https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/12/need-to-declutter-dont-bother-oliver-burkeman

Letting go of the craving for tidiness applies to physical possessions too.’ Illustration: Thomas Pullin for the Guardian

It’s a mysterious truth of the digital era that we can build self-driving cars and astronauts can tweet from space – yet there’s still no half-decent, non-maddening system for organising the photos you take on your smartphone. Actually, it’s not that mysterious: there are simply too many photos. Back in pre-digital days, when nobody owned more than a few thousand snaps, arranging them in albums made sense. Then came software that tried to replicate albums, which worked for a bit. But now that it’s normal to return from a day trip with 100 snaps, a threshold’s been breached.

Naturally, the same goes for emails, electronic documents, bookmarked websites and so on: we’re each expected to manage a volume of data that once might have kept a whole government department fully occupied. “I spent days experimenting with neurotic tagging systems, tedious backup processes and album management,” Brian Chen wrote in the New York Timesrecently, before concluding that the only way to manage your photos is to give up. Upload them, blurry mistakes and all, to the least bad service, Google Photos. Then rely on its search function to find what you need when you need it.

For those of us with neat-freak tendencies, it’s a harsh truth we have to keep relearning: treating your digital “possessions” like your physical ones is a loser’s game. You could spend a lifetime trying to keep them tidy. But as Chen notes, you’d be making a bad “search/sort tradeoff”: it would take so long, and search technology is now so good, that you’d be wasting countless hours. That’s also why you should abandon your complex hierarchy of email folders and use a single archive instead, and chuck every document into an “everything bucket” app, such as Evernote. Accept the mess – which, if you like keeping things orderly, won’t feel good at first. I speak as someone who regularly deletes emails from my spam and trash folders, not because I need the space but because it offends me to think they’re still there.

Want an antidote to chaos in the world? Maybe Barack Obama has the answer

 Read more

Letting go of the craving for tidiness isn’t only useful in a digital context, though: it applies to physical possessions, too.

Only one more week to Christmas!

Two more weeks to the year’s end!

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So very soon a New Year, namely 2019, is going to begin.

I still have a lot of memories how last year ended.

https://auntyuta.com/2017/12/07/utas-december-diary-2017/

The above post from December 2017 brings back memories what our place looked like one year ago. I find it is interesting to compare last year’s pictures with this year’s December pictures! 

https://auntyuta.com/2018/01/21/what-we- did-on-the-day- of- the epiphanie

On Saturday, the 23rd of December 2017, we went with son Martin to Berry for morning coffee, then to Kiama for an early fish and chips lunch, and later to Shellharbour for ice-cream. After we have had our delicious ice-cream, Martin drove us to the Beach Farm with is now a beautiful public area  close by the sea.

Our Christmas Season started with Sunday, the 24th of December, when the family gathered at our place for our customary Christmas Eve celebrations. Matthew and Caroline had arranged that Yittah, Matthew’s mum could join us for Christmas Eve and stay overnight at our place. This was really great, that Yittah could join us!

https://auntyuta.com/2018/01/11/what-i-wrote-on-the-day-of-the-epiphany/

I think the link to the above post leads to some pictures that I published about Christmas in 2017. But now I do not want to forget to publish already a few pictures that I took over the last weekend! Here they are. No sorry, it did not work.

Apparently I did not pay attention and the photos went right to the top. They are of some pictures that Caroline and Matthew attached to the wall for us yesterday, on the 3rd of  Advent Sunday. Some pictures are in new frames! We are very happy with the work they did for us. They spent many hours of work doing all this. The four pictures in the vestibule  are all Berlin pictures. So we call this wall our ‘Berlin Wall’ now.

The other picture in the living-room looks great in this new frame. 

https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/898/

It is this pictures by Sir Edward John Poynter: “The visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon”

I think I leave the publishing of more pictures to another day. The settings are different from what they used to be. This is why I have difficulty finding my way around with inserting pictures and some other problems with changes that I have to get used to first.