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Purging your “idea” clutter – all of those cool ideas you’ve seen or heard about on the internet that you’ve saved here and there and everywhere!
Items Mentioned
Music Teacher’s National Association (MTNA)
Amy’s Digital Organization Retreat
Support the podcast on Patreon
Episode 068 – The Great Purge (Pt 1): Games and Resources
Episode 069 – The Great Purge (Pt 2): Sheet Music
Episode 071 – The Great Purge (Pt 3): College Notebooks and Professional Magazines
Episode 105 – Evernote v. Notion
Transcript
Are you a member of the Music Teacher’s National Association, also known as MTNA? If so, I invite you to attend this month’s webinar on Friday, May 24, 2024, at 12:00 p.m. Eastern.
I and two other colleagues—Michelle Sisler from Keys to Imagination and Annie Jeng from the University of North Carolina Greensboro—are presenting a webinar called “Practical Insights for Balancing Fun, Organization, and Wellness in Summer and Beyond.”
Preparing for this webinar along with my digital organization retreat, which is only a month away, has me thinking about one of my favorite pastimes: clearing out and purging things.
Last spring, I did a 3-part series here on this podcast called The Great Purge. Over episodes 68, 69, and 71, we purged physical games and resources, sheet music, college notebooks, and professional magazines.
Today, it’s time to purge your digital life. While there are a lot of angles we could take with this – many of which I cover at the digital organization retreat – today, I want you to focus specifically on purging the “idea clutter.”
I’m Amy Chaplin, and you’re listening to episode 121 of The Piano Pantry Podcast. Before we get to it, I want to thank members of my Patreon community for their support – including Janelle B – an Indiana friend and colleague. You’re the best, If you enjoy this podcast and would like to show your thanks like Janelle, visit PianoPantry.com/patreon to join today.
So, what is “idea clutter?” Idea clutter is all of those cool ideas you’ve seen or heard about on the internet that you’ve saved here and there and everywhere. You know what I’m talking about!
It’s all over the place. You have photos of cool ideas from other teachers’ studio spaces and screenshots of things that stopped you in your scroll. You have hundreds of saved Facebook posts from 15 different teacher group threads with things you think you need to remember, notes in your favorite note-taking app, random emails to yourself, bookmark links, links saved to your device’s home screen, and more. It’s everywhere.
I’m telling you, friends, it’s time to let go. Believe me, I have seen and heard about a lot of your idea clutter, and I can say pretty confidently that you rarely, if ever, go back and look at 95% of them. Am I right?
Please consider if it’s really doing you any good. I would suffice to say that all it’s doing is adding to your sense of overwhelm – especially the way it’s scattered all over the place. When we add a lot of random clutter to our lives I often wonder if it’s not adding value but instead taking away more than we realize by pulling us into lots of “shoulds” and “what-ifs” – many of which we don’t have time for anyway.
I mean, what are we holding onto? We can only try so many new things and implement so many new ideas at a time, so why are you holding onto more than you can even remotely come close to getting around to using?
Instead, it’s time to start rethinking how to effectively take in content and new ideas and filter what we allow ourselves to same and hold onto. It’s one thing to scroll through social media or read cool ideas from creators in our email but it’s another to download every freebie and save every fun idea in case we ever decide to try it.
When I first started using Evernote years ago, one of the reasons I loved it was that it finally made it feasible to save information in a variety of formats all in one location, whether it was an image, a link, a screenshot, a PDF document, or whatever. Besides that, everything was easy to retrieve thanks to strong search functions.
Here’s the thing, though: I can’t tell you how many things I conveniently saved over the last umpteen years, thinking I could easily go back and search out those favorite ideas. Guess how many times I ever went back to most of those saves? Almost never.
Before I knew it, my Evernote account had swollen to almost 4,000 notes. I wish I had some way of knowing how many of those 4,000 notes were truly valuable things like notes for students, highlights from books I was reading, or whatever—and how many were just quick grabs off the internet, like a great idea for group classes or a great article on running a small business.
In the past couple of year’s it’s finally hit me how ridiculous it was to save so much.
This was “idea overwhelm,” and it was unnecessary.
As I’ve been moving all of my life and work organization out of Evernote and into Notion, I’ve slowly started to clean out my Evernote and have since eliminated half the notes I had in Evernote. I just started deleting. Oh my goodness, there were so many free downloadable PDF guides on things like the top 10 tools I use to run my business, how to get your first 1,000 Facebook followers, improvisation tips and activities for beginners, or how to maximize engagement in a Facebook group, and on and on and on.
Just last night, I sorted through 75 notes I had tagged as “teaching aid projects”—that is, fun activities to print off or remember to do during lessons. 75, friends! Some had been in there for more than 5 years and had never been utilized. It’s just too much.
While I’ve since cut my notes in Evernote from 4,000 to just under 2,000, I’m not sure it’s even practical for me to take the time to try and sort through what’s left. I’m not sure I will ever get through all of them, but there was definitely a huge amount of mental release on my part when I finally let go of all of the “ideas” I had banked away for years.
As you sort through your idea clutter, my best piece of advice is this: Don’t let it be a thing – don’t let the decision on whether to keep or delete an idea last more than a few seconds. In a split second ask yourself – is this really something I can see myself wanting to implement in my studio or life in the next 12 months, and if the answer isn’t a definite yes, then just delete it. There will always be more ideas. Let me say that again. There will always be more ideas.
There are sooo many good ideas out there and interesting things but we simply can’t know about, care about, or remember them all.
If you see something that’s interesting or fun, take it in for the moment that it piques your interest and then let it go. We have to start filtering what makes it into our lives more, or there will never be an end to the continuous cycle of saving more ideas than we can ever put into practice.
In the future, when you do go to save ideas, try to minimize the locations where you allow yourself to save them. It very hard to relegate ideas to one location – although tools like Evernote and Notion do make it a lot easier – but it’s not perfect. Creating a bookmark folder in your internet browser is one place to just let yourself dump ideas fairly easily. Try to avoid emailing them to yourself or creating new notes in your note app for every idea. Maybe you do the bookmarks folder, create a single photo album in your photo stream for random ideas, and then designate one note in your note app for random ideas as well.
Just do your best to keep those random notes as confined as possible but remember – they need to be really worth the save and something you want to use in the very near future.
Let’s turn up our filters, friends!
If you’re curious to hear more about my journey out of Evernote and into Notion, listen to episode 105 on Evernote vs. Notion.
Find the link to that along with anything else mentioned today in the show notes at PianoPantry.com/podcast/episode121.
Speaking of Notion, my friend Joy Morin and I put on a wonderful workshop this past March on how to Organize Your Life in Notion. It was such a success that we are looking at offering another in September 2024 so keep an eye out!
Don’t forget about this Friday’s webinar for those that are members of Music Teachers National Association. I’ll look forward to seeing some of you there!
