#hack your stuff

First, some questions

About five years ago, I walked around my office asking coworkers a simple question – “Why do you work?” I got a lot of surprised looks. They were working sixteen-hour days, not seeing their kids grow up. They took pride in not using up all their vacation days. What kind of a question was that to ask? “Tell me why you work,” I would prod.

Their answers fell into a few broad categories: saving for kids education, trying to pay off the mortgage, having enough for retirement. I would then offer them another scenario: What if you could take the equity in your home and buy a property outright in another part of the country? What if that part of the country has in-state tuition that’s so low that you don’t need to worry about saving for college? Two major reasons for working just went away. Would you still work?

Today I ask, “What will you do when you retire?” When they tell me, I respond, “Why don’t you just do that now?” Most people’s fantasies of retirement are tied into what they will do once they have accumulated a certain amount of money. If your future is tied into money and having certain amounts of it, then yes, you have to wait. In the new world where time is currency, focusing on money is a sure way to live an unfulfilled life.

Turning money on its head

20th century thinking held that you had to own things in order to be successful. You had to have a better car, a better house, more money, a better job. Success was measured in terms of things. In order to have more things, you had to have more money. In the 21st century, technology and connectedness have made it possible to have experiences without the burden of owning something. The transformation that has occurred is that experiences are more readily available for a fraction of the cost. It turns out that’s what we wanted all along. Why own a designer dress when you can rent the runway?

Here’s what it costs to own a car in America in 2015:

Does this still make sense in a world where you can call up a ride via an app on your phone and be driven anywhere you want? Will it make sense in a world of autonomous vehicles?

Technology enables experiences

There’s a factoid I keep hearing at social gatherings and repeated ad nauseam in watercooler conversations that goes like this:

Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

What is interesting is that this has become a mainstream topic of conversation. The quote comes from a piece by Tom Goodwin. Later in the same article, he captures the essence of what’s at play:

The Internet is the most powerful mechanism we can imagine to match perfectly individuals that need something, and people with something to offer. 

The ability to share experiences drives down the total cost of ownership of the things we own. Suddenly, money is not as important as it once was. You can have a richer life with less money than you thought you needed.

Hacking your stuff is a conscious decision you make to live a more fulfilling life in this new world of experiences that’s driven by technology. The less stuff you own, the more time you have to spend on what’s important.

More reading

Our Year of Living Airbnb

Living home-free requires the right temperament. If I’m anything to go by, it’s a combination of wanderlust and an urge to diversify the risk of, say, being stuck next to a construction site.

Could Self-Driving Cars Spell the End of Ownership?

The utilization rate of automobiles in the U.S. is about 5%. For the remaining 95% of the time (23 hours), our cars just sit there, a slow, awful cash burn, like condos at the beach.

Uber Would Like to Buy Your Robotics Department

If you’re ready for a year-end purge to make space for more time to think and to do what’s important, start by using the KonMari method to organize your life. This past week, I procrastinated on the clothing step but got cracking with the books and over 100 books have been dispatched to new homes! While working through the KonMari process, I was struck by how conceptually similar it is to GTD and how both lead to that ‘Aah’ sense of relief when you start practicing them.

Collect

At the beginning, both methods ask you to collect everything. GTD includes a mind sweep that focuses on getting everything out of your head. KonMari asks you to dump everything on the floor. Both methods recognize that you can start organizing only once you have full inventory of all your stuff. There’s perhaps an implicit shock value that acts as a call to action once you realize just how much stuff exists – whether it’s clothes in your closet, books on your bookshelves, thoughts in your head, or to-do lists on slips of paper.

Ask

Once you’ve collected everything, there’s a key question you must ask yourself. With GTD, “Is it actionable?” Answering this question determines whether something you’ve collected needs to be done or not. It also helps you decide how you will organize it and actually get it done. The critical question with KonMari is, “Does it spark joy?” Things that don’t spark joy detract from your enjoyment of life and are to be discarded.

Organize

After you’ve answered the critical question, both methods offer counterintuitive ways of looking at your stuff. With GTD, action choice is determined by context, not priority. As I mentioned in an earlier post, success with GTD hinges on your acceptance of organization by context. Contexts help you evaluate what gets done, when it gets done and where it gets done. When following Konmari, you tidy by category, not location. So rather than moving from room to room, you decide what you’re going to organize and then do it all at once. So all your clothes get organized at once, then your books and so on. So by switching your mindset so that you’re focusing on contexts or categories, you find that you’re hacking your stuff in a more effective manner.

Take a look at the picture below. It looks perfectly innocuous and in fact is a very attractive version of a living room bookshelf. Look closely at the shelves, and you’ll notice the random arrangements of books, CD’s, photo albums and DVD’s. Maybe even cassette tapes?

So what’s wrong with this picture?

What’s wrong with this picture is that it represents what living rooms used to look like. In the 20th century.

Digital services like Kindle, Pandora, Netflix and Instagram have replaced the need to have physical ‘stuff’ lying around the house. What’s great about this is that we can cut down on the amount of stuff we have. Take a look around your house or apartment and decide how many of your possessions you can lose by replacing them with their virtual counterparts. This will let you clear out physical and psychic space that you’ve devoted to the care and feeding of your possessions, leaving you free to think. In future posts, I’ll explore what you can do with all that thinking space you just freed up!

Are you one of those people who prefers books to a Kindle because you like the feel of the paper and the rustle of the page? I used to be that way too. Curious about how I broke that attachment or want to know more about being digital? Ask me anything!

Here’s another more modern living room. What’s wrong with this picture?

Growing up, I heard this story that reinforced the idea that the more things you owned, the more things you would need to support the things you already had.