This whole thing with Twitter started me down a path with my Twitter archive that has spawned an entire new direction of personal tasks that all tie in with Marie Kondo’s philosophy of reducing clutter and determining what “sparks joy” in your life. I finally figured out a way to automate the creation of posts on this site for every historical @kingsbury tweet that was missing and have set up yearly pages you can access here.
Since Twitter would downsize any attached photos, I’ve been going through those pages to look for pictures that have better originals, then looking through my iCloud library to see if I can locate and update to the best versions. This lead to the discovery that my iCloud photo library was missing a number of months, so I started looking through all of my old hard drives to see what I could find. After moving jobs and upgrading personal laptops over the years, this was a prime candidate for reducing clutter and better organization.
I’ve long battled with music and photo files, but this is my first stab in a long time of trying to get everything at least in one spot for a review of what to keep and what to delete. Just trying to eliminate duplicate folders is a huge step in the right direction. Now that iCloud file storage is (mostly) solid and we have fiber to the new house, I’m consolidating everything in the cloud now. This generally works great with my many devices that can access it, but I do still have concerns about how iCloud manages local disk space (and how I can have local and secondary cloud backups of this data).
This digital clean-up lead to a quick audit of my 1Password vault where I store all of my passwords. I moved all of the old, unused accounts to archive and started to look at the Watchtower feature that goes through the vault and makes recommendations about 2FA, reused and weak passwords and companies that have been involved in breaches. Next up: make sure I have the current recovery key for 1Password in our fire safe (with instructions) and the creation of a new spreadsheet with all of our account information.
Gathering account information lead us to contact our financial planner and finally start the process of consolidating all retirement accounts in one location. That’s another remnant of changing jobs over the years, as I’ve generally tended to just leave 401K money in the original spot each time. Now I’m scheduled to get all of the necessary forms together early next month and move everything under one roof. Also made sure all of these accounts are set to paperless electronic delivery in the interim.
As I worked on these tasks, I looked up at the wooden bill holder and the plastic document holder that I’ve been using to collect paper concert tickets, stamps, gift cards and birthday and anniversary cards. Both were total disasters (and likely haven’t been organized in at least two moves). Spent time with the shredder and a recycling bag to get them both tidy and organized. My old wine jug penny jar that sat next to my desk for years broke outside the stadium years ago and I’d replaced it with a junky paper holder that was overflowing loose coins on the floor. Replaced that with a nice glass container that I moved to my nightstand this weekend.
My home office now just needs a few more things physically cleaned up: the old cables and boxes still sitting on the floor from the move, the CDs, books and DVDs I got from the TPT giveaway, clean out the black file cabinet and get my old X Games skate decks mounted somewhere upstairs. In other parts of the house, I’d like to go through the storage closet upstairs (and put the holiday stuff away), organize the garage (maybe add shelves?) and find a better way to organize my shoes. With kid one moving out soon and kid two shuffling through, it will be nice to clean up some of the random boxes and furniture items that have accumulated since we moved here last year.
Back in the digital realm, I’m trying to clean up and streamline all of our video and news subscriptions via AppleTV, bookmarks and RSS feeds. I recently discovered that I get access to Apple News+ through my AppleOne subscription, which will end up saving me money and give me access to additional paywalled stories at no extra charge. The iCloud organization project will likely take me far into 2023 to complete, but I already feel better about where things sit (plus I was just able to enable Advanced Data Protection today too after getting all of our devices upgraded to the latest software versions). Just hoping they expand the 2TB maximum before I hit that benchmark…
