I am starting to move towards owning less stuff. I have started to put together a plan on how to do this, and there are things that I have to buy to make it happen correctly, yeah I know that sounds oxymoronic.
One of the moves that I have made recently is that I am not buying any books. I am using the library. Of course there are always going to be reference books that I am going to need to buy for work, but for the last few years I have been buying books, reading them once and putting them on a shelf where they sit till I put them in a box, move them to a new apartment and unpack them. This is tiring, and takes up a lot of valuable space in my home.
The other move is working on going paperless. I get all of my bank statements online, I pay all my bills online and I do the majority of my work online. That said I don’t enjoy reading on the computer, so I still print off large reports that I am proof reading to read and mark up on. The other thing I print off are large format drawings for review, this again I find hard to work with on the computer. Most of the problem is the ease of marking and eye strain.
I think that I have found a solution for both the eye strain and the marking. It is the iRexTechnologies Digital Reader. This reader is approximately the size of a letter sheet and has a Wacom pen-tablet built it. It is the first e-ink device that I think is large enough for me to review reports full size. With it I will be able to review reports, mark up and then send back to be modified. I will also be able to use this device to take meeting notes and make design notes, both things that I currently do on paper and then scan into the project file.
With this tool I believe that I can go completely paperless in my day-to-day life, there will always be print shops when required. That means that I can also dispose of my printers, which I have 3. One ink jet, one laser and one “large” format 11×17 max. These take up a lot of space that I hope to clear out.
What Stays, What Goes
The next step is to look at what comes into the house and give it a 1-10 rating on importance. For example, magazines I am going to give most of them a 2, maybe some of my industry specific magazines I will give a higher ranking but for the most part every magazine that comes into my home is read once and then put in a pile. The advantage that I believe that magazines have is not in the actual information that they convey, but in the filtering of the noise out there. This is the same reason I still read technical books. I can find the information free in other places but there is much more work involved to parse through all of the crap.
Getting Rid of it
Some of this is the magazines that I mentioned before, the printers, but it is also books and “stuff” that I don’t need any more, well they can go now. Some of this I think there is still some monetary value in and I can probably sell online with ebay or Kijiji. I will use the money generated by these sales to off set any costs that are associated in the new tools (or Toys) that I am going to use, including the Digital Reader. I will have more on my strategy, and talk about the volumes of stuff I have purged in the future.
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