How collecting and making lists made this year of isolation a bit easier
By: Akhila K.
Tags: Digital, Productivity, Collecting, Online, Lists

I love personality tests, though I find myself never quite fitting into the boxes they’ve created. Yet, each one I take seems to reveal something useful about myself. StrengthsFinder, for instance, tells me one of my top themes is “Input.” It tells me:

“You file away lots of ideas and facts, sensing that one day this information will prove to be useful. Whether it ever actually does become useful makes no difference to you … Your fascination with knowledge has probably been part of you even before you formed the words to ask your first question.”

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a collector and a list-maker. As I was digging through old files and folders, I stumbled upon a list I’d made when I was twelve. I wish I had a picture of it to show you now— but it included gems like “do homework,” “write about my day in journal,” and “eat lunch.” I’ve also been a collector: when I was younger, I collected stamps, coins, and even rocks.

This year, the world blew up: the coronavirus, an economic recession, the virus of racial injustice and growing threats to our democracy all intertwined into one twisted monster.

I was lucky to escape largely unscathed, my privilege shielding me from the worst. Perhaps the opposite, in some ways — as the pandemic created more opportunities to connect across borders virtually, my work has also blossomed and amplified. Virtual panels, conferences, day after day of zoom meetings. More opportunities to write and publish, more projects, more funding. But all of this work now lives online.

Yet, I have not escaped fully from the pandemic’s effects: I still felt the pains of isolation for all these months.

This year, I’ve felt myself transformed, more than ever, into a digital creature. Who am I, without my laptop, my smartphone, my apps, my online profiles? Who am I, but a body made of data? The boundaries between the so-called “real” world and the “digital” world are increasingly blurred.

In some ways, I slowly began to lose my grip on my human body, even as I strove to anchor myself in physicality. Cooking required me to refer back to the Internet for the recipes I found, being someone who needs to follow each step in turn. My workouts, too, depended on technology: Spotify playlists to run to, YouTube workouts to follow along to once gyms closed down. Even meditation required an app: Headspace, where a voice would guide me through ten minutes of attempting to bring my attention back to my breath, my body. Yes, I was a living, breathing being. But spending so much time indoors, online, and without seeing anyone other than my partner saw me feeling more and more disembodied as winter approached.

Going offline has not been an easy option. The work seems to amplify by the day, and is dependent on me remaining connected. Spending time disconnected meant that I would fall behind on work, be unable to balance the demands on my time. Yet, strangely enough, reverting to my habits of choice — reading, absorbing, learning, collecting, and listing — has given me some measure of comfort as I’ve dealt with slowly becoming part-cyborg.

My collecting is now not just physical, but digital. I tend to have dozens of tabs open as I’m researching for projects, papers, and articles. When I close my browser, I’m loathe to let go of those, knowing they might come in handy later— so downloading Chrome extension OneTab has allowed me to save, collect and organize those tabs into lists: “Work.” “Writing.” “Research.” “Recipes.” Now, I can finally peacefully close my Chrome browser at the end of the day and declutter my digital space, for a moment at least.

I’ve also fallen deeper in love with the Pocket app. With the amount of media I find myself consuming, I can file an interesting article away for later, and tag them by project or category to make them easy to find when I’m ready. The process of categorizing and saving these articles itself is soothing, in some ways.

I’ve also spent time uploading and organizing my photos in my external hard drive into folders by month and year. These methods of organizing information are wholly for myself —my photos or pocket articles aren’t something that I’ll share with others, like my Goodreads or Yelp reviews. This activity is not for public consumption, but purely a therapeutic exercise: how can I organize this material in ways that will be meaningful for future-me?

That, in itself, makes these tasks more akin to Marie Kondo’s suggestions for home organization: “everything has its home.” Similarly, everything in my digital orbit should have a clear home. Articles to read should belong somewhere. Photos should be clearly labeled and easy to find. Each project has an appropriate folder on my Google Drive.

One of my to-do list structures

Then come the lists. The first category is to-do lists. I’ve used Asana for my work-related tasks. On top of that, I’ve created both online and offline grids to manage my to-dos, separated by the category (“Home.” “Work.” “Projects.” “Other.”) and by urgency. What needs to get done today? What can wait until later in the week? Sitting down in the morning to write these out helps me understand my priorities for the day, and forces me to be a bit realistic about what I can feasible do in a day — and there’s nothing more satisfying than crossing off an item when it’s done. But the digitized version of this list in Google Docs makes sense too: it’s easier to keep an ongoing list, quicker to delete and add.

As someone with many identities and many hats, I’m sometimes a creative writer, sometimes a researcher, sometimes a policy advocate. That means I need to have places to park all my ideas, especially for my writing. I rely on one very lengthy, very rambling Google doc: it’s my go-to place to capture any random new idea I have for a blog post, for a newsletter, or for a personal essay or article. I’ve got a similar spreadsheet to document my progress. Where have I pitched this year? How many rejections have I racked up? What are places I’d like to target? It’s important to have a running document to celebrate my successes, learnings and accomplishments too.

I’ll close out the year with one final list: reviewing my 2020 goals and creating a fresh set of goals for the next year. I’m rarely someone that’s motivated by goal setting; I tend to go with the flow, and follow opportunities where they arise. To be honest, I often fail to check my annual goals until it’s the end of the year. But it’s a nice way to look back on what I hoped to accomplish — and what I actually have. It’s also a good reminder that even when life doesn’t work the way you’ve planned, you can still have a year of immense growth, of change, of learning.

These tools are just that — tools — and they are in no way silver bullets for information consumption. At some point, it all gets to be too much. I’ll need to find ways to disconnect and unplug, to ground myself in the physical space once again. But as far as our new ways of working and connecting digitally are here to stay — and I believe they are — these are ways I find comfort in organizing and decluttering my digital and mental space. And I hope you, too, have found some small pleasures like this to keep you going during a very hard year.