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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3501 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 17, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I threw out 75% of my wardrobe. The mental peace of finding the clothes I want at an arm's reach at a moments notice is worth whatever couple of hundreds I'll have to spend replacing a few shirts and pants.

It's not mental peace exactly, it's not having to think, saving bandwidth. I've been lately optimizing my life towards using as little bandwidth as I can, to save it for the important things.

What are your unconventional mental bandwidth saving hacks? (I understand minimalism isn't rocket science, but that's my most recent example)

Thirty second rule. If I notice it, and it’ll take less than 30 seconds to fix, it should be done immediately. Helps keep the general pressure of tidying at bay.

I have been absolutely terrible at following this lately. Not sure if that’s cause or effect of my stress levels.

A slightly less practical one but a good mindset to aspire to nonetheless is the "touch it once" principle.

I generally bundle this and the thirty second rule into just mentally taking the piss out of myself that "I'll do it later, there'll be a better time" is a stupid lazy lie when I'm standing right in front of a task that already has my attention.

Sounds like you independently discovered Mari Kondo minimalism. Read her book since she's a nut for throwing things away to increase mental bandwidth.

What are your unconventional mental bandwidth saving hacks?

This is more common than unconventional, since it's the GTD method, but be sure to transfer the noisiness of your brain into a coppermind. For every thought that you anticipate will touch your mind more than once: put tasks in a todo app, high-priority facts like face-name pairs in a flashcard app, notes and writings in a searchable reference app. (I'm use Todoist, Anki, and Obsidian atm.)

For those with anxiety, there's a fourth category I use called recurring worries. Thoughts like 'am I on the right path?' 'why am I wasting time on this?' 'what will people think about this?' etc. I put these in an evergreen note called 'The Worry Bucket' and allocate one hour on Sundays for them. This makes them easier to dismiss and focus for the rest of the week.

I am confused how throwing out 75% of clothes helped given that you now need to buy more to replace it.

I had far too many that I never wore. Now I have only the ones I wear. And these I can wash, iron and maintain well because there's like a dozen left.

Oh, then it makes sense! Situation where half of clothes is never used is silly and makes sense to give them away.

This is wild to me, I get a certain mental comfort from knowing that raggedy t shirt is still in my drawer in case tomorrow is the day I want to wear it again. I would like to throw out all my socks and buy only one style of perfectly matching socks so I don't have to match a sock again.

I would like to throw out all my socks and buy only one style of perfectly matching socks so I don't have to match a sock again.

For the longest time Amazon Canada would only sell packs of assorted socks, which was very annoying. Now they sell packs of Amazon Basics identical socks. The big downside is now I have exactly the same socks as some of my friends.

It varies by person. My wife loves the KonMari thing, I try it and just end up realizing how much I like all the things I own and get rid of very little.

My case is special, I haven't thrown out any clothes since High School (I'm 26 now). So it was a long time coming.

I’ve got you beat, boyo. I’m in my thirties and still wear t-shirts from when I was in middle school.

You didn't grow since middle school or wat

I’ve only grown a few inches since then, and most of that growth was in my limbs.

Same here, but not sure it's something to be loud about!

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