Infomaniac

post Infomagical makeover

It’s month 2 of my yearlong experiment of month-long focus areas rather than a New Year’s resolution. In January, I consumed all things finance and had a major focus on savings to recover from the holiday spending spree. It worked and I am back on steady footing with my accounts. My fellow educators will understand, we get paid on the last working day of the month (Mid-December), and not again until the end of January. Each year I forget about it until those last weeks of January when I’m eating Kraft Mac & Cheese. 

For February I will be focused on organization. I had other plans, but then my boyfriend proposed, decided to move in all his stuff, and now there’s a wedding to plan! Hurrah! So I have got to get some systems in place so I don't go completely mad.
 
There’s a saying “When the student is ready the teacher will appear”. No clue who to credit that to but it fits right now because as I was seeking podcasts and blogs I ran across Note to Self, and  just this week they are doing a challenge called Infomagical! And it is magical. Each day there is a new interactive that allows you to clear some of the chaos from your brain by controlling technology and information consumption. Yesterday the challenge taught us how to apply the KonMari method to the phone screen. A little activity that makes a world of difference. I also turned off notifications, sounds, and badges. Today, I’ve diagnosed myself with the plight of the 21st century: infomania.

The term infomania is used to describe a sometimes debilitating feeling of "information overload", caused by the combination of a backlog of information to process (usually in e-mail), and continuous interruptions from technologies like phones, instant messaging, and e-mail. 

According to the podcast, this is the curse of curious people! There is so much information in a constant waterfall, like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory begging us to try everything, to click and click and click. So I am thankful to have a tool to begin organizing my brain. As for organizing stuff, I was an early adopter of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and spent days vertical folding and deciding whether or not things brought me joy. Some systems I set up were great, some a total flop. I am also influenced by The Minimalists, who, like Marie Kondo know that less is more. This month I will work on getting rid of the things I don’t need.

In February, I’ll be working on the organization of my things, my time, my projects, and my thoughts in order to have more space in my brain for the things that do bring me joy. 

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