#100Days, Day 30 and No Weekly Accountability For June 14th

Quick announcement: I'm dropping the weekly accountability as a regular feature. Mostly because I'm not moving forward with my goals at an agressive pace. So, each week, even though I'm doing things I enjoy and even don't enjoy for the sake of work, I just see goals every week that don't move forward. I thought that by writing down my goals, I'd be compelled to rush toward them because they're out in the open. Turns out, that's not really how I operate.
So, experiment tried and failed. On to the rest of today's post.

I have to admit, this week has really flown by. It's been the perfect combination of busy yet not stressful. I truly hope more weeks can be like this one. While not necessarily the flying by part, as that makes life seem really short, but the balance I've been able to enjoy.

Perhaps striving for even more simplification is also helping. I'm not completely done consolidating my emails just yet, but over half are consolidated into my new email service. What I've found is that I need to teach myself new habits when giving out my email address.

Not necessarily to other people, as my new address works just fine, but more for kiosks and automated services. I tend to want to give out a less secure email address that will automatically forward to my new email address. This way, if someone gets my email address through a nefarious means, and somehow break into that email box, they'll pretty much have an empty decoy.

But then that defeats the purpose of having a singular email box with which to manage and organize emails. I also have to remind myself that my new email box is private and secured. And, with the best technologies available, and a company that is committed to ensuring that remains the case.

The service I use also donates a portion of their proceeds to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and to other online privacy causes. That's not a make or break, but it does tell me they're very serious about individual privacy and security.

So, sometimes I have to just let go of the handlebars and let the vehicle keep moving forward without me getting in the way of it. Which means that less complexity for email means less things to keep up with overall.

Kind of a digital minimalism if you will.

I'm also consolidating other services I use. From streaming TV to cloud storage to virtual assistants. For some reason I tend to have more than one of everything. Perhaps that's my military background kicking in where for any mission you always have a Plan B.

There's a case to be made for redundancy in things. Like production networks, mission critical systems, paid technology services so the customer never experiences an outage.

But not everything I use is mission critical. There can be outages in my world, and it's not the end of my world. Granted, could be inconvenient and have some true repercussions, maybe even financial. But at what cost for a "maybe"?

Sure, I might have used that redundancy once in a year, or once in every five years. But how much did I pay for that redundancy that didn't get used vs. how much I saved during that one time I needed it? I bet the former would be more expensive than the latter.

Plus, it frees up my mind from having to keep track of so many things. Again, like minimalism for material things, I'm also going for minimalism in all the things. Especially services.

If I can't find the reliability and stability I need from any one service that does that thing, then I need to find a new service that does. Period. Instead, I've been doing all the work determining which service is good at what, then having to decide every time which service I should use for this or that one thing.

Not a good use of my time at all. It's like having to decide what to wear every day. Minimalists, myself included, pare down their wardrobes to be a few things that get worn regularly, and things like t-shorts are all bought in the same color. This reduces "decision fatigue" and allows the person to spend more time on things that matter instea of what to wear.

As long as it's clean and in good repair, no one really notices what I wear anyway. So, I freed up a bunch of space in my closet, and time in my day by wearing pretty much the same things every week to work, and the same things every weekend for hanging out.

Not it's time to do the same with the multitude of services I use. Only ONE cloud storage. Only one streaming TV (goodbye DirecTV now), only one virtual assisting service.

What this all really boils down to is that I need to give up control and leave things for other people to solve. That's why I pay them, isn't it? I mean, if I have to solve for using more of one of the same service because I have an issue that isn't solved by one, but is solved by another, I need to do one of two things:

1. Find a service that already solved it for me

OR

1. Find a service that's wanting to solve it for me, and let them do it

I wrote a blog post a while back about the value I see in outsourcing. I prefer to pay someone else to do the things I don't want to do. And in most cases, they do it better than I ever could, because that's what they do.

But in looking at what I've just written today, I've been selling myself short when it comes to outsourcing things. I've been trying to solve all the problems of the services' shortcomings, instead of doing one of the two things above.

Essentially, I've been working for free, and companies that don't fulfill my true needs are getting paid anyway. Wow, am I stupid!

Now that I've written this out, my next steps make even more sense than just when I was sharing what I'm doing in the broad strokes. Now that I've drilled down deeper, I found a path to free up both time and money.

Bingo!