happiness project monthly breakdown: friends/family/social networks (jan)

trains – 16 jan 2016

When I first started the monthly breakdown, Friends and Family was assigned to the month of January and Social Networks to February. After a year of Simplifying, I was able to combine the two into one month, January. As I’ve mentioned before, while there is a month assigned to a topic, I really spread each topic across the year, but do more of the “heavy lifting” and re-evaluating in the assigned month.

During the first year, I worked on organizing my address book. It really wasn’t in terrible shape, but I did have multiple entries for some people or didn’t have their email address or birthday, etc. Each month I organized two letters of the alphabet. I ordered custom birthday cards to send and started sending them. It isn’t much yet, but I’m trying to use the guide to remind myself to reach out more and more as I have more time.

Holy cow, “Social Networks”! I had gotten out of control in our homeschooling years. I was constantly creating new accounts, multiple accounts. What a mess. It took me a lot of hours to clean up that mess. First I had to try to list all the very many different online identities I had created – some related to Pine Lake, others to various parts of my kids’ music stuff, and still others just for kicks. Then think about all the accounts that I might have created using those names. Then figuring out passwords for each site. Finally I could work on deleting as many accounts as possible. Organizing and recording the accounts I chose to keep. Simply reining it all in, getting it down to something a bit more manageable. After months of work, I finally arrived at a steady state.

Since I tackled the big project of simplifying social networks, I was able then to combine the topic with Friends and Family. At the moment, this topic is in maintenance mode. I work on cleaning up my address book, sending out birthday cards, reaching out to friends, and organizing social networks a little bit each month. That might change in the future, but for now it’s good enough.