Optimizing Life

Lately I’ve been feeling pretty annoyed at some of the things going on in my life, so trying to make some improvements, looking at what I dislike about my lifestyle currently.

• Credit Cards – A necessarily evil – I do a lot of travel and they are vital for that – but at the same time, terrible habit of putting all my purchases onto them and not really realizing how much is being spent until I get the bill… Moving to using EFTPOS more to better track regular spending.
• Services I don’t need – this is an easy one to get into, been looking at what I pay for – maybe I don’t need 5 SIP trunks and/or 20 domains – it’s easy to say that something is only $15 a month or so and doesn’t really matter,  but over a year it adds up….
• Paper Mail – physical bills and letters are extremely annoying, working to move everyone who sends me paper materials to electronic forms and culling as many mailing lists as possible.
• Email – I get way too much email and the fact is, about 50% of it I don’t care about… I’m being pretty brutal lately and unsubscribing from lots of different lists and groups.
• Computers – As part of my goal of reducing the complexity of my computers, by the end of the month, I will have decommissioned one of my two collocation servers and my flat server infrastructure is down to a single tower and router/switch, as well as having completed a number of VM reductions and improvements.
• Stuff – Been going pretty well at my goal of reducing the amount of stuff I have, down to a final few servers to sell off, and a few boxes of bits to sort through/out.
• Car – Having recently obtained my full license and not needing one much for work now, tempted to consider selling off my car – after all it’s expensive to run and TBH, I prefer to walk to most places. Thinking something I might visit later this year, at least at my current flat parking isn’t that expensive.
• I fucking hate TVs – We have a 32″ TV in the lounge – whilst it’s not connected to public broadcasting, it’s far too easy to just blob infront of it and waste time away watching stuff. I’d much rather sell the TV to discourage myself from wasting so much time and instead spend it on the computer doing more geeky things. And I have more than enough LCDs to watch things on anyway. :-)
• Business – There’s a number of things I do that cost a lot, make little money and add to stressful life – which makes little sense, so I’m culling some things and focusing on those I enjoy and which do help me in my savings goals.
• Games – I need to play a few more games, do more fun hacking, in general, taking some de-stressing time away from computers, but in a way that’s more interactive than just passive entertainment.
• Open Source – There’s a lot of content I’m working on, I need to force myself to make the time to get it out into the public.

So a number of areas to work on improving – want to obtain a better life style, stop wasting so much money and generally feel like I’m doing something a bit more productive with my life.

I think part of it is that very scared of falling into a “work, come home, watch stuff, sleep, repeat” habit and starting to feel like it’s more of a possibility.

I want to feel motivated, complete geeky projects and do amazing things – one of the most depressive things I’ve seen has been people I know who do nothing but watch TV all evening after work, never doing anything exciting, challanging or geeky.

(of course, each to their own, but to me, there’s nothing worse than that life style, I need more challenge, to make something valuable and worthwhile).

Hopefully by posting this, I’ll have a rough list of aims that you can all accuse me of failing if I start to stray to motivate me further. ;-)