@online: still going at it

After three hours of trying to tackle what seems like a never-ending iPhoto mountain of images  - shifting, organizing, deleting - I'm still at 17.2K photos!

Why is this taking so looooonnggg....

It's a long and tiring process really - going through so many memories. I've amazed myself with how much I remember with regards to the significance of different photos and the memories tied to each one of them (ranging from where and when I got them, or where and when I took them, to who I showed them to, to what the reactions were...). I suppose with all the activity going on in my head, having been able to get rid of 300 more photos was probably somewhat of an accomplishment.

There is such a thing as emotional fatigue when it comes to cleaning (which is really quite different from laziness or procrastination), and at some point I did hit that wall. I tried fighting it by moving with my laptop to another environment in hopes to get some encouragement to fight the fatigue, but when I realized I was starting to linger too long at certain photos, I knew it would have been a more productive use of my time to move on to another task altogether. As so:

I'll admit I didn't exactly do a stellar job with the drawers, but considering I only gave myself an hour on this area and that pretty much everything in the drawers weren't mine (and I had to sort them as I went along), I was pretty proud for how much I did throw out. There were four other drawers but the photos didn't turn out too good. :( Still, it was a good productive breakaway.

My main springcleaning thought for this week has been "How do I make a sustainable system in my home and office so that I don't have constantly be cleaning up a specific place?" Things can move very quickly (see: deteriorate) in a house with seven other people - especially when the group includes two guys, one hoarder, two other women who have a ton of stuff of their own... then there's Y who's my perfect partner in getting the house in order (a little task at a time). As I reflected on my efforts to keep my house in order, I realized that I've been in a constant clean-deteriorate-clean-deteriorate cycle (which can be really quite emotionally tiring after a while). 

Work has been tremendously busy, but I've still been trying to keep decluttering as one of my priorities. In fact, this past week I challenged my Operations team to 5S the whole factory - one area at a time. If you're not familiar with the 5S system, it's basically a lean management system which was developed in Japan to support efficient "Just In Time" manufacturing. What I love most about it is that the first step starts with the elimination of everything unnecessary...then there are the parts about making sure everything meets my mildly-OCD standards.

This week, Whilst the Ops-team will be busy with the red-tagging, and we happily make big donations to our nearest Salvation Army, I'll be continuing with the decluttering and organizing the paperwork in my office. Last week, I believe I must have shredded at least a thousand sheets of unnecessary (outdated, duplicated, trash) paperwork in the office and it felt amazing! And tomorrow, I'll be back to the ploughing! It's truly amazing how much rubbish can build up over 25 years.

Springcleaning priorities for the week:

1. Watch over the Operations-team's 5Sing of the factory
2. Continue clearing out paperwork on my side unit and in the accounts cabinet. Lots of paperwork to put together...especially with the closure of the year.)
3. Clear out at least another 500 photos from iPhoto (to 16.8K). Yes, I'm going to take it one step at a time.
4. Clear out 1500 emails across the board (yes, I'm going to be ruthless with them this week...especially that I've taken over two other email boxes this past week and decided to start looking into my SPCG mail too!)

That should be challenging enough for the week.

Current email standing (ARGH, these mails are creeping up on me!)

• Personal Gmail Standing (Was: 238, Now: 283)
• Work Gmail (Was: 398, Now: 407)
• Work Intramail (Was: 1393, Now: 1408) 
• Work Sales Intramail: (383)
• Work Marketing Intramail: (263)
• Work YahooMail (Was: 199, Now: 205)
• SPCG Mail (51)
• Previous Total: (Was: 2228, NOW: Exactly 3000!)

@online...I'm going to be staying here on this task for a while.

Still over 17,500 photos. :(

It's amazing how much time and emotions clearing through photographs can take up. I still have to delete another 7500 photos to reach my target... almost as bad as my email-flood (which is still work in progress). But I suppose I should still celebrate. After all, I have deleted almost 500 random, blurry, and unnecessary photos. From this day forward, I've decided to no longer take pictures of food unless it is a purely function shot (for research/idea generation purposes). It is astounding how many "oh, I ate that!" photos I have... and so many of mundane normal foods. =_=

Other than clearing through the iPhotos today, I also cleared through another box of random documents in the office and hopefully have started a little cleaning movement for the office to get tidier. My administration director especially needs a new revamp to her space.

Tomorrow, clearing out MINDSPACE is the plan.

I plan to prioritize clearing out my work intra-email (the one with the 1400 mails in the inbox) and getting some action on some of the projects I've been procrastinating on, and finishing some of the irritating projects that I've been irrationally fearing to start - worrying that I might not be able to do them well due to the tremendous size of them. Mindspace is a precious thing that needs to be protected. Having it filled with worries and anxieties and "to do"s that have been on the list for a long time can be really disconcerting.

Today, I've discovered that I also seem to have a period of "distractedness" sometime in the afternoon around 2-4pm which my brain pretty much surrenders and tells me it needs a break...perhaps it's my "work saturation point". I need to somehow fill with some sort of repetitive or active work that doesn't require too much brainwork. For those two hours tomorrow, I plan to either clear the office stationery cabinet or do something creative to occupy my mind.

Okay, time to sleep! Tomorrow is another day and with all the work I'm planning to do, I need all the rest I can get.

SPCG @home & @online

Okay, after a day of trying to go through as many mails as possible, and to clear as much of the room as possible, this is what I could get to... I'l start with the room (which yes, deteriorated over time because...it's just how life is with the sisters. Though they are improving!)

My table got all cluttered with all sorts of things again after the flurry of the wedding weekend.
The best part of today was that the younger sister finally cleared out the grey basket in the corner!
Yay! Achievement of the month for her!
Yes, I celebrate the smallest of victories!

We use the vanity table everyday and somehow things just get here like a vicious cycle.
I'm glad we got to go through it together this time though so that we could throw out old makeup and stuff.
When things are thrown out, there are less things around, and they won't have the opportunity to move or come back. :D
The stuff on the floor has been promised to be moved when my sister gets to her new office in a few weeks. :)

I took the "before" pic after just starting to LifeHack the bottom drawer
by stacking them upwards (instead of on top of each other).
I was amazed that it was actually my younger sister who requested that I should try organizing the drawer that way.
I was very happy with the results!

This is my lower drawer of dresses.
As you can see, they are sorted by colour and I put the most "fragile" ones in Ziplocks.
Finding my dresses is going to be so much easier now! :D

There's more to the room to be done, but I somehow found myself at "room-cleaning saturation point" after going through my table, these two drawers, my undergarments drawer, as well as the bookshelf, and I knew pushing myself to try to tackle the rest of the room would have been at a lower productivity rate, so I decided to do it on Friday when I have the night free. :)

Instead, I decided to get back to decluttering the emails...and look at how much I got accomplished!

And here's the rundown of how we're doing in terms of Email-decluttering

• Personal Gmail (Had: 390, Now: 238)
• Work Gmail (Had: 415, Now: 398)
• Work IntraMail (Had: 1396, Now: 1393)
• Work YahooMail (Had: 4678, NOW: 199!!!!)
• Previous Total: 6897 Mails to get through, NOW: 2228)

I pretty much cleared 70% of my mails! I was so proud of myself!

As you can probably guess, I spent most of my time on the Work YahooMail. I still can't believe that I could bring it down by that many (I suppose because a lot of it was junk mail, obsolete information, or needed simple archiving). It took a lot of time-investment, but I'm glad I got through them. I can't wait to hit my target of having only 7 mails in each inbox. 

And for the iPhotos
Before: 18,078 Photos
Currently: 17,814 Photos

For the photos, I was mainly deleting duplicate pictures, random, insignificant, and blurry pics. It's amazing how many unnecessary photos I've taken of food and random bits of life. Not to mention I still have yet to compile all the photos of the ex together. I already know it's going to be an exceptionally emotionally draining experience, but I suppose somethings need to be done sooner or later. (And today, being the exact one-year mark of our breakup last year, it's probably high time to get them together, store them away in a CD, and out of my daily workspace - far away to prevent memory triggers. Perhaps I'll stay up tonight to try to sort through them and bring a little more closure.)

My goal for my iPhotos is to go through all my photos, delete all the crummy ones, organize all the nice ones into proper Events/Categories, and choose a few pretty & memorable ones to be printed out. :) I'll probably burn a the photos into CDs by the year or something too. Either that or store it in an online space. Not to mention that I have a lot of work product-shots in my laptop that really could be somewhere else. Hopefully by the end of the exercise, I will have less than 10,000 personal pictures on my laptop.

There's so much more to go, but we're getting somewhere.

For this e-decluttering, once we're through with the emails and iPhotos, I'm planning to go through my iPhone and DropBox, and eventually look into my online profiling and clear any junk floating around..and I suppose we'd be done for the year for the online side of things!

It's back to office tomorrow and I'll be back to clearing out boxes of random information chucked together. Especially that it's tax-filing in a month, we've just got to get all our information and paperwork sorted out quickly! Looking forward to closing this year well to start afresh in 2014!