Last Updated on April 20, 2020

It is Friday night as I’m writing this now, and what you see in the picture is my Yahoo Mail inbox. The owner of this mailbox lives a very simple, beautiful and well organized life. If there was a contest, I would have been the “no-matter-what-stuff” pile-building champion. Those messages waiting to be read are only one example of what I’m capable of.

Based on an inborn “talent”, and further trained to build up and ignore the clutter, I go through life with an eternal Duchenne smile on my face. Maybe the real challenge is not to sort out your clutter, but to learn to live with it and feel like in a zen house. It is true that I clean as I go, and I never procrastinate. Intention is always followed by action. Subjective Reality embraces Objective Reality, shaping thoughts, feelings and emotions in a way that doesn’t depend of details and doesn’t rely on logic or prejudice. Life is fun in Subjective Reality. Only watch this video of Professor Randy Pausch from Carnegie-Mellon University and come back here with a fresh perspective.

Are you back? How’s life now? Did the sparkle in the professor’s eyes convince you that Subjective Reality is the key to a fulfilled life? Do you still want to know what to do when your inbox can be cleaned only with a grenade? There are two possibilities: use it just like it is or leave it behind and get a new one. The same applies to all piles in your life:

How Fast Can You Find Your Things?

The advantage of being a pile-builder is that you always know where things are in the pile, before even starting to look for them. Piles can be great time-savers if you only know how to build them.

If you are the minimalist kind, trying to find a hidden place for every thing, how many things and places do you think you can remember at one given moment? Seth Godin says three. If you try harder, probably seven.

Each time you need an item, your mind works, your neurons connect to each other, bringing in front of your mind the association between that item and its stable place in the house. After you use it, other neurons will connect again, in their collective attempt to put the item back in its place.

Every time I need something, I just see it. Maybe not always from the very first moment, but the effort to move a little bit those piles and to reveal it is much smaller than the one of reminding the place of all those things a human can accumulate in 30 years of life.

After I use the items, I always put them in their place. Not in the old place, where I’ve taken them from, but in a new one: usually, this is somewhere in a range of a few inches around me. The new place is filed and labeled by my neurons, making it possible to find the item next time I need it.

Pile-building and blogging

Pile-builders have the advantage of being used to put all sort of things together. Their head is a pile of ideas. If they only had the time to put them on paper! (How shall I say this better: to put them on the keyboard, or to put them on the screen?)

What do you want to write about today? For me it’s enough to take a look through my inbox: 3-4 pages of messages, and I know what I want to write about.

Then I take a quick look at Google Hot Trends, to see what my readers would like to read today. After that, I’m spending some time on AdWords, trying to figure out which of the hot topics are also the most competitive. I want to secure some passive income from blogging, after all, at least for a few nights sleep, if not sell my blog like I just found out from the Content Blog that NorthxEast is doing.

Then I usually try to craft cash-creating climactic copy (it rather looks like a diction exercise, than a headline, but it was written by a great copywriter). This is the reason why my inbox cannot be cleaned from the keyboard anymore 😉

The outcome? This evening I started writing with the intention of telling you some jokes with Bula (Bula is a popular character in Romanian jokes, who enlightened our childhood). What came out, you saw for yourself, if you managed to read this far.

I’ll let Bula for tomorrow, so if you want to read those jokes, make sure you subscribe to my feed.

One more thing: can I ask you, please, for a tiny two-in-one favor? Would it be so hard for you to:

1. Add AllTipsAndTricks to your Technorati Favorites, and
2. join my MyBlogLog community,

so we can celebrate together my glorious entrance in Top 100 Technorati and in the 6 My Blog Log Hot Communities?

Come on, it has to be something in this 400 posts pile for each of you. Just leave Zen behind and dig through those piled categories. Do you know how to cook cheese cauliflower, for instance?
To sum up, if content is king, then comment is the queen, so please leave your comments after the beep: … beep! …