Monday, February 11, 2008

First Steps of 2008 Toward Simplicity...

So...since I made the decision to embrace simplicity in my life in mid-January, I have done a few things toward simplifying my life.

One of the first steps I made toward simplifying my life is still a work-in-progress. This is the simplifying of my online life. I completely closed out my accounts on Myspace, Yahoo 360, Tickle, Friendster, and Flixster. I was going to cancel my Hi5 account, but am leaving it open for now, as it is one of the only ways to keep in touch with so many of my Romanian friends. I also have been ruthlessly pruning out old email on my Hotmail and Yahoo accounts in anticipation of moving all email just to my Gmail accounts (which then funnel into my Outlook). Not done on the email pruning yet, but I'm making progess!!

I also moved my old Yahoo 360 blog posts over to my Blogger account and have started copying my Xanga posts over to there as well. I won't be leaving Xanga for a good bit yet, but am going to be posting simultaneously for a while. With Blogger I can have one dashboard for three blogs: my "Random Days" (texanromaniac) blog, my "A Missionary Journey" blog (which I've started to rally people into helping my career missionary parents get into a decent house), and for this "Essential Simplicity" blog!!

Another thing I did was to go thru my "Favorites" links. I deleted any links that no longer were interesting to me, set up RSS feeds for any blogs that I'd saved to favorites that I actually wanted to keep up with, and posted bookmarks on my Google homepage for any other often-used sites. Now on the laptop I have just a few links in Favorites left to go thru...and all the ones on the desktop are organized into folders. The laptop is threatening to die soon...so I want to have anything really important saved to the desktop before that happens!!

I will not be completely swearing off the internet...no worries!! But I figure if I can get it down to just Gmail, Facebook, a few blog feeds, a few message boards, and my own blogs....then I will be doing pretty good. It is just too easy to get sucked into wasting too much time on social networks and slogging thru junk email!!

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