My brother is a fan of the Kondo method. He’s worked to declutter his life and reduce the choices he is required to make on a daily basis to the bare minimum, as is in line with the thinking of a computer programmer. I tried being a programmer. It didn’t work out. I tried the KondoMarie method. It hasn’t worked out. She released a book about decluttering your work life in 2020, and I intend to try that, but I feel like I need to go back to the basics of her approach and start to reconsider the things I am holding on to. As readers of this blog know, I keep a lot of windows open on my desktop. At present there are 50 open tabs on my desktop chrome to go along with 33 additional open tabs on my phone browser. 83 tabs is a lot of information to attempt to juggle and absorb. Align this thought with the four outstanding projects and four teaching classes in my queue and you have my state of mind in a frazzled state.
All of this is under deadline. Two of the classes end next week (and require grading to be completed before then) and the projects have staggered though near due dates. Again, it is no small wonder why I am having heart issues. I was able to compensate for this stress (and all the sitting–especially the sitting) by taking long walks in the beautiful woods of Canada. I found that my eyes even functioned better with time off task. In sum: I’m doing too much. It is made worse in contrast to my kids who wake up, plop down on the couch, and do little to nothing else but sit there and absorb nonsense for the rest of the day. It is a small, but increasingly noticeable thread of my stressed psyche.
That brings me to Kondo.
I need to chill out. I thought I was chilling in Canada, but being back here is a swift reminder that I was just better at juggling when the externals felt like they were aiding to my life as opposed to subtracting. So now what I need to do is condense, cut, and streamline both personally and professionally. I will not be taking on so many projects at once moving forward. In some ways I may be largely done with developing RPG material entirely (though that remains to be seen). What I do know is that I’ve been living in an unsustainable fashion and the cracks are not only showing, but quickly wearing me down. I am not the writer I was nor am I presently the writer I am going to be.
What remains is to figure out what needs to be shed and what needs to be better organized in order to get there.