My modest change, something I’ve been trying to be consistent in doing every day, is that every time I notice something has gotten too big for me to keep a hold on, for better or for worse, I ditch all of it. Well, I keep the things that are presently in my mind. For instance, a folder full of email. I don’t get much email, I max out at about 20 per day, but I like to just leave it wallowing in my inbox. So what I’ll do is filter out every email from someone on my contact list, go through them quick, shooting off replies, and then just dump the rest. Delete them like they didn’t exist. It’d be nice if gmail had a “bounce” button, so people would know that I never read their email, but whatever.

Perhaps not the most elegant way of dealing with overload, but it helps me relieve stress. I was reading 6 different books, 1 for school, 1 for a book club I’m in and 4 for personal pleasure. Yesterday I said “this is too many books” and I picked my favorite, one that I was reading for personal pleasure, alerted the book club that I wouldn’t be doing a review this month, bookmarked the spark notes for my AP lit book, and now I’m down to one great novel that I can devote more time to completing by, oh, mid february, and still get that one important thing finished.