Out of sight, out of mind
I’ve been struggling with a high mental load for the last months.. in several areas, my work, my personal life, my creative space and my escapism..
I don’t know if it’s due passing of the year but I felt inspired to do some spring cleaning.. I started with my Steam library which holds over 200 games, a bunch which I might never get around to playing or impulse buys that I regretted weeks after the refund policy expired. I went through it again, removed everything from my Steam Deck I wouldn’t play in the next months and switched my view from a backlog/todo list to a list of possible worlds to jump into. Since I only have my Deck and a mac, I chose to try and play a few games for 5 mins to see controls, if it clicks etc. any game that wouldn’t run or doesn’t have decent controller support (golden oldies) will be hidden from my library, out of sight out of mind was the idea.
And it worked beautifully, I still have a very large list of games, but any game that sparked buyers regret or simply no fun any more in this day and age I dropped from my brain, and I feel more excited whenever I get stuck or tired of one that I’m playing to see what else I have lined up.
Aside from this, I have another issue, completionist syndrome of some sort.. I like to finish a game, and if I love it, finish it with 100% achievements to be able to just uninstall, hide it and give me closure and dopamine hits at the same time. Well guess what, some turned out to become frustrations, a job. So I’m trying hard to let it be too. Still finishing if it brings me pleasure, otherwise hide and delete. And sometimes I even take drastic measures with the ones I’m super sure I’ll never touch to just remove them from my account. Out of sight, out of mind really worked here for me.
I went to Lightroom, as a hobby photographer I accumulated thousands of RAW footage over the years, and most of the time I sit down to post edit I get overwhelmed with the options. I don’t want to cull, I want my creative juices to flow. But at the same time my perfectionism gets in the way again. What if it doesn’t come out the way I’m hoping? So I came up with a rule and went through year by year in phases. Look at the shot. Does it move my heart in 3 seconds or less? Keep, otherwise export to JPG and put in my photo library for just memory shots. Otherwise drop. This process gave me really satisfying clean up process and I was left with a library much easier to handle. But the worst one was the GoPro footage I collected over the years, that takes so much time to go through. I’m just splitting clips to interesting bits and pieces, leaving a bit of extra before and after for decent transitions.. but it’s tedious.
I took the same approach with snippets I wrote the past years, some I’ll edit a bit and post soon. Others can just be gone. Out of sight, out of mind. For me, it gives me really space to breathe again.