About six months ago, I read an article by Wesley Fryer and made a note to myself to write a blog post about my reactions and how it applies to my life. The fact that the note sat in my “drafts” folder on this blog for six months tells you something about how much I really took it to heart.
As I’m wrapping up the school year over the next week, I’m already beginning to plan for the summer and for next year. Yes, I’m kind of sick that way. In any case, one of the things I know I need to do is streamline and simplify, particularly my digital life. Here’s an example: I currently have 141 feeds in my blog reader, with 897 unread articles. Every one of those feeds is one that I added because it was something worthwhile and that I wanted to read regularly. I’ll never be able to keep up, though, and unfortunately some of them will have to go.
Just as I plan to schedule serious time evaluating and purging my feed reader, I have many other things I plan to examine carefully and decide which things to keep and which to reluctantly drop.
Part of my digital discipline will also involve balancing consuming and creating. I learn and grow more when I’m contributing to the conversation than when I’m just absorbing. Unfortunately, I have allowed the contribution side of things to dry up—my last blog post before yesterday was almost two months ago. Part will also involve being selective about where I contribute, focusing on the best. As a result, I plan to move all of my education-related posts from this blog to Quisitivity.org to make that one a little broader and more regular.
It’s going to mean some hard decisions. There are things that I enjoy and are very worthwhile that I’ll have to give up simply because they take time away from things that are more important and more worthy of my investment of time. But I think the discipline will make me a better husband and father, and also a better teacher.
