After a fairly simple and super rewarding January challenge, I rolled into February 1 cocky, and trusting I’d find equal if not greater satisfaction in the challenge I was about to tackle. That held true for this month’s workout challenge, but the mind challenge — in this case a decluttering exercise — was far from satisfying or fun.
On February 1 I set out to clean up my iPhone photo library. I had 23,627 photos on my phone (eyes pop and you close your laptop unable to face any more of this disaster). A couple thousand were taken in the hands of my toddler, a couple more were screenshots of recipes, airline tickets and even a weather forecast or two…but the majority can only be described as sets of photographs, 100 versions of the near-exact same thing.
Every day I spent 15 minutes on my phone deleting old photos (Well, almost every day. I missed two days and made them up with 30 minute sessions the following days). Here were my initial observations:
- The photos and videos of my then two year-old having a temper tantrum are hilarious. I assure you they weren’t at the time.
- Beautiful family and friends are notably missing from photos beginning in March 2020. I cannot wait to hug them again.
- I apparently have a serious fear of the delete button. This is something that needs to be worked on.
This repeated for 28 days. At 15 minutes each session, that’s 7 hours of photo clean up. I deleted more than 6,000 photos and only made it to fall 2017. :face-palm:.
The thought of revisiting this daily undertaking for yet another month is unbearable at the moment. That said, there remains another 17,000 or so photos on my phone. They are sitting there, holding memories of the past and not being looked at, at all, and they need to be cleaned up. Of that I am now sure of, a solid lesson learned from this monthly challenge.
Encouraging Better Habits
One of the objectives of Kelly Attempts is to encourage better habits, and sometimes that means getting away from bad ones. To be clear, I’m not giving up what I don’t want to (i.e. wine, and cheese, and bread…), and I’m certainly not suggesting you do it. These challenges and monthly “attempts” are all about adding things to life, not taking away. But for me, I want to clean up my virtual clutter.
This is going to take time. After jump starting the process the last 28 days, here are three tangible (and reasonable) things I can do to support this goal:
- Set a 15 minute recurring weekly “meeting” for myself to go through my old photos
- On the last day of the month, redline pictures from the last four weeks to help avoid a future repeat of the current situation
- Bonus action: print my favorite photos. As it turns out, there are literally thousands to choose from.
About Kelly Attempts
Every month, I’m tackling two new challenges, one for the mind, and one for the body. The possibilities are endless.
Two months in, I’ve successfully completed four challenges — which I’m feeling pretty great about. As it turns out flossing is awesome, daily exercise was always really hard and still is, and cleaning up your virtual clutter is an annoying task with the promise of great reward.