Am I Creating a Bigger Mess with Project DO?

I’ve been ‘DOing’ for about a month now and have to ask – am I just creating a bigger mess? Strictly from a DO standpoint, am I better off than I was four weeks ago? First, let's see what I did this past week.

Project DO Progress - Week 4

Downloaded Real Player so I can keep videos straight. The problem being that I didn’t even have any videos when I started the month – and now I have dozens! Due to limited bandwidth, it’s only been recently that we can watch videos online, but to do so I have to get up really early (that’s another story). So to watch all these great videos at my convenience, I’m downloading. Hmm. How does this help me declutter my hard drive?

On the organizing side, however, I’ve created playlists and changed clip info so that I can sort and store the videos and easily find whatever I want whenever I want it. I guess I’m doing great on O but not so well on D…

Join me for Leah Day's free motion class!

On the other hand, you know how we’re supposed to learn new things to keep our minds active? Well, I’m excelling on that front! I’m telling you, watching a demo to learn some things is so much better than just reading a description. Through my new love, Craftsy, my brain is awhirr! I’m finally getting some proficiency with free motion quilting (many thanks to Leah Day for the great demos) and even signed up for a free Online Food Craft Class, Perfect Pizza at Home. Who knew that would ever happen? (affiliate links, fyi)

I’ve also discovered YouTube. Am I late to the party, or what?

Unsubscribed to 22 email newsletters, which really cut down on the amount of email I receive each day. I also set my message rules to delete known spam from server. If your email program allows you to do this, BE CAREFUL! You may miss important emails and never know it. I found this out the hard way several months ago when I kept expecting a file by email and it never showed up. I contacted the sender and she resent…again…and again…and again…

Finally, I turned off my message rules and guess what? Yep, it came through just fine. I examined the sender and subject lines and never did figure out the problem. There was nothing in either of those or the content that should have triggered the deletion. But it happened – true story – so be forewarned.

After this problem, why did I turn my delete from server back on? Because when I get several dozen spam emails with the same sender info, I get annoyed. Also, there are some subjects I just don’t want in my inbox. Period. So when I see a trend, I just quickly add the offending word(s) to my delete rule and am done with it.

As usual, I got distracted and dropped the ball on some Project DO tasks. For instance, although I’ve been adding my new Kindle for PC content to Calibre regularly and immediately categorizing by location and DRM status, I haven’t kept up on tags. So now I have quite a few ebooks that are not categorized by subject. Oops. Beings I’m up to 468 Kindle ebooks (at the end of week one, I had 261 - how is this decluttering?), it’s kind of important to be able to search by subject, don’t you think?

I did manage to make good progress on updating some of my computer files, which was actually my first Project DO focus. For instance, all my computer files for a couple of blogs now match the post/page titles. I also moved all my blog/site folders to a main folder rather than having them buried deeper on my hard drive. And I’ve started creating subfolders to better organize the content on each blog/site. Am I done? Not by a long shot. And if I keep adding instead of taking away, well…it could be never ending.

But am I better off?

Now, back to the original question: Am I creating a bigger mess with Project DO? I don’t think so. I would have discovered online video learning anyway but now I’m keeping it all organized as I go. No more going back and playing catch-up like I’m doing with the rest of my computer files.  So yes, I am better off!

What will I DO in February? I haven’t decided yet. I’ll continue with the good habits developed in January but may start focusing on another area and come back to my computer files later in the year. That’s the beauty of Project DO – I make the rules!

So...what are you DOing in February?