What makes my life

I carry my laptop with me wherever I go. Not when I go shoppping but a lot. But I have one problem with it and with all computers I have ever used in the past. I try a lot of software and I like doing that but it slows down my PC so much that it is getting irritating. I keep reinstalling it. Recently I tested Mojopac. What you do is add a harddisk / usb drive or any other external storage device to your PC and install Mojopac to it. Then start the program and it shows you a clear and crisp XP install.

You now have two computers running.

1. Your host PC
2. Your Mojopac PC.

Anything you install on your Mojopac PC will stay on your Mojopac installation and not on your host PC. It works very good. This gives me the opportunity to test software on my own PC and when I like it I will go on to the host PC. This will prevent it (or at least slow down the process of) getting slower and slower over the months.

Another thing is that if you do not own a laptop or you have a desktop at home and a desktop at the office you could carry your home environment with you. Just start your mojopac installation at home and use it from your external drive. Whenever you put this external drive into your computer at work you get the same setting you have at home. Even your personal e-mail, skype, ebay auctions etc… etc…

Now it is time for you employers to get scared because you can switch between the Mojopac and host PC with a click of the button. Any signal of the Mojopac PC (aside from a small systemtray item) will be silenced making it possible to switch between hobby and work with a flick of the switch.

And when you are a computer samaritan maintaining your family and friends’ computers all the time you could install a set of assisting programs, plug into the computer of the perosn you are trying to help and start using your settings to help them and not their, most of the time, Mickey Mouse settings.

You could also for that purpose use U3.

At zen habits I read a nice post by a guest editor Ian Newby-Clark an associate professor of psychology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada who studies habit change. It is about how to change your habits. As I said earlier in another post decluttering is like chaning your habits and therefor one of the most difficult things to do. Read the whole  article to see what you should do. The top 3 things you should to change your habits are:…

1. Work on One Habit at a Time.

2. Create a Plan and Write it Down.
3. Refine Your Plan.

Decluttering is not that difficult. It’s like changing your habits not more not less. One simple tip that can be done on a day to day basis is this.

Commit yourself to doing this. As soon as one new piece of info or junk arrives in you in stream at least work away two older items befor starting with this one. Chances come and go but leaving chances stacked up on a day to day basis is not a good way of dealing with your chances.

If you have read my previous article on decluttering for beginnners you must know this will not be an easy task. Another tip on how to change your behaviour in order to help declutter and make more structure for yourself.

3. Claim some time to do this task

A lot of the time people think that doing something new can be done during your other tasks. But that is not true. Because if it could be done during your other tasks wouldn’n you have done it already? So claim you hour a day by putting it on your calendar and telling everyone around you that you are claiming this time to achieve your goal. This might be one of the biggest steps to take to acknowledge that decluttering and structuring takes time. Be confident you will get your precious minutes back, with intrest.

More to read on this issue.

A tip if you’d also like some of those short checklists to help achieve more:

• Less Stress: Declutter Your Desk: simple article 30 seconds read and a no-brainer.
  
• Detach yourself from stuff: 1 min read on why your attachment does not help you to achieve your goals.
• Professional purgers’ organizing tip: 3 mi read on how to delete stuff from your life in general.

You can read a lot about decluttering and structuring yourlife. All those people used to working in a clean environment are perfect in describing it is so easy and it is just a simple trick. In real life I feel like a kid in a candy store when reading about decluttering and structuring your life. I’d like to but I feel I can not and I keep failing. Where to start and what to do when I fail? I felt like helping myself and those wishing they would be better on structuring and decluttering by writing some articles on what to do. This wil not be a top 10 tricks or a quick how to hack your way through life. I tend to focus on real behavioral change without any academic claims.

1. Its a habit change not a trick.

When you like to live a more structured life with time for yourself realize that you are about to change your habits. This is not done overnight and it will not feel as help in te beginning. It’s like quitting to smoke which I did so I must know how this works. Whenever you stop you feel a sense of euforia. Great, I have stopped smoking (or started decluttering). Then after a few hours you feel the urge to smoke. It gets stronger and stronger and finally you grab a sigarette and smoke it. This works the same with decluttering. You started to declutter great. You picked up a big brown bag and dropped everything in this bag just to get rid of it. Then new stuff keeps coming in. You keep working to put everything in the right place but eventually you cannot keep up. You feel like you have failed and both when you stop smoking as wel as when you start to declutter you give up on your effort feeling a failure. This is all because what you are trying to change is your behaviour. This is one of the most difficult things to change. You are acustomed to your behaviour as are others. They act to you in a way with their expectations of your reactions taken in acount. They will not help you. It’s is your wish not their command. Be prepared to work on your behaviour.

2. Quit quittin’

This is the easiest part which is just as much the most difficult part. When you have set your hopes on a goal accept your own failure and start over again and again. The same when you quit smoking. If you have failed yourself and taken a cigarette smoke it, enjoy it and then try to quit for a longer period of time. Over time this period wil be hours, days, weeks and all of a sudden you haven’n smoked in a year. Same with decluttering. When everything is a mess again. Pick out the old big brown bag again and start cleaning. Only then you can help yourself. Start over and over again. The time between the times you have to start over again keeps getting longer and longer until you feel you never have to pick that bag again. But don’t fear it, someday you will need it again.