most likely to avoid doing any real work), and put a stop to them. For this reason I am not going to stop watching TV but will only watch programs that genuinely interest me. For example, I finally convinced myself 24 is so unrealistic it's not worth investing an hour per week just to find out the ending. I have a feeling Iron Chef will soon follow for being too repetitive but unable to improve my culinary skills. I can think of a few more examples but that will just impose more bloat on everyone, so I shall move on to conclusions.

For a computer, the less programs you have running the faster it will process tasks. I cannot tell you how much faster Windows Vista runs when it loses all the cosmetic bloat. The same goes for life. Sure I can do this and that and a million other things, but if they do not benefit me that much maybe it's time to switch activities rather than clinging onto the status quo.