The aspirational nature of books is undeniable. We display books we haven’t read because we believe the appearance of these unread books says something about us. (It does: our desire to present ourselves in a certain light). We leave certain books out where they are visible, while hiding others, which is much easier now that we can read electronically. We’re reluctant to cull books that have sat unopened on our shelves for years. We buy magazines, which mostly symbolize high-quality leisure time, and genuinely believe we’re going to read them one day. In my case, I tend to accumulate books of a similar type when I’m trying to get my head around something. The books symbolize an intention that may remain unfulfilled for years. I keep digital records of books I’ve read. I started doing it ten years ago, and when I started, I put in a lot of mental effort to include everything I’d read up to that point. I don’t need physical or electronic copies of the books I’ve read to remind myself that I read them; I can check LibraryThing or Goodreads. I don’t re-read books as a general rule, because a second read almost always replaces my initial impression with a less favorable one. Most of my reading comes from library books. If physical books are hanging around my house, it’s because I felt a strong impulse to buy them, but haven’t read them yet. Since I read over 200 books a year, I have to assume that I had plenty of time to read everything in the house. Why haven’t I? I have a two-volume novel, The Man Without Qualities, that I bought because I wanted to read it and the local library didn’t have it. It’s gone through five moves with me and it’s still sitting there. I had this idea that I’d save it for the plane when I finally went to Europe. When I did “finally go to Europe,” I was backpacking, and I didn’t really want to carry nearly four pounds of printed matter. When am I going to read this 1800-page epic? What am I trying to prove? The cover prices total $50 (probably not what I spent), so do I think I won’t have wasted money if I ever finally read the darn thing? If someone came over and was impressed by the fact that I own this unread book, it would mean nothing. If that person had read the book and enthusiastically wanted to discuss it with me, I’d be busted. Hopefully it’s just aspirational and not completely pretentious. I have a couple of books on writing screenplays. I bought them when we first moved to Southern California. I can look out my window and see palm trees; I don’t need books to remind me that I am indeed near an entertainment wonderland. If I really did have solid intentions to write a screenplay, I’m sure I could have found some manuals at that time. Maybe they’d even be up to date. I have a few dozen cookbooks, down from over a hundred a few years ago. Cookbooks used to be an impulse purchase for me. I was powerless in my desire for more. I bought and assembled an entire bookcase to house them. When I finally started to learn to cook, the pressure started to relax. I discovered that not all cookbooks were created equal. Gradually, I tried enough recipes in certain volumes that I was sure I didn’t want to try more! What happened after a couple of years was that I started confidently throwing things into pots and knowing it would work. I often found that what I called “Freezer Surprise” turned out better than other people’s recipes. I haven’t bought a new cookbook in about two years now. The books stood for an unformed desire. I wanted to eat delicious meals, but it took longer than it should have for me to realize that they wouldn’t spring out of the illustrations without a little help. I have a stack of running manuals and fitness books. I ran a marathon and I am a pretty fit person, fit for a middle-aged suburbanite anyway. I bought them as a stand-in when I injured my ankle. Then I found that reading them upset me too much. It was like reading a romance novel after a bad breakup. I used to buy fitness books in the same way I bought cookbooks; I had no idea what I was doing, but being in that aisle of the bookstore would give me a fleeting burst of motivation that fled by morning. I have a few German-language novels that I found at various used bookstores. I’m at A1 level in German, barely able to ask for a glass of water. Those were moments of FoMO and bargain hunting. I saw something I believed at the time to be scarce, I thought I was getting a deal, and I whipped out my wallet. Apparently I could have waited at least three years, because I can’t even read a child’s picture book yet. We won’t talk about the various other foreign language dictionaries and textbooks I have hanging around. There is a small folding bookshelf in our office. It’s full of textbooks. They’re not mine, as would be abundantly clear to you if you read the titles. They’re my husband’s books from engineering school. He actually uses them. Periodically, a few of them will disappear for a while, and eventually return. There are too many to keep near his desk at work, and he’s just as likely to refer to them here at the house. Once or twice a year, he’ll order a textbook or software manual online. Do you know what he does? I still have trouble believing it even though I’ve seen him do it. He opens the box, starts reading the book, goes through it cover to cover, and finishes it! He’s over there reading a robotics manual and I’m over here with my unread, cliché screenwriting manuals. He can demonstrably build a robot. Can I write a screenplay? Like every waiter in my region? Nobody knows. Nobody will ever know because evidently I’ve committed myself to read a two-volume, 1800-page novel first. Maybe I’ll adapt it. I have a history of resolving certain intentions and letting go of the books. I’m down to maybe 20% of what I had ten years ago. I used to buy books of knitting and crochet patterns; I worked through many of them and gave the results away as gifts. I used to chain-read metric buttloads of true crime books, and now I rarely do because I figured out why I read them. If I get ahold of a mystery or thriller, especially by certain authors, I’ll read it right away. When I was in a book club (three times), I would actually read the book before we met. Occasionally, I’ll buy a book of poetry at an independent bookstore, because THAT IS WHAT I DO, SO SUE ME, and work through it a little at a time. I bought a couple of ukulele songbooks and spent hours learning a dozen or so simple songs. (Then I realized that my level of playing was designed to accompany singing, and that kind of fizzled out, but come on over if you like to sing the Everly Brothers). We read graphic novels as a family (Walking Dead, Scott Pilgrim), and those go like popcorn. Books go through our house at a significantly faster rate than loaves of bread. Why is it, then, that some go when they’re still fresh and others hang around when they’ve gone stale? It’s different in every house. A lot of people hang on to old textbooks and academic notebooks. There are so many hundreds of thousands of collections of old National Geographic magazines that we could use them to decoupage the Statue of Liberty. A surprising number of people have every book from their childhood bookcase. I know I’m not the only person who buys novels and leaves them unread. What I don’t do is to put them back on the shelf only partially finished, though I think that is another common habit. Probably the most common unresolved intention is when people save every book they ever liked, believing they will go back and reread them all one day. The math on this is discouraging. As much as I’ve always lived my life surrounded by books, my feelings about this have started to change. Moving 27 times in 20 years may have had something to do with this. When I want the comfort of walls of books around me, I can go to a bookstore or the public library. Being surrounded by books I haven’t read, despite a stated intention, is becoming stressful. I’ve started seeing them as one long centipede of a volume, thousands of pages long, that I’ll have to get through before I can bring home anything new. As a writer, I’ve started to feel dirty about buying used books, knowing the author doesn’t get any of the proceeds. As a reader, I’ve gotten sucked into the delight of buying books with my fingerprint and being able to read them 10 seconds later. My shelves have gradually diminished over the last few years. I’ve been reading through them and letting them go. I keep telling myself that “the next time I move, they’ll all be gone,” and maybe one day that will actually be true. Humbly admitting to yourself that you don’t know as much as you thought you did is one of the very toughest experiences for the ego. It’s almost as tough as giving a sincere apology. When I think of this practice of dumping inaccurate, mistaken, preconceived, or unhelpful information, I refer to it as emptying the cup. It comes from a Zen story about a know-it-all novice monk who wouldn’t listen. I see my personal mental teacup as one of the traditional Asian variety; it only holds a couple of tablespoons! If I want fresh, hot tea, I need to routinely drain my cup and make room for more. It takes discipline to Snopes yourself all the time and let go of incorrect stories. I’m going to walk through my process of doing this, specifically for the category of physical fitness. A “factual statement” purports something to be objectively verifiable. “The Moon is made of green cheese.” “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” There are probably a million times more pseudo-facts than there are actual facts. Misinformation is much easier to find than accurate information. My first task is to lay out what I think I know. Then I need to pick through what’s working and what isn’t working. Unfortunately, I know from experience that I tend to cling desperately to the least effective things I’ve been doing, while strongly resisting exactly the new information that would be most helpful. Resistance tends to pop up in response to unfamiliar new information, not incorrect or inaccurate information. It feels like boredom or disgust. That’s my flag. Resistance means I’m onto something! Resistance means it’s time to activate the ignition on my curiosity. As I learn around the edges of a new topic, it starts to become more familiar, more interesting, and more appealing. Some of the very things that are most interesting to me now began as things that totally repelled me before. (Cooking, mud runs, the world of finance). My original attitude toward physical fitness was that it was the consolation of idiots. I thought certain people were born smart and others weren’t, and that the drive to work out or play any kind of sports was a signal of cognitive deficiency. I was so smart I wound up spending years trapped in chronic pain and fatigue. It was my comeuppance. You think you know so much? Here, have a four-day migraine! Discovering that I could control my illness through physical inputs really knocked me down several pegs. I was finally ready to listen. I started running on a whim. The decision came out of nowhere. I just turned to my husband and said, “You know how I do something new at the New Year?” “Yeah?” “Next year, I think it’s going to be running.” His head rocked back. “Really?” I felt a little sick as I realized what I was doing, but I felt the commitment in my gut. “Yeah, I think so.” I started a couple weeks early. On the first day, I literally couldn’t run around the block without stopping. I had to lie on the floor until I stopped seeing black spots. At that point, I understood in a visceral way something that I never could understand in an intellectual way. I was NOT in good shape for a 35-year-old. (I try to think of my body from the perspective of 80-year-old Future Me). “I guess I know what I’m doing tomorrow,” I thought. I learned a lot over the next four years. I learned how to fit workout time into my schedule. I learned that it didn’t matter whether I ran in the morning, afternoon, or late at night. I learned to plan routes and gradually increase my distance. I learned that my weight was determined 98% by what I ate, and that my workout had virtually nothing at all to do with whether I lost or gained. I learned how to sign up for races and attach a race bib. I learned that the time I saw on the clock as I crossed the finish line was not my actual time, and that I could check for my true time online. I learned what arrangements of workout clothes worked for me in different weather conditions. I had to re-learn how to tie my shoelaces, and if you ever want an exercise in being more humble, that is a good one. My dog learned to distinguish the word RUN in normal ape conversation, such as, “I’m going to run some laundry.” He would come around the corner so fast he would skid out on the tile. He would show up ready to RUN even when he’d already RUN six miles that day. (He’s a master at recovery; he sprawls on the floor after a workout and sleeps). I became one of Those People. I started fantasizing about running. I would think about my next run while I was still on the trail during my current run. I would look out a window, see someone running, and want to jump up and join her. I scoped out people’s gear. I read running magazines and books. I watched running documentaries. I took pictures of my race medals. I secretly hoarded my worn-out running shoes. I had lucky socks. Then the almost-inevitable happened. I got sidelined by an overuse injury. It happens to 8 out of 10 runners at some point. The pain in my ankle became so intense that it would wake me in the night. It felt like someone was kicking me in a specific spot with a cowboy boot. I learned that the analgesic effect of distance running that had helped me overcome chronic pain could also mask the pain of injury. I didn’t notice something was wrong until it was really, really wrong. I learned all about physical therapy, foam rollers, ice massage, kinesiotherapy tape, and ace bandages. I’m starting from zero now. Well, not zero, because my base fitness level is in the stratosphere compared to where it was when I started. I think of myself as a runner now, rather than Not Applicable or Haha, No. Where I’m starting now is the place of the empty cup. My prior routine was to suit up, run whatever route suited the distance I felt like running that day, shower, change clothes, and Eat All the Things. I had read that stretching had either no discernible effect or could actually lead to injury, so I didn’t do any warmup or cool-down. I knew there was this thing called “cross-training,” and that there were specific strength training exercises that runners could do to help their performance, but I shrugged that stuff off. Not interested. I had seen such amazing changes in my body from running that I didn’t think I needed more. What I’m doing works for me, so shut up. My cup was full. It turns out that I was in a dangerous position. I had personal experience up to a certain point on the growth curve. I thought I knew everything I needed to know. I wasn’t a coach or a trainer. I had no experience in organized athletics. What I was doing “worked” until it quit working. I was like a novice driver with a new car, going along great until the engine ran out of oil. In retrospect, if I wasn’t going to work with a trainer, I should have come up with a more organized plan before I began training for a marathon. I doubled my distance, changed my shoes, and started training on a different surface all at the same time. Too many variables. When the injury started surfacing, I didn’t recognize it for what it was. Fast forward 18 months. I’m desperate to get back out there. Default Me is downbeat, moody, and tightly wound. Running Me is cheerful and energetic. Running Me sleeps better. Running Me is more productive. Running Me is less triggered by interpersonal drama, more forgiving, better at listening. There is no substitute for cardio. If it came in a pill it would be more revolutionary than antibiotics. That’s why I want to be doing it in the long term. I want to run another marathon, and next time, I’m going to do it without having to drag my leg the last 8 miles. I took careful notes in physical therapy. I learned that I have weak glutes. This corresponded with how I felt after my marathon. I was sore in certain areas but not others. I worked one hip flexor to failure, and this helped me understand that I was probably running a little heavier on one side. Strengthening my glutes and hip flexors should help steady my stride. I also learned that my calves are extremely tight, something that probably affects that tendon in my ankle. I need to work my core and my quads. Now I have independent sources corroborating the same information: running manuals, a physical therapist, and sensations in isolated muscle groups that I can physically feel in my own body. It’s easy to nod along and think, “Duh, obviously.” It’s unforgettable when you try to step into the shower and have to grab your thigh with your hands and pick up your leg because your foot won’t respond to your command. I have another couple of weeks before my toenail finishes growing back (long story) and I’m going to use that as study time. I’m starting from the perspective of a Sadder But Wiser Person Who Wants to Avoid Injury. Fortunately/unfortunately, there is a cottage industry for middle-aged athletes who want to come back after various overuse injuries. Not only do I want to proceed without my ankle acting up again, I want to make sure I avoid developing any “new and different” injuries to other parts of my body. Rather than skimming or skipping the diagrams and chapters on sports physiology, I’m going to read with a highlighter behind each ear. I’m going to stick post-its everywhere. I’m going to take written notes in an actual notepad. I’m going to slap myself whenever I catch myself feeling resistance or lack of focus. If I really think I’m so smart, I’m smart enough to pay attention and recognize I can benefit from learning more. The first day I show my dog his harness and ask if he’s READY to RUN, I’m going to make sure I’m really ready, too. Queues. Lists. Bookmarks. Playlists. It’s not enough that we can fill our homes with stacks of paper representing stored information. Now we can even fill the intangible world of the Cloud with electronic representations of information! It follows us everywhere. Even in our sleep, the junk mail, spam, email, newsletter subscriptions, and algorithmic recommendations of new TV shows, books, articles, movies, music, and products keep coming at us. They’re etheric arrows aiming straight at our thought bubbles. What are we going to do with it all? How are we going to keep up? When are we going to get “caught up”? There is no “catching up” to anything. It’s the Catch-22 of journaling. The more time I spend trying to track the details of my life for posterity, the more time I must dedicate to journaling, until the day I find myself meta-journaling about my journaling habit. There isn’t anything left to write about except the process of writing. The same is true of managing the constant influx of new information. If we genuinely try to “keep up” with all of it, eventually that’s the only thing we’ll do. This is what we mean when we talk about focusing on the past, the present, or the future. Past Self has made a lot of decisions for us about desirable ways to spend our time. Past Self loves to try to assign us binge-watching episodes, magazine articles, books, and especially recipes. We look at Past Self’s stacks, shrug, and address them to Future Self. My grandmother, for example, has been reading through all the books she already owns but hadn’t “gotten around to” yet. Some are from the 1970s. This gives me pause, because I’m working on the same project, and I have books in my stack that I bought about a decade ago. On a scale of 1-10, I’m probably at around a 7 for information hoarding. We do paperless billing. I do my writing digitally. I’ve been working on reading through my book collection and redefining what I consider a “reference” book. I’ve been going through cookbooks (my biggest area of clutter) and winnowing them. We don’t have cable, and the most TV we’ll watch is a purchased season of a TV series every couple of months. So I’m getting better. I do, however, still have an ungainly collection of notebooks, loose notes, and more index cards than a casino has playing cards. There are about 3600 recipes in my digital recipe collection. I have 89 e-books and audio books on my digital library wish list. Well, for one library. In the interest of full disclosure, there are 560 on my other library account. As for saved articles, I have no idea, but it’s a lot more than 560. I understand that I have assigned my Future Self at least three years’ worth of reading. That’s assuming that I never see another book or article that interests me. If snow fell in hell, or pigs flew, there would undoubtedly be articles published about these events, and I would undoubtedly bookmark them and plan to read them “later.” In other words, I haven’t yet gotten my head around the idea that THERE IS NOT ENOUGH TIME. I can only pretend I’ll be able to “catch up.” I can only pretend that time has no meaning in certain circumstances. I can only pretend that there is a wormhole, which I will find, which will enable me to read as much as I want outside the flow of years, minutes, and hours. My areas of info hoarding are pretty specific. I have no real limits on my writing notes, even though I’ve already determined that paper notes are unsafe. My sole copies of these ideas and bits of reference material are totally vulnerable to loss, water damage, or fire. I can’t access them from remote locations, which is bad, because most of my work is not done at home. This is an example of a specific problem, with a specific solution, for a specific purpose. My issue with no-limit, no-boundary leisure reading is on the opposite end of the scale. I don’t have specific purposes for reading books and articles; I just want to. My stack of paper notes, notebooks, files, and index cards is finite and measurable. My queue of pleasure reading material is more or less infinite. The sort of info hoarding among my clients is all over the map. Almost everyone has at least a little trouble organizing papers and electronic information, even regular folk who are not chronically disorganized. People who have no other clutter often have paper clutter. There are some common areas of focus, though. Mail (real, important mail) Mail (junk mail, often disguised as real mail) Old academic papers (notes, notebooks, handouts) PHOTOGRAPHS Recipes Magazine or newspaper clippings Personal letters / cards / e-mail Invitations that need decisions Business cards Keepsakes (invitations, event programs, favors, souvenirs, ticket stubs) The prime question when evaluating information is, WHAT DO I PLAN TO DO WITH IT? Obviously, important mail needs to get processed. Bills need to be paid, checks need to be deposited, bank statements need to be reconciled, subpoenas need to be answered. Invitations can be ignored until the date has passed, a habit we indulge until the day we ourselves schedule something for which we desire RSVPs. EVERYTHING ELSE can sit indefinitely. That’s fine – there’s nothing necessarily wrong with owning a stack of paper – except that paper has a nefarious tendency to get on top of more important paper and hide it. It takes constant vigilance to track and process the important stuff. What do we think we’re going to do with our old academic papers? I scanned mine and put them on a thumb drive. I have never needed any of them. I think I thought they might come in handy one day, if I met a younger person who wanted an example of a certain type of academic paper. I saved scanned images if they had a grade I liked scrawled on them. “Looky, an A!” Needless to say, though I tend to have a lot of college-aged kids in my life at any given moment, none of them has ever asked to see my old papers. I suspect I’m keeping them as proof that I put myself through school. The point, though, is that we learned that material. Education should be a starting point, not an ending point. It’s true that I’ve gone on to read and learn a lot more about history since I got my degree. I can’t learn much from reading my own papers or my own notes. If I went back to grad school at some point, I wouldn’t be pursuing a master’s in history; I already made that decision. I save my old notes because they fit on the thumb drive, and I don’t have to make the decision to delete them based on space. What do we think we’re going to do with all the photographs? At a certain point, I transitioned to digital photographs. Everything I have in a hard copy is old. I have at least 100x more photographs of the people I care about now than I did 20 years ago. They’re of better quality and they tend to reflect moments of daily life rather than artificial poses and awkward smiles. I also take scads of photos of random things, because it’s so easy and because I always have a camera in my pocket now. The aluminum box that contains my photo collection is almost never opened. I seem to remember looking through everything in it about 7 years ago, when I did a burning ceremony, but those photos are not a part of my daily life. If they were, I would have put them in frames. (Frames, not flames). What do we think we’re going to do with all the recipes? I’m probably the worst offender in the world when it comes to clipping recipes. Not only do I have the 3600 digital recipes, I have no fewer than four recipe apps on my phone. I also have a box of recipes on index cards and a collection of roughly 50 cookbooks. I’m not going to run out! The funniest thing about this is that I don’t always use recipes anymore. We tend to cook the same vegetables in the same ways. I probably only test out a new recipe about once a month now. Every now and then, I freak out about how many untested recipes I have. Even if I had done one a day since then, I still would not have made a dent. What do we think we’re going to do with all the magazine or newspaper clippings? This is a big one for a lot of people. My issue is that I think I’m going to read them all one day. Since I always bookmark more each day than I read, I could only “catch up” if I quit bookmarking anything for the rest of the year. I’m better off giving up on the older stuff and limiting myself to a certain amount of reading time per day. I have yet to make that happen. For many people, the issue is rather one of preserving information they’ve already read. They want to save it. For what, though? What are they going to do with the information? How are they going to let it change their lives? Are they researching a specific project? If not, well, my philosophy is to ‘read and delete.’ I tend to want to forward everything to everyone, but I can’t force other people to be interested in things they aren’t. If I read it and it doesn’t make enough of an impression for me to remember it, change my mind, or change my behavior, eh, easy come easy go. What do we think we’re going to do with the letters, cards, and email? It turns out that a lot of people get these personal missives and freeze. We can’t bring ourselves to return the favor and write back. When we do this (talking to myself here), we’re effectively rejecting the other person’s gesture of love and connection. They don’t see it as shyness or a desire to wait until the proper attention can be summoned to do it justice. They just see it as a disconnect. Old letters often represent a broken love affair, vanished friendship, or family connection that could have been made stronger. We hang on to these tokens out of grief and regret. Far better to reach out by other means, rebuild connections, and let the tokens go. Invitations that need decisions are in the same category. Delay the decision too long and the decision has been made. REJECTED AND DENIED. We let ourselves off the hook. Often, our default response is ‘no.’ We have to double check and make sure that ‘no’ is really the setting we want for life. We’ll never know what would have happened if we had shown up, unless we do show up. Business cards also represent potential connections and decisions that need to be made. So much of the time, we take someone’s card, and then never follow through. That’s fine – a business card is a very inexpensive, low-risk form of advertising – but perhaps we can start making the decisions earlier in the process. We don’t have to keep these cards forever. Most people have some kind of web presence if we look. What do we think we’re going to do with the souvenirs and mementos? This can be a dangerous area. Almost anything can be construed as a souvenir. I saved an all-day lollipop from a trip to Disneyland for about 10 years. For some reason, I thought that would be a great souvenir, even though I had also saved the ticket stubs. Then I found this sucker again. (See what I did there?) It was melted and stuck all over everything. It had in fact ruined other things I had intended to save. I’m really lucky my papers weren’t swarming with ants. As with many things, keeping clutter left me worse off than getting rid of it. Dealing with the flow of information is a problem that will never end. It’s like laundry, except that laundry doesn’t follow you into the Cloud. It helps to make categorical decisions. Why would I want to keep old school papers? Why would I want to save clippings or recipes? How often am I going to dedicate an hour of my life to looking through old photos or yearbooks? Which types of events am I never going to miss, and which will I always avoid? When we have figured out why we’re tracking or keeping information, we can start with what arrives from that day forward. Whether we ever get around to going through the older stuff is more of a philosophical question. Before I ever learned that ‘minimalist’ referred to a lifestyle as well as a design principle, I started hearing about the trend of taking a complete inventory of one’s personal belongings. There seems to be a sort of contest among avowed minimalists as to who can detach from the most things. Surely a monk who owns nothing but a yellow robe and a begging bowl is the all-time winner of this game? (Although the last time I saw a yellow-robed monk, he had a tote bag with a 16-oz plastic bottle of Coke peeking out…) I have tried taking my own inventory of personal items. It didn’t take long before I realized I should work out a list of must-haves, sort of like the accessories that are stapled to the inside of the display box of a new doll. It’s the middle-aged suburban writer model! She comes with a laptop bag, Scrabble board, battered notebook, parrot carrier, ukulele, and four hula hoops. Wait, that’s the custom version. What I found during my attempt to devise a minimalist inventory checklist was that everyone who has done this… has cheated! The main cheat is to consider an entire category of objects as a single object, namely: BOOKS. You have got to be kidding me. Books are the heaviest and bulkiest aside from furniture! Of course books count as single items! The other pitfall is CLOTHING. Okay, no. I work with hoarding and compulsive acquisition, and I have only ever had one single client who was an exception to the rule that Clothes Will Take Over All Available Space and Then Some. There is a subcategory of minimalist inventories, and that is the cult of the capsule wardrobe. If they can do it, anyone can. If clothing, shoes, coats, and accessories don’t count as separate, individual items, then there is really no point to the exercise of trying to take the inventory in the first place. I think I’ve hit on the problem here. I look at my belongings in the context of having to pack, move, and unpack them on a regular basis. Most of the minimalist thought leaders exclude shared or household items, such as furniture, linens, and housewares. That’s legit: it can be a real minefield when one person in a household becomes enamored of minimalism and tries to drag everyone else into it without the proper emotional adjustment period. From a more nomadic perspective, every toothpick, safety pin, and spare button has to count, because all of it has to be tracked, packed, and stacked. I’ll never win the minimalist inventory game. My “go bag” alone has a few dozen items in it. My backpacking gear fits in a plastic tub, but it also consists of dozens of separate things. I’m not counting my sewing box as “one item” because, well, where does it stop? Do we just limit ourselves to, say, 100 categories? Do we then merge categories to capture everything? How about just calling it “MY STUFF” and leaving it in the singular? My household consists of my husband, a dog, and a parrot. Hubby is better at minimalism than I am in some ways; I have seen him pack his entire work wardrobe into a single suitcase for a three-week international business trip. My minimalist project makes sense to him, and it supports his career development. We’re in it together. We have to be, as we’ve been married 6 years and we’ve already moved together 5 times. Our focus has been more on downsizing furniture and workout equipment – the big stuff. There is a base level of material goods that makes a comfortable home. We’re still in the process of unpacking from our latest move, and it is astonishing how much space is taken up by the blankets, pillows, soup pots, towels, mops, brooms, and hangers. Even such mundane items as a laundry basket and a dish rack start to add bulk and numbers quickly. What counts? What doesn’t count? There are a lot of standard household items that we don’t have. We don’t have a barbecue, a roasting pan, a recliner, a wine rack, a second vehicle, a gaming system, holiday decorations, a stereo, a collection of CDs, or, well, actually we don’t even have a couch right now. Many of our ‘things’ are virtual. Do they count? Does it somehow not count that I have a couple dozen e-books, three movies, and hours of podcasts stored on my phone? How about all those digital photos? We are now entering a twilit world where we can be emotionally involved with things that aren’t there, whilst surrounded by physical things we don’t even notice anymore. My response to this has been to try to be more portable. We are now living in a 728 square foot house that was built in 1939. We love it. It doesn’t feel small at all, perhaps because the ceilings are maybe a foot higher and the ratio of window to wall is higher, too. This place is 53% of the size of our last house. We’re not going to have to get rid of 47% of our stuff, though. The closet rod is 40” long – that’s THREE FEET FOUR INCHES - and all my existing clothes (and two hanging shoe racks) fit on it. We were able to contemplate moving here because we realized that we had a lot of wasted space. Each time we’ve moved, we’ve gotten rid of a certain amount of stuff. Either we had too many redundant spatulas or whatever, a piece of furniture wouldn’t fit the appropriate room, the colors were off, or we realized that time had gone by and we hadn’t been using it. Every time we cull items, we think about our desire to eventually live and work overseas for a few years, which means most of the basic housewares are completely expendable. All our media will eventually be digitized, from books, music, and movies to our few remaining binders and handwritten notes. The important things aren’t things at all. What we want to bring is our marriage, our pets, and our lifestyle. The core of minimalism is to focus on what is most important in life. We are too prone as a society to focus on shopping and interacting with STUFF. Counting every item in the house is a great way to return our focus to STUFF instead of our loved ones, our values, and living our purpose. What I want to be thinking about are enduring topics like: Can I make my husband belly-laugh today? Can I teach my parrot to whistle any part of the Harry Potter theme? Can my dog learn to jump rope? The idea is to live life. We want to break our cultural addiction to debt, driving, staring at screens, overeating, under-sleeping, and clutter. We want to live within our means. We want to have the strongest relationships possible with all the people we care about. We want to find out just how big life can get. There needs to be room for it. We make space by turning away from material things and turning toward one another. I woke up in Past Self’s bed, wearing Past Self’s nightgown. I took a shower and used her soap and shampoo and even her razor. I know she won’t mind; she’s Past Self and she won’t be needing it anymore. The trouble with Past Self is that when she moved out, she left all her junk behind. My closet is full of her clothes, my shelves are full of her books, and my fridge is full of her leftovers. What. A. Slob. Past Self, I’m so tired of cleaning up after you all the time. Past Self isn’t completely selfish, though. In fact, her rationale for most of the clutter she brought home was that she thought I would want it. Apparently she thought a bunch of crumpled receipts were my thing. Judging by my bookshelves, she also had some pretty misguided ideas about what I would want to read. She made all these queues and playlists for me, not just of books but of movies and music and articles and YouTube videos. It’s like, doesn’t she have anything better to do? Why does she have to keep trying to decide what I do in my spare time? At least she finally quit buying me craft supplies, like I was really going to want her to plan my next 10-15 years’ worth of leisure time. You don’t own me, Past Self! What a control freak. I’m in this limbo period right now. I’ve finally managed to wind down my compulsive media acquisition, so I can work through the backlog, either reading/listening to items or editing them out of the list. I’m trying to develop a sense of how many books, articles, podcasts, etc. I can process in a day and in a week. I want to be current. I want to let go of any attachment to the idea that I will “catch up” with items that may date back to 2007. Similarly, I am working on a vision of how Future Self is going to live, and what her material surroundings will look like. See, the thing about Future Self is that she is going to wake up in my bed one day. She’ll have to deal with the ramifications of my choices, for good or ill. I can leave her stacks of bills, piles of dirty laundry, and boxes full of clutter. I can also choose to treat her to something nice. I could get her a bouquet for tomorrow. I could send her money. I could surprise her with her dream home one day. All I have to do is to figure out how she would want it decorated. What kind of stuff will Future Self have? What is she going to want? If we started with a clean slate, how much of my stuff and Past Self’s stuff would she wish she had? Unless she goes to live full-time at a luxury resort, I can assume she’ll want furniture and dishes and laundry detergent and all the dozens of other basic household items. Those are things she can get anywhere. It’s the personalized stuff that’s under scrutiny. How many hard copies of photographs and documents and academic papers will she want? How many ornaments and decorations and bits of bric-a-brac? Is she really going to want to re-read everything I think she will? Is she still going to like the same music as me? Is she going to fit in my hand-me-down clothes, and will they still be in style? I know I’ve had to have these same conversations with Past Self, because she kept buying me clothes that turned out to be four sizes too big. She also left me a lot of boxes of random stuff. It’s not that I’m ungrateful, Past Self, I just wish you’d saved your money and sent me on a Parisian vacation instead. When I picture Future Self, I like to think of her having more freedom and more options than I do now. I like to think she’ll be able to travel more than I do. I like to think that her house looks intentional, that she has some kind of readily apparent design sensibility on display. I like to think that she’s fit and stylish and that she has better hair than I do. When I think of the technology that will be available to her, I quiver a little. She’ll be reading books my favorite authors haven’t even written yet and listening to music that doesn’t exist. GPS will be better, search engines will be better, and there will be hundreds of incremental improvements and innovations I can’t even imagine, but she’ll be able to take them for granted. If I saw her phone right now, I’d probably cry. In my lifetime so far, I’ve seen a lot of things become obsolete and fall by the wayside. For example, I used to have a push-button phone that picked up AM radio in the background, but only on my end. It had a three-foot cord. I’ve also spent countless hours in thrift stores that are chock-full of fugly castoffs, like an “Aisle” of Misfit Toys, but for clothes and lamps and plates. It makes me skeptical about material objects. They seem so desirable, until the zeitgeist blows by and they start looking shabby and lame in comparison. When Past Self and Future Self are separated by more than five years, it’s safe to assume that Future Self is not going to feel aesthetic delight in Past Self’s tacky, shopworn choices. Future Self may be traveling the world, living out of a suitcase, and not interested in most physical possessions of any kind. When I was 7, I tried to teach myself to read two books at once, one for each eye. After about an hour of experimentation, I decided it was too hard for little kids and that I’d have to try again when I was an adult. It took a university course in neurolinguistics before I fully let go of that dream. Speed reading apps are a reasonable facsimile. Note: This review was inspired by my indignation toward the ReadQuick app, toward which I feel the gamut of emotions of a jilted lover. I had a crush on you from afar, I fell in love with you the moment we met, we spent all that time together… and now you want to limit my access behind a pay wall? I paid $10 for you! (Okay, the emotions of a jilted lover plus those of a thwarted skinflint). Let’s start with ReadQuick as the baseline for speed reading apps. Basically, the app allows you to load news articles and read them more quickly by showing only one word at a time. The technical term for how many words appear on-screen at a time is ‘fixations.’ (Seems legit… ) ReadQuick can bookmark articles, and it can also draw from other bookmarking services such as Pocket and Instapaper. I use it with Pocket. I’ve found that certain articles in my Pocket Queue will not appear in my ReadQuick queue, generally if they start with a large illustration. Some articles would begin at a random place in the middle, or stop at the first page, due to either illustrations or formatting. At least 90% of my reading material was unaffected by these problems. I liked that each article in the queue showed a reading time based on my current reading speed. It’s currently set at 610 words per minute, triple the average unassisted reading pace. I was able to train upward by 10-wpm increments. It would sometimes crash after I had finished a long article, but the new revision seems to have fixed that. The new revision appears to allow increased fixations, but I’m still having a fit of pique about having to pay another $10 for a $10 app, so I can’t confirm it. When I first got the app, I was frustrated that it would not accommodate books due to DRM issues. Now that I’ve read a few thousand news articles on it, I no longer think it would suit my style to read fiction on it. There are a lot of typographic conventions, such conversational formatting and mid-chapter section breaks, that would seem to affect comprehension. I like speed-reading best for keeping up on the news. I prefer to have the gist of many stories so that I have time to delve into a greater proportion of long-form reportage. Accelerator (formerly known as Velocity) is the next app I tried. At $2.99, it’s a lot cheaper than ReadQuick. The reading experience is virtually indistinguishable if the two are set on the same speed and background. They each have features that the other doesn’t, so I’ll compare them. · Same: Black/white, white/black, and sepia themes, just like iBooks and Kindle. Set speed up to 1000 words per minute. Read from Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability. Archive articles after reading. Both apps are stumped by slide shows. Neither app allows sorting the queue with oldest first. · Different: ReadQuick reads from Feedly and Evernote; Accelerator reads from the web. ReadQuick queue shows reading time and whether article is finished; Accelerator only shows this from reading view. ReadQuick allows deletion as well as archiving. ReadQuick allows web view; Accelerator allows plain text view. Accelerator is my new default news reader. I do miss a few features from ReadQuick. My favorite feature was the icon that shows how long each article will take to read. Accelerator also neglects to show the source of the original article. The best of both worlds would be an app that combined everything from both apps. It would allow a web view as well as a plain text view; it would show the source of each article and how long it would take to read. Maybe it would also cost $12.98. Eh, no app is perfect. The reading experience itself is the key feature, and that is fully optimized in my opinion. Acceleread is a different sort of enterprise altogether. It’s designed to train people to read faster and with better comprehension. I took a reading speed test of traditionally formatted text, and it gave me 400 words per minute with 100% comprehension. It comes with some pre-copyright novels, of which I had already read 17 out of 20. As far as I can tell, Acceleread is designed to read DRM-free books, not news articles, so it is a different use case. I tested it out, though. It wants to orient sideways. It allows multiple lines as well as multiple fixations per line. This does seem to be the best way to train for comprehension as well as speed, and it also seems to be a better transition to traditional text on paper. I’m talking myself into giving it a try for fiction, but I’ll have to find something DRM-free that I really want to read. Sprint is a free iOS app based on Spritz. There are several iterations, including one for PDFs and one for ePub books, called ReadMe!. I about fainted when I saw that. It’s great, but as far as I can tell it does not support my library’s ePub catalog. The Spritz-based style is distinctive, with a logo, user name, reading speed, and playback buttons prominently displayed at all times. Speed tops out at 1000 wpm and can be adjusted in 25-wpm increments. Back to the Sprint app. It can read websites, which is a different use case from Accelerator or ReadQuick. Sprint does not work on everything. I logged into my Pocket account and was not able to Sprint anything. I couldn’t speed-read my own website, though that is probably a good thing, as you really need to pontificate on my magisterial writing skills to get the most out of my scintillating wit and iconoclastic observations. Sprint would be a good supplement for Accelerator, as their draw may be mutually exclusive for a lot of web content. What I really want is a configurable auto-scroll setting on e-book readers that support DRM content. Kindle and iBooks, I am looking at you. When I buy a book, I should be able to read it in any format I like. I want auto-scroll and I want a ceiling projection display. My old Palm PDA from the year 2000 had an app with auto-scroll, and I could buy e-books from Barnes & Noble with it. Why can’t I have this on my phone? WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY!
Should we speed-read, though? A million new books were published in English last year. The average dedicated reader can enjoy 3000 books in a lifetime. It would be magnificent if we could somehow double this, or triple it, and still get the same comprehension and leisure value, in the same way that we can double the number of cats in a lap. I speed-read, and I also read e-books and print at normal speed. I listen to audio books, sometimes at 1.5 or 2x speed. I listen to podcasts as well. Like most people, when introduced to a new medium of information processing, I add it to my repertoire and continue using all the same formats I used before. Speed-reading is fantastic for skimming through a large volume of ephemera, like the news, though perhaps less so for assessing whether something is suitable for a research project. It would be pointless for poetry or plays or children’s literature or graphic novels. Woe betide anyone who tries to speed-read while learning a foreign language. In short, I adore it, because it suits my temperament, but I don’t think it’s for everyone and I definitely don’t think it’s for everything. There is a picture of Lemuel Gulliver hanging on the wall behind the check-out counter at my local library branch. (From Jonathan Swift’s never-out-of-print classic, Gulliver’s Travels). It’s the scene where he wakes up on the beach and finds that the Lilliputians have tied him to the ground. Although the threads are fine, there are so many of them staked down that he can only free one arm. They’ve even tied his hair. He’s so ensnared that he can’t even roll over to pee. The Lilliputians shoot him with arrows, threaten him with spears, drug his wine, and finally replace his ropes with chains. None of this was meant as an allegory about the mundane details of life, but... These are the ropes that tie us down: Sleep deprivation Debt Clutter Disorganization Health problems (one rope each) Poor eating habits (one rope each) Dehydration Procrastination Toxic relationships (one rope each) Uninspiring work Creative blocks Emotional baggage Addictions Boredom Chronic complaining This is why habit change can be so discouraging. It can take a lot of effort to snap a thread. But after all that work, all the other threads are still in place. Not sure about you, but I have definitely felt so stressed and overworked that I couldn’t even find time for a pee break! I have also felt that gloomy sense of 100 arrows pointed my way if I tried to make a break for it. Dire circumstances indeed, especially when we consider that “falling back to sleep” might lead to those cords being replaced with chains. Habits do chain us and they do start at a scarcely perceptible gauge. They start when we aren’t paying attention. Gulliver falls asleep after drinking a half-pint of brandy. Clearly, he has no idea that he will be captured with all these binding cords. It’s just that he relaxes his guard and stops paying attention, even though he’s in a vulnerable place. This is perfectly understandable, considering that he is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Trauma and exhaustion, don’t you know. Nobody can blame him for what happens to him. He didn’t ask for it. Trouble often leads to more trouble in this manner, though. It’s the same way for us non-fictional, ordinary humans. We turn to mediocre or ineffective coping strategies when times are hard, and they often lead to further problems. What do we do when nothing is really going very well? When we’re burned out and exhausted and we feel unsupported? When we’re broke and having health issues? When we’re out of shape and disorganized, yet we also need to find a better job? Where do we even start? Which thread do we try to snap first? The first key is to recognize that all these threads are the same: obstacles that hold us back and prevent us from moving forward. It doesn’t really matter which one we break first, because they’re all going to have to go. Gulliver gets his left hand free first, though it happens more or less by accident. If his right hand had been loose instead, it might have gone differently. That translates to focusing on whichever negative force will make it easiest to work on the others. In my opinion, the first cord to break is the sense of futility and resignation. Learned helplessness teaches us to keep trudging along, tolerating the intolerable. We don’t know our own strength. We don’t always realize that all we have to do is to sit up quickly, put the smackdown on the mean little spear-carrying Lilliputians, and start walking. We are much bigger than our problems – even when there are 40 of them and only one of us. Next in my opinion are disorganization and sleep deprivation. Those become simple when we have a clear sense of purpose and when we let go of the desire to distract ourselves late at night. We keep trying to buy ourselves a bit of cloud real estate where we can escape the world. Daydream time for real dreamtime. The truth is that it’s impossible to enjoy anything when we are chronically short on sleep, and we don’t realize how true this is until we start getting enough. Getting enough sleep improves focus and willpower, gives us more physical energy, helps fight chronic pain, and helps eliminate food cravings. Plus it’s free! We start to feel as though the other things holding us back maybe aren’t quite as serious as we first thought. When Gulliver gets free, he eventually goes on to travel the world, come home again, and start hanging out with his horse a lot. Not such a bad ending. Many of us would do the same, once it crosses our minds that it’s possible. This post is a real-time exploration of a topic that is new to me, in this case, a “product development strategy” called scrum. I want to explore this new concept on its own merits. I also want to demonstrate the way my information-gathering process works. I’m a divergent thinker, so my mind races off in all directions, most of which may seem irrelevant or ridiculous to someone who is better informed. As I learn more, my focus starts to contract again, until finally I have a solid understanding of the subject. My learning curve is a very long, flat line, with a suddenly steep ramp way off at the end. Why would the average person, a person who does not develop software, care about a “product development strategy”? I have a suspicion that this thing called scrum echoes a seasonal work rhythm that would be a natural, practical fit for most people. I think it could be even more valuable for an individual working on personal projects than for a working team. In a nutshell, the way I understand scrum to work is that one person owns the project, and the team works together to break it down into a task list, called a “product backlog.” The list is broken down further into a “sprint backlog” – work that needs to be done in a sprint, usually two weeks but not more than a month. Each person chooses a task that suits his or her skills and interest. Everything must be completed by the end of the sprint time period. In software, this is when they “ship it.” Then it’s time for another sprint. Anything else that needs to get done, but realistically can’t/shouldn’t be started until after the current sprint, is added to the product backlog. The team meets for a 15-minute “scrum” every day to report progress. How would this work at home? Let’s say I’m trying to “get organized” and my house is cluttered and in need of a serious spring cleaning. I’ve got this passel o’ kids/roommates/pets who may or may not be on board. Where do I start? I can break down the areas of the house into two-week sections, and work only in that area until it’s done. If I can’t convince anyone else who lives with me to help out (or at least stop being afraid of the vacuum), at least I can ride herd on them and keep them from adding more clutter in that sprint’s focus area. Gradually, the clean and organized portion starts to spread, until finally the whole house is done. I can schedule a party on a specific day so I have a built-in deadline. Let’s say I’m trying to “get in shape” and I’m overweight and I have no idea what I’m doing. (Purely hypothetical, of course. I was born in a gymnasium with a free weight in each hand. Weren’t you?) I can set a small goal that I aim to reach in a two-week time period, and pause for analysis at the end of the sprint. If I didn’t meet my goal, I can crunch numbers and try to figure out what happened. #1: Figure out where the gain came from. #2: Stop gaining. #3: Get used to what maintenance feels like. #4: Lose some weight. #5: Adjust to how physical changes can trigger emotional changes. Two weeks is a short enough period to make course corrections, and also a long enough period to see a trend line start to emerge. If the trend line is not sloping even a tiny amount after two weeks, there is a flaw in the plan somewhere. Let’s say I’m a writer/artist/Maker and I’ve got a bunch of unfinished projects. I can plan a sprint and a hard deadline for each one. At the end of a sprint, I can look at my work basket or my table or my draft folder and get a better sense of how much I can realistically produce in a set time period. When I decided not to take on any further craft projects until I had finished everything I had currently planned, it took a solid ten years. In fact, I’m still working on the last one. (It wasn’t until I got to the tail end of all these crafty things that I started writing; the response to my writing has been far better than the response to any particular hat or scarf or children’s toy I ever made). This is my novice understanding of scrum. Next, I’ll read a couple of books and a bunch of articles on the topic. Either this will help me to understand something really cool and useful, which is great, or I’ll realize I had no idea what I was talking about, and I’ll revert to my own warped ideas and lose interest in the idea that originally caught my attention. That’s fine, too. It happens. I’m finding that the idea of establishing a production schedule longer than a week and shorter than a year is really attractive and helpful for me at this time. Maybe it can help other people, too. One of my resolutions for the year has been to change my relationship to books. I’ve been a compulsive reader since age 7, when it occurred to me that I could read twice as much if I read a different book with each eye. It took a few hours before I decided that was too hard for little kids, and that maybe I could give it another go when I grew up. Unfortunately, I seem to have continued believing I could eventually double my reading volume at some future point. There are unread books in almost every room of my house. There are also unread books, both print and audio, on my phone and my laptop. That’s not counting my podcast queue or all the articles I’ve bookmarked in various apps. After six months of focus, I think I’ve finally started to get a handle on how to manage this problem. The reason it’s a problem is that I feel frantic about trying to “catch up.” I’m ingesting as much media as I can fit into a day already. I have slightly less time than I did when I was single, which is a good thing, because hanging out with my husband is more fun than reading. (Anything less would have been a non-starter). I also have less time to read because I’m writing, which is another good thing. Sometimes I find myself working at bedtime, when I’ve already finished my quota for the day. Writing is more interesting than reading, but it doesn’t displace my desire to read other people’s stuff. I just want more hours in the day. I was supposed to finish reading all the library books in the house by the end of January, and then read through everything in the house that I hadn’t read yet. I have totally failed at this. The stack of books I meant to read “one day” is still taller than me. The problem is that I keep putting “must-read” books on hold. I’m making choices based on their desirability at the time, not my ability to sustainably make use of them. This is the precise reason I used to have a weight problem. I finally learned that I could only eat a set amount of food in a week, no matter how many cakes and pies and donuts and cookies caught my attention. It turns out that there is also a predetermined quantity I can read, and it’s only about 20% of the amount I add to my list. What I’ve realized is that there are going to be more fantastic options every year. My favorite authors will keep writing new material. I’ll keep discovering new writers that I like, and they will keep writing, too. There will still be everything on my To Be Read list, and it’ll grow exponentially. Meanwhile, there will still be hundreds of articles every day, dozens of blogs and podcasts, and just as many movies and “must watch” TV shows as there ever were. There will never be any “catching up.” There’s no reason to feel a sense of scarcity; on the contrary. Just like I have learned to trust that I can buy cookies any time I want, so I don’t have to eat every visible cookie in this moment, I can learn to trust that I will never run out of interesting things to read. I don’t need to keep my house full of hundreds of books, when I can and do buy them in 10 seconds using my fingerprint. The future is going to be much more about curating and blocking content than about finding it. I coined a phrase! The word ‘loremonger’ popped into my mind the other day. I was thinking about my tendency to do absurd amounts of research when I start something new. My house is still stuffed with books, even after a steady effort over the past three years to downsize, and I was pondering whether I use this as a form of procrastination. Then I realized that I generally act on new information. For instance, I had a bizarre whim, truly out of nowhere, to start running in the fall of 2010. I was terrible at it. Couldn’t run around the block on my first day and barely had the breath to cuss out my husband. My distance pace is 12-minute miles on a good day. Ah, but. Penguin that I was, I huffed and puffed my yardage, while continually studying running lore. I read websites and blogs and handbooks. By the time I ran my marathon, I felt intellectually prepared to do an ultra, and my friends were suggesting that I write my own running book. Without the support of all this research material, I doubt I would have kept going past my first week. I started learning to cook in a serious way long after I realized I had accumulated over a hundred cookbooks. I sat at the dining table and stared down my collection and realized that illiterate peasants over the millennia had attained better cooking skills than me by actually cooking. I was taught that my great-grandmother always said, “If you can read, you can do anything,” and I certainly had the materials. It wasn’t long before I could prepare a decent meal, and not much longer than that before I was cooking for groups of 12-20 on a weekly basis. I finally hit the point when I could look at a spread of ingredients and make something nice out of them without a recipe. At that point, I started feeling like I could pare down my cookbook collection. It took years of reading organizing and time-management and decluttering books before I understood that the name for people like me was “chronically disorganized,” and that I wasn’t anymore. Then I went through a productivity binge, until I started being productive and realizing that I was no longer encountering information I hadn’t already internalized. I also read stacks and piles of nutrition and fitness books before I reached the point where I am now, one of the tiny margin of people who routinely eats the recommended amount of micronutrients. Now I’m continuing to work on minimalism, since there’s still an imbalance between my vision of myself and my surroundings. About a year ago, I started studying languages again after a long hiatus, and now I’m in the “drinking from the firehose” stage of serious loremongering. Literacy is a powerful tool. An entire lifetime would not be long enough to read through a list of mere titles of all the books and articles in print. We have the Internet, the most impressive invention of all time, and it’s chock full of free material explaining everything from windsurfing to how to preserve a shrunken head. Any common problem can most likely be tackled with readily available information. The trick is to look it up and start processing it with an aim to using it for some interesting purpose. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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