After several years of minimalism, I wanted to try The Mins Game. I am suspicious that it would not be the right technique for me, but who knows? I also really wanted to find out if this is a good game to build momentum and decluttering muscles.
With this goal in mind, I set off to find a friend to challenge. We didn’t end up putting any consequences to the game but we both find decluttering generally calming so it didn’t seem necessary. This first month of the game, for both of us, started October 1st. We chose the classic Day 1 = 1 item, not the backward version.
Planning for The Mins Game:
I can’t help myself, but I plan these types of things. I picked an area that has been holding clutter that I just couldn’t get myself to finish. It’s half project and half clutter and I just don’t know what to do with it. So my goal for October was to eliminate my excess of electronic clutter.
I had isolated most of this ages ago. Many burnt CDs with files from backups of old computers and dead hard drives and computers or phones. I also collected my music CD collection from my parent’s house so that I could have 490-something items for all 31 days. Most of the files I’d already copied to my hard drive but wanted to confirm my system works before I threw out the copies.
For the music CDs, I purchased an external CD drive to rip the music again. It was pretty cheap on Amazon.
Day 1-11 of The Mins Game:
Very early on I knew I would be traveling for two weeks in the month, so I spent days 1 through 11 trying to declutter for days 1-26. After much self-debate, I decided to rip every CD in both WAV and MP3 formats onto my smaller hard drive.
The first few days I just donated the CDs because I couldn’t have recalled the artist if I’d tried. The song was hokey as well. After that, I started pretty blindly ripping all CDs. I only made it to day 23 before I needed to leave on my trip. I counted the CD case and the CD separately as they had been stored separately for over a decade if not two.
Even as I approached things for day 20 and with all the forward momentum, I started to recognize this feeling of wasting my time. I was glued to the computer because ripping CDs is both slow and fast with lots of waiting for the program to pull the CD image and often failing in the end. It was increasingly stressful to complete during the day.
I had done this same thing with bank statements a few years before. I couldn’t make myself just pitch them, yet I have not referenced these scans except a year or two back. So I had to reference my statements to discover I hadn’t finished paying my property taxes over a year ago. That was rough and I was thankful that I was able to confirm, but I didn’t need 10-plus years of statements.
Do I need any copies of these music CDs? Very little of the music is what I still listen to. It was a huge part of my teen years as escapism and rage at the world, but I’m just not that person anymore. There are some artists that I can’t get for free on Amazon Music but…not many.
My challenge partner at this point wasn’t counting or sending me picks but as her energy was good she was almost rage purging. Not looking so good for following the actual rules of this game at this point.
Day 24-27 of The Mins Game:
I returned home on Day 24. My stay away was extended by one day to welcome my first niece! When I came back, I was already a day behind. On the next day, I ripped one and a half days’ worth of CDs!
On day 27…I got 3/4 of the way through the second stack and the hard drive failed! In the middle of ripping a CD! The computer knew what was plugged in but the data could not be accessed.
So…I’m very frustrated at this point. There was so much time invested and stress involved with ripping these CDs. Additionally, I’ve now lost data that was recovered from a previously crashed hard drive. The original music files were corrupted which is what sent me ripping all these CDs all over again. A ton of what was on the drive was unreadable….it wasn’t full when I started and I’d just moved a ton of recent files off of it to make room for this project.
The questions:
- Do I put $600 into trying to recover an already recovered data drive in hopes that several years of lost photos are in there?
- Is it even worth ripping any of this music?
The upside:
Thankfully, the second hard drive contains most of my documents and photos that I’d been pulling off of CDs and old computers and such. This drive is nearly as old so it shows that it’s time to get this one mirrored!
Moving forward:
This has me very frustrated and even angry at this particular brand of hard drive that I used to widely endorse. They were even rude with my options.
Lessons learned:
- Bigger isn’t better (1TB of unknown data lost vs 250 GB is more stressful and more expensive)
- Hard drives, even SSDs, can’t be trusted for long (I read somewhere the Mean Time to Failure is 4 years so replace them).
- Data isn’t free and the electronic waste is uncomfortable, the equation of conscious cloud storage is looking better – though I’m still cheap so I don’t like it.
- Holding onto things causes unnecessary distress. I would have been fine had I made decisions timely about those original recovered files. I wouldn’t even have to think about trying to recover the data had there not been unknown files on there.
- I don’t know what I have or where it is…95% of my electronic files are unknown
- Indiscriminate cloud storage is not the solution but neither is indiscriminate personal storage
Well, here we are. I lost the game and failed to follow the rules, but I won. I’m pretty sure there were more than 500 “items” on that hard drive and I am not comfortable paying for yet another crap drive. The system I was using was a mess and it needs to change.
What is my electronic clutter threshold? How can we even know? It appears that electronic files are to paper as credit cards are to cash; I can’t see how many stacks of paper these files are. I have many versions of files. I have photos in many sizes all over the place but I can’t see them!
I knew in my paper process that I was creating more electronic chaos by scanning files and I worked to organize and label so they were searchable and organized as my paper was. This process never caught up with electronic files. How do I get them all in the same place to see if I have duplicate named documents?
These electronic files have been nagging at me since my OneDrive told me it stopped syncing files because the drive was full and I needed to buy more storage. It grew when I had to buy a phone without an external memory card slot, and then as I’d expected when Google Drive started screaming about running out of storage there.
I couldn’t even navigate the mess inside OneDrive! It was utter nonsense copied across three computers and most of it was completely unhelpful. I reset what would sync on my current laptop but I never cleared enough space for OneDrive to start syncing again….or not well. I’ve rarely used it, yet there it is routinely backing stuff up there. Whatever random image I may have downloaded, it’s there….from 10 years ago.
An additional question that pops up, would I be better off deleting everything on my cloud storage? The sheer number of hours required to sort through it all…makes me shiver. It took numerous nights for hours to delete my inbox down to 5k e-mails and all read. I can’t say that I’ve never needed those files, but so few.
When I started my account e-mails were chats, and now it’s all spam. My OneDrive hasn’t been able to backup for like five years. Google is pretty scattered as well but more likely to be recent or useful and maintainable.
Day 28 of The Mins Game:
Give up…or reframe. At this point, everything except for days 8 and 9 is destroyed. The music CDs are mixed between ones I don’t care about and ones that I may still listen to. None are ripped anymore. Most are still not what I’d listen to. Additionally, the last part of my month was going to be to get rid of my backup disks, but that hard drive is in question too (same brand and nearly as old).
New Plan: Buy a cheaper brand drive to mirror the aging drive, and move forward with non-music CDs. Try to sort the CDs that were previously ripped and get rid of ones that I won’t listen to again and am not nostalgic about. Add a “Best By:” sticker to each drive.
Let it go!
I believe there’s a book called “Fail Forward” that emphasizes the benefits that come from failing. The only way to truly fail is to learn nothing, which is nearly impossible to do. Are items leaving or left my home already? Absolutely! Did big emotional burdens leave my home? YES! Am I happy about all this? No, but I will be FINE without it.
Day 29 of The Mins Game:
I picked up the cheaper hard drive that went on sale. Mirrored the other drive and sat stunned and defeated for the rest of the following day.
Day 30 of The Mins Game:
I sorted back through all the CDs and confirmed whether I had free access to some of the artists and pulled a few out that I wanted to have a version of the music. Then continued with the CDs I’d confirmed were copied with files and computer components that I chose to get rid of.
Since my count was all messed up, I had to go back and figure out how many days were covered. I was up to, but not including, 25 before I started the day. I found enough physical items to get Day 27 covered.
After feeling defeated for a minute I switched to digital decluttering and deleted items from e-mail for the last Days 28-Day 31 of The Mins Game. I continued to go beyond what was required and got screenshots of the # items deleted popup screen.
Day 31 of The Mins Game: Halloween!
Ironically, this project did end up going in the direction I intended, despite the unfortunate setback. I didn’t get as far into the electronic documents as I’d hoped and now I have yet another hard drive to decide on and no way to confirm what I’ve lost.
I hadn’t intended to go to something as easy as e-mail but I did need easier decisions mixed in. Had I been able to keep going on track, I may have run out of time anyway, and trying to rip everything was stressing me out. I think my favorite songs are still on an old phone backup anyway…hopefully. I may check that before discarding many more of the remaining CDs because I love one or two songs. They aren’t sentimental so I just want the tracks that I listen to.
Overall, I don’t love The Mins Game for project-type clutter. I think it would be easier for someone who has office supplies to go through. In general, I had more momentum in the front end and wouldn’t want to have to count or limit myself. Additionally, it became a pain to post photos so even though I did take them, I didn’t post them.
I don’t think I learned what I set out to with The Mins Game, but I did make progress so I’ll take it! Stay tuned for my disaster of digital declutter progress.
