A challenge for you, and me: cut down on input, raise our level of output.
You know how there’s too much television to watch? Too many books to read? Too many video games to play? Let’s let ourselves off the hook.
I’m deleting movies on my hard drive that I “meant to watch”. It reminds me of the old Netflix physical queue days… I always had a Tyvek envelope on my DVD player of a movie I felt it would be good for me to watch. I kept assigning really dull movies to my future self because I figured he would have his life together enough to watch something insightful and civilized instead of putting on Ronin for the eighth time.
Now that same pressure exists but in a folder on an external hard drive. Along with a bunch of books on my Kindle, and an infinite number of television shows on a near-infinite number of streaming services.
But we aren’t here just to consume things other people create. At least I’m not. (And you might not be either.)
So I’m chucking some of the ballast and putting my eye towards output.
Ship it. Early and often. Start projects, complete them, send them.
(There’s a separate psychological challenge to this for me that maybe I’ll discuss later, or with a therapist. It revolves around… do I need someone to “hear” what I’m saying for it to have value? To date the answer has been “yes” and I think a more productive life awaits me if I flip that to “no”.)
If you want to take this challenge for me… let go of five things you aren’t going to read, watch, or listen to that are sitting in your library in whatever form. You can always reacquire them if it becomes urgent that you consume them.
I’m letting go of:
The British TV show Hunderby. It never clicked with me although I admired it very much. I watched one or two episodes and meant to finish it. I’m okay not doing that.
A library by Berlitz on learning Spanish. I’ve tried for years to acquire a second language and to be honest at this point I’d much rather know Mandarin.
A digital course on Creative Lighting for Studio Photography. I don’t do studio photography. I thought I might. I don’t. I don’t plan to. So I don’t need to learn this.
A collection of Cook’s Illustrated magazines. Most of this stuff I can Google if I really need it, and there are probably more recent and up-to-date versions of these recipes.
The Terence Malick film Knight of Cups. I’ve started this several times. It’s beautiful but I fall asleep. I don’t need to watch it.
And now as we come out of this pandemic: we focus on output.
Have a wonderful day.