racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

The last year has come and gone, and if you’re still in that holiday mood, I can sympathize with you. I hardly got any rest during the holidays because of all the traveling to and fro, and the events/parties here and there. It’s the second week of January and I feel like I still have a hangover. And I didn’t even drink that much!

I think a good waker-upper would be a good spring cleaning—and for those of us whose work (and personal lives) revolves around the computer and getting online, that means starting fresh. Here are some things I’ll be doing to clean up that pile of mess on my desk, so to speak.

1. Restart the computer. I’m a sucker for hibernate and sleep whether for laptops or desktops. Both my PowerBook and Windows laptops have been up since late November (only sleeping or hibernating in between use), and my ongoing work is still cluttered across the machines’ respective screens. I wonder which is more productive—not having to reopen each and every document you need to work on every power cycle, or having too much stuff open it becomes information overload.
2. Clean up my email inbox. Gmail says I have 19,000 unread items on my inbox. Of course many of these are spam mail I just ignored over the course of two years since I got a Gmail account (too lazy to hit the “Report Spam” button!). I could probably just leave them in Inbox view and keep using my “For Reply” and “To Do” labels for those messages for urgent action. After all, that’s what Gmail’s threaded interface and almost-unlimited capacity are supposed to be about, right? On the other hand, it might be more sensible to send these all to Archive so I won’t have to feel overwhelmed everytime I look at a very full inbox view.
3. Work on those draft blog entries. My blog drafts area consists of unfinished blog posts, duplicate entries (WordPress saves renamed drafts as new entries altogether) and posts I finished but had second thoughts about publishing (due to various reasons). These are most likely to be outdated a few weeks or even days after being saved to drafts, so it’s time to purge the draft folder and start fresh.
4. Backup important files and delete unnecessary ones. It’s time to save those digital photos and iTunes libraries onto CD or some online-backup facility. You never know when things can screw up and you end up with a dead hard drive—arguably, the data is more valuable than the hardware itself. As for deleting unnecessary ones, files and documents tend to build up in the course of time, and these can fill up your hard drive pretty quickly. I usually fall victim to my own disorganized-ness, which usually leads to shortages in space and even virtual memory.
5. Run maintenance software on my computers. I recommend doing a virus-scan and spyware-scan, and all those other performance-enhancing clean-ups like clearing of caches, defragmenting (if that’s still applicable) and the like. I recommend Mac Janitor for OS X, which lets you manually start maintenance tasks that your Mac is supposed to do daily, weekly, and monthly.
6. Actually go clean up that pile of mess on my desk. Being online most of the time doesn’t mean my physical surroundings don’t affect my productivity. I have a ton of books, tools, wires and gadgetry on my desk that I can probably do without. The still-to-be-used stuff should go to the drawers (which need cleaning up themselves). And those for disposal go straight to the trash or recycling bin.

Of course, this mostly applies to me, and I’d appreciate a little help if you have something to pitch in.

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