Matt Galligan

Confession: I’m a horrible procrastinator.

In high school, I’d wait until literally the last 24-48 hours to write my papers, sometimes not even getting them done. I hated busy work. That trend continued through college, only that time the impact was far worse. Through my working career, I’ve noticed similar trends. I tended to wait until the last minute to get stuff done…and that’s IF I remembered when the last minute actually was.

I’ve tried for years to get this under control, but had never found the right solution. I’ve tried so many software tools (read: every one of them) that helped with organization and task completion. But the thing that I noticed was that most of these tools are horribly overcomplicated for most people and tend to make the problems even worse.

Let’s look at a couple of examples:

Here’s OmniFocus. It’s insanely complicated, does everything under the kitchen sink and has the looks of an overflowing desk. Though to be fair, I’m sure that it absolutely works for some people.

Here’s Things, the “easy” one of the bunch. Forget that they haven’t had over-the-air device syncing and still don’t, the “ease” still isn’t quite there to me. Here’s an example of them outlining simple “explanations” of the many features in a few marketing graphics.

After many years of trying to over optimize and conform to the software to get my shit done, I finally gave up and went for paper. Here was the result:

What did I find out? I actually got shit done. I didn’t need over the air syncing because, well, I just carried my notebook around and wrote it all done. I didn’t need tagging, or all the other stuff. It also felt incredibly satisfying to just cross stuff off when it was accomplished. This method has really worked for me for the last few months, up until my iPhone 4S.

Enter the iOS 5 Reminders App. It didn’t have tags. It didn’t have milestones, no concept of “areas of responsibility”, no starring, not much more than tasks and due dates. At first, I cringed, thinking “wow, how could they release software that had 10% the features of Things and OmniFocus and Wunderlist and blah blah. Then I realized what Apple did: they re-created my paper notebook in an app. No bullshit, just tasks.

But then they went a step further and added the next killer feature:

Siri

Now, no matter what I was doing - whether with my phone in and hand or over bluetooth while out and about, I could log the tasks that I needed to accomplish. Siri can set my reminder, as well as when I should be notified about it.

Then, while still adhering to simplicity, they made it more useful with the location-enabled reminders. I could say things like “Siri, remind me to take out the trash when I get home” and then, as soon as I drove up to my house, I would get notified to take the trash out. Seems simple, and maybe superfluous, but it’s powerful. Trust me.

It underscored to me what Apple’s motto has been for a long time and why I love them so much - get rid of the bullshit, simplify. I realized I didn’t need tags, or a lot of the other crap that the various To Do apps out there provided. I just needed something to get my work done and then get out of my way, not create more work for myself.

After a few months with the paper, and now the Reminders app, I can safely say that my life is far more organized and I’m feeling GREAT just checking stuff off the list. Removing features made the software far more usable. This is certainly the mantra of Apple, but also lots of other companies, like 37 Signals. I just wish more people adhered to that philosophy.

“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.” - Henry David Thoreau

I’ve lied to myself about simplicity in my life far too many times. Sure using Dropbox across my multiple computers would make accessing files far simpler. But wait…why do I have multiple computers? Oh, one for home, one for mobile, one for work, one for more intense computing stuff, etc. Simplicity…right?

In the last few weeks, I’ve made a serious effort to simplify my life. Part of this has to do with purging unnecessary things from my life. Other parts have to do with removing complexities from my life. In just the few weeks that I’ve been working on this experience, my head is already far more clear than before, and I’m so much more productive. Here’s what I did:

Purge

This isn’t exactly easy. You accumulate stuff. Plenty of stuff. So how do you decide what to get rid of? Matters are only made worse when oneself is somewhat materialistic and has disposable income. That was me. I had five computers to my name (MacBook Air for travel, MacBook Pro for photos and music production, two Mac Minis, one in each place of residence, and an iMac at work). Ridiculous right? In the last few weeks, I’ve consolidated down to just my MacBook Air and gotten rid of every other computer. It’s uncanny just how much better I felt knowing that I’m on one machine.

But it goes way beyond that…how about those random gadgets that you bought that you were determined to learn? Or that new hobby that you picked up and bought stuff for, but aren’t ever going to find time to get into it? For the most part, that was DJ’ing for me. After getting into electronic music, I felt like I was going to dive in and learn to DJ, because it looked like fun. I bought lots of equipment (more than I needed) and proceeded to watch it sit on the stand, unused for the better part of the year. Then I thought of taking lessons. Then I realized that I wasn’t ever going to get to it. Or at least for some significant amount of time. So I purged. Sold it all on Ebay. And the result? I didn’t feel emotionally any better the day before, when the stuff was still in my possession.

UPDATE: Thanks to Jeffrey Kalmikoff for pointing out this fantastic video that adequately sums up how I used to pick up hobbies. For those of you wondering, in my lifetime my hobbies have been: Legos, K’nex, Erector Sets, model rockets, model planes, hockey, golf, Magic: The Gathering, Battletech minatures, rollerblading, skateboarding, freebording, World of Warcraft, skiing, guitar, bass, drums, dj’ing, photography, beer brewing, cooking, comic books, video games, and probably a lot more that I can’t remember right now because I spent a whole of 30 minutes on them.

Which brings me to my point about material goods: it’s just stuff. Sure, you might like having stuff, maybe you show it off…but at the end of the day it’s too easy to get caught up in and fake emotional connectedness. The result is that I fill my life with more wholesome things than just playing with random gadgets I felt I needed.

Protip: How about for the packrat that keeps every bit of clothing they’ve ever bought? Here’s a trick: Turn all of your hangers in your closet backwards. Then, as you wear clothes, turn them back around. After 6-12 months, evaluate what is still backwards. Those are things you should get rid of immediately…you don’t wear them!

Unnecessary Complexities

About two years ago, I had what I thought was a brilliant theory: get rid of my desk. If I didn’t have a desk, well then I probably wouldn’t work as much as I did at home. What a complete and utter failure that was. Turns out, when you don’t have a desk, your entire home becomes your work. I would constantly be on my laptop everywhere…my chair, couch, bed, kitchen table, etc. I realized that by getting rid of the computer’s dedicated “place” that I could no longer escape it. I’ve since re-purchased a desk, and it was the greatest thing I could have done. I keep my computer there…rarely taking it down to work elsewhere. Now, when I’m standing at my desk, I’m in “work mode”. When I’m away, my mind doesn’t stay attached to the work…it’s free to do whatever else.

A Clean Environment, a Clean Mind

I’ve had an odd relationship with the cleanliness of my place my entire life. As a child, I never made my bed…for some reason I just couldn’t justify it when I was just going to sleep in it 16 hours from then. I felt better if I just let my place go to crap for two weeks, and then do some big cleanup at some point. The same would be true for my desk.

Then one day, I just started being more mindful about my environment, and keeping it tidy. Now, I can only speak for myself, but I feel so much better day-to-day as I spend time in that environment. I feel as though clutter on a desk, or in a house can lead to a cluttered mind. If things aren’t in their right place, how are we to expect that our mind will be clean? Now, I make my bed, do my dishes, straighten up my desk, etc. on a regular basis. It’s incredible what a difference it makes. I highly recommend this.

Procrastination is Evil

Tasks don’t complete themselves. Ever. If you need to do something, just do it. For years, I’ve put the pro in procrastination. I would hold on till the absolute last minute to get anything done. Taxes, assignments, work tasks, cleaning out the fridge (ew). Now, I’ve gotten serious. I put tasks on my todo list, and I get them done. No waiting, no hanging around until the last minute…just accomplishing things. I think procrastination is a like a bad drug. It’s addictive, it feels good at the time, but the more you do it, the more it destroys you. I’m still working on breaking the addiction, but I’m already feeling a billion times better just by getting shit done and not letting it wait until the very last moment to be done.

Final Thoughts

The funny thing is, most of these things are very easy to execute…some are not. Maybe you can’t accomplish everything at once. But now that I’ve put my mind to it, I’ve tried to remove all of the complexities, the bad influences, etc. in my life. Now I feel better, physically, mentally, in every part of my life. I get more work done, I get to experience more interesting things on a day-to-day basis. Simply put, it’s awesome. I’d challenge you to seriously think about all of the complexities in your life, and how you might simplify them. You might just do yourself some good.

I live my life by email. It’s my primary form of communication (with SMS pretty closely behind). So between work, junk, notifications, personal and other mail, I tend to get a bunch. Historically, I’ve kept a series of email addresses so that I could keep my most important emails in the right places. This was mostly for my own sanity.

I’ve been a Gmail user for a very long time (back when you had to buy an invite from someone on Ebay because it was such a hot commodity). Ever since I got access, I used that address for every single box that said “Email” next to it. Mailing lists, purchases, logins, everything. As a result, after a few years of having that account, I would get thousands of emails every week that inundated me all the time. It was impossible to keep up with that account. Beyond that, if I got an actual important message to that account, I was mostly screwed. So for that reason, I kept a separate personal email address and made sure my close friends sent mail to that address.

A few months back, I heard of a service called Unsubscribe.com. The gist is basically that you tell it what mailing lists, etc. you want to be unsubscribed from, it then works its magic and poof you’re unsubscribed. Now I’m sure you might be thinking “but most of those messages have ‘Unsubscribe me from this list’ at the bottom of each message”. And sure, I’d tell you that you’d be right. However, between the sheer amount of messages I would get, and the fact that some of them just would not unsubscribe sometimes, I gave up with that tactic. So I signed up for Unsubscribe.com.

Unsubscribe.com sends you daily summaries of how many lists you were successfully removed from

And?

It took me about a month using Unsubscribe.com to really get through the lion’s share of the lists I needed unsubscribed from, but I can happily report that it works. I just forward my unwanted mail to them and they get me off the lists. I can’t tell you how it works, but it’s seriously magic. Hundreds, possibly thousands of lists later, I am in an email utopia. Maybe a handful (meaning around 4-5) unwanted messages get through a day, but that number is getting to be less and less.

Finally, yesterday, through the additional help of a company called MigrationBox I was able to move all of my addresses that weren’t work into one inbox. So thank you, Unsubscribe.com. You have made my email life 1000% better.