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Stephen Pickering

Category: 1 Minute Tips

  • The Essence of the Marie Kondo KonMarie Decluttering Philosopy

    “When you pick up an item, feel it and think, ‘Does this make my heart skip a beat?’” – KonMarie, [Youtube Video Link]

    “In the KonMari Method even the contents of a drawer that is hidden away should spark joy in you.” – [12:08 Mark in NHK Video]

    “It is very important to choose what you want to keep rather than what you want to throw away in tidying.”  – [10:36 mark in NHK Video]

    “The Goal of my tidying method is not just to reduce what’s in a room and remove clutter. My criterion is whether or not, you, as its occupant are comfortable being in that room.”
    – [2:42 minute mark in this Video Link]

    “Keep only things that bring joy,” she writes. The rest should be thanked and then discarded. – The Japan Times

    “Anything doesn’t make you feel happy, get rid of.”  – Marie Kondo, [Youtube Link]

    “If you’re not sure, ask yourself if it’s suitable for you. Does it create the image you have of yourself? No? Look back over the memories you shared with it and say, ‘Thank you.’ You’ll end up with only the items you really like.” – Marie Kondo, [Youtube Link]

    “It’s paradoxical, but I believe that precisely because we hang on to such materials, we fail to put what we learn into practice.” – pg. 101 “The Life-Changing magic of tidying up”

    It may seem rather drastic, but I’m convinced that letting go, at least once, of anything that doesn’t bring you joy is the ultimate way to experience what it’s like to surround yourself only with things that do bring you joy.
    “It might come in handy.” Believe me, it never will. You can always manage without it.
    – pg. 21, “Spark Joy”

  • The Key That Makes the KonMarie Method Work Better than Others

    The Indians addressed life as a ‘thou.’ I mean trees, stones, and everything else. You can address anything as a “thou,” and you can feel the change in your psychology as you do it. – Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth, Ep. 3, The First Story Tellers, 25m 32s

    Holding an old pair of Eddie Bauer Khakis, asking not just my conscious mind, but also my “feeling body,” whether they “spark joy,” I suddenly realized that this method allows you to take the time, that it puts you in another state of mind. I walked into my closet, just now, on about “Day 3” of  my “KonMarieing” adventure, and that’s the exact thought that popped into my head along with a very calm, opening of the heart feeling:

    “It allows you to take your time. It puts you in another state of mind.”

    I think this is the key why this method works whereas many others don’t.

    We’re so used to rushing in every area of our lives: making appointments, phone calls, paying bills, getting this or that done by the end of the week or month. It puts a stress on the subconscious, on the soul.

    And you would think that a project like “decluttering” would also demand such a sense of rushing and stress. And when I first started, I found myself almost spontaneously trying to rush, thinking,  “Oh I’ve got to get this row of clothes done in the next hour!”

    But here’s the special key: Hoarding is a psychological problem, not a time one.

    So the part of her program where you actually hold each and every item allows you to slow down and bring calmness into the picture. It becomes a ritual. Your spirit is invited to the party. A transformation of consciousness occurs. This is the essence of a ritual. And a ritual like this, one that’s sincere and from the heart, allows the hoarder to break the psychological bond. And that’s freedom.

    You can feel it.

    Although not large, the space I live in is graced only with those things that speak to my heart. My life-style brings me joy.    – KonMarie, “The life-changing magic of tidying up,” pg. 31

  • How to Delete All Songs from iPhone Quickly

    “Connect your iPhone to iTunes, go to the Music tab and uncheck Sync Music and press Apply to resync.” – from “Randers4 on the Apple Support Forums. (This worked for me and took only a couple minutes, even with 2000 songs, to complete).

    Man, iTunes is just crazy, and drives me crazy.  But anyway, the reason I needed to do this: My old iPhone 4 was filled up to where I couldn’t update anything, and in this age of Spotify, I’m not listening to any of the music on my phone’s library. Now my photos and videos are taking up as much space, but my trust in iPhoto is just as weak, so I’m afraid to delete all photos at once, because I’m just sure there’ll be some in there that I have only one copy of. Ugh!

    At first when I googled it said to “Uncheck” the unwanted songs and then Re-Sync. But you have to do that one by one! I’m not going to sit there and uncheck 2000 songs! Well actually I started to, and then realized the insanity and futility. Then something weird happened. I Googled some more to see if there was a way to Uncheck all the songs at once. One guy said to, within iTunes, click Edit>Select All, as if that was a way to mass uncheck all the songs. But that didn’t work. It scared me because, after I did that, and again started “re-unchecking” songs, the songs would disappear as I unchecked them. I thought, “OMG, am I deleting them from my computer or phone or both!?!?!?!?!”
    Turns out, luckily, I wasn’t. For whatever reason the “Unchecked” songs, as I unchecked them were being moved to the bottom of the page, automatically. Phew! But still crazy. Now, I just went back and clicked Edit>Select All, clicked around the left side of the iTunes window, to the left of the check boxes, and the display seems returned to normal, with the Unchecked and Checked songs together in their normal order.

    OK, so finally I found the simple answer on how to delete all my songs at once. It’s the 8th response down, from “Randers4” on this page in the Apple Support Forums: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3593697?start=0&tstart=0

    He simply states: “Connect your iPhone to iTunes, go to the Music tab and uncheck Sync Music and press Apply to resync.”

    Boom! And that was it. Did the trick. They were all deleted in seconds, and I freed up space to do my iOS update as well as app updates.

    Now, as to how to go in there and selectively add back songs, perhaps things I can’t get on Spotify, or for when I’m out of connectivity range, I don’t know what the best practice is. I saw somewhere that using Playlists was the best way, you add the things you want on the phone to a certain playlist, and when you connect your phone there’s an option to only Sync certain “selected” playlists.

    But I’m not worried about that now. I just wanted to free up space so that I could update. And I really appreciate Randers4 plain English, one sentence response. Why can’t Apple explain things so that a human being can understand? I mean, do you know if you go into “Help” within iTunes that there is utterly no topic on deleting songs from your phone? The craziness stupefies me.

  • Some Blogging Advice: Continually Update Your Old Posts

    I haven’t given any ‘blogging’ advice in a long time. And whom and I to give it?

    But I have noticed one little thing that can help get your posts a little edge. Maybe it’s this increasingly ‘real-time’ World, or maybe they’ve always done it, but Google is so much constantly crawling, that when your content changes, even on an older post, the Google ‘bot’ almost immediately notices and comes running to check it out. So in this ‘timely’ World, it could get you a spot on the top or at least on the front page of results, for your particular topic. In other words, one gets the since that ‘timeliness’ is increasingly an ingredient in the secret ‘sauce’ of Page Rank.

    Also I’ve noticed another benefit: It sort of gives you a sense of continuum and wholeness to your ideas if you’re keeping them alive in this way. In other words, if you add to them when some new material arises, simultaneously your subsconscious goes to work, ‘effortlessly’ bringing you some new creativity and synthesizing your main ideas, perhaps by doing it’s own ‘crawling’ in the otherwise overlooked areas of your mind.

  • Advice for Aspiring Writers

    I came across this today via Twitter, and I thought it was so good, that I needed to keep it on my blog, so that I would always have a copy.

    Here’s the advice:

    First — keep reading. Writers are readers. Writers are also people who can’t not write.

    Second, follow Heinlein’s rules for getting published:

    1. Write it.
    2. Finish it.
    3. Send it out.
    4. Keep sending it out until someone sends you a check.

    There are variations on that, but that’s basically what works.

    Ciao,
    Annie

    It’s from novelist Anne McCaffery who died today at 85. I wasn’t aware of here, but when I read the blog post about her death and it noted this piece of advice, it made such an impression on me that I posted it on all my Social networks, but also felt the need to keep it on my blog.

    You’re blog on you’re own domain, I think is important, because things like Twitter, Facebook, are great for “Real-Time” but they are ephemeral, and you tend to forget what you posted after a few days, much less can you find things that you need.

    One of the things that resonates with me on her list is “Finish it.” I’ve noticed that with songs: Even if you don’t necessarily like your lyrics, it’s always so much better to finish the song, rather than leave it lingering, waiting for the “perfect” lyrics to “someday” come. Someday never will come, but if you finish the song as best you can, then it takes on a life of it’s own and has the opportunity to get better.

    “Done is Better than Perfect.” is a sign that they have around Facebook’s Headquarters. Very à propos.

  • How to Link Text in HTML

    OK, I know this is dumb. But mainly this post is for me. When I write things down, and especially in a public facing place like a blog, it helps me remember. Which goes to one of my tenants:

    A blog can simply be a repository of things you want to remember, and if that thing isn’t something private, it might possibly be also helpful to someone else.

    It’s kind of like that teaching is really a way for the teacher to remind themselves, or ditto for writers, although writers often have the extra benefit of learning while they write. One of the best arguments for writing is that (for folks who are “readers and writers” as opposed to “Talkers and Listeners”) writing is the best educational instrument there is. Writing is the best, most efficient way to learn.

    Anyway on to the subject.

    How to Link Text in HTML

    You simply wrap your text with the “a” tag in this code:

    <a href=”insert your link here“>this would be your text</a>

    Simple as that, but today I had to “hot” link some text, and I wrote href=”” and forgot the “a” tag. Had to “Google” the code for the billionth time. Sick of that. Felt like I needed to remember simple code that I use all the time without having to Google it all the time. So you see linking is essentially an “a” tag with that little “href=” bit added in there also you must make sure your link is in quotation marks.

    So here’s for helping me learn writing and blog. Maybe one day I can learn the code to make this blog look prettier and sparkle!

    Have any questions? Who knows, if I can figure out your problem, maybe I’ll learn something.