I love it when I see people doing things differently. Any things.
Especially when doing things differently means less stress, less admin and just overall less time doing the things you don’t want to do.
And using that time you would have been doing nonsense to do exactly what you want instead.
I will say it over and over until my last breath: You truly do not need half (or even a quarter) of what you think you need (all the things that “everyone” is using) to be a valid business.
If you do (or even if you don’t) fall prey to the hype, It is a challenge to keep things simple. The focus can be limiting scope creep with clients and sometimes we forget about technological debt and tools. Something may seem like a good idea or you go to try it out. Soon it is 2 years later and you are monitoring a system or using a product you never even wanted in the first place.
To tie back from my last post, what do you really want to be doing?
Whatever isn’t that, don’t do it. Whatever takes you away from it, try not to engage.
Especially, if it seems like the “latest and greatest” thing and what you need to have to be “official.”
I will only consider something if it automates a task (correctly and with minimal time to set up) to save more time in the long run. Interestingly enough, usually the time and money that is needed to set up and keep the systems running may not be worth it. Sometimes it is but usually it is not.
I just did a thorough review of all my business log-in/technology things. Note: it is just me, doing my work, updating my spreadsheets, trying to stay off the internet. Yet I had collected an extra 30-50 logins that I didn’t even realize I had. Maybe I used it once, never used it or used it and then promptly forgot about it. Some of it, I didn’t even know why I had it and could never figure it out.
Some were easy to let go of. It was the ones that I didn’t understand that were the hardest to delete. I wanted to know why I had signed up for it? What was I trying to accomplish? Maybe I let it slide and I shouldn’t have forgotten? Is this something I should be looking into again?
Inevitably, they would be deleted as I thought of all of the time that I spent signing up, trying to use whatever it was and then forgetting about it.
Some would say “leave them” and “Who cares?”
For me, it is about knowing where I am energetically. If I don’t use it, I should close it, cancel it, or unsubscribe. There are places where I don’t want to be physically. I think of it the same way for technology. I don’t want to be there anymore.
I re-apply the question: Do I want to be using this in 1-5 years?
Sometimes (looking at you all social media) there is no other solution. Other technologies can be a slow drop – stop using one feature and do it elsewhere (or drop it all together). And keep chipping away at it until you can get rid of it completely.
Just like our physical clutter, the technological clutter accumulates. It’s probably easier to acquire while creating a business as we are pushed and prodded to “stay up to date” and be on to top of “the next big thing.”
(Oh and all this AI nonsense! So now it takes me more time to read my email and pdfs because I have to wait for the AI summary to load so I can turn it off and go back to what I was reading in the first place. Turning to AI for help and as a coach/counselor – oh God, please no. I do not want to support a company who uses AI in that way. Which means I’m out of luck for most basic things in life right now.)
It’s not surprising we see that we have hundreds if not thousands of logins that we can’t remember we had.
And now it’s another task to think about – paying attention to our technological footprint. For many it may not matter. (Isn’t all our information public now anyway if we want to acknowledge that fact or not?)
Still, I think it is important to be aware where you have your information and what information is out there. We move through life chapters leaving people, places and things behind. I think that should be the case with our online presence too. Sometimes it is time to shut it down, close the account and sign out.
You might just be surprised how much clarity and ease a little bit of that clean up one brings (while also protecting you.)
Once I did this for my business, I looked at my personal login’s – *sigh* – that’s the next project.
