Organizing My Digital World

Until today, this blog has been published on a 13" MacBook Air.  It's been good to me: traveling the world, enabling me to start this business, providing everything I need and nothing I don't.   Over the past year, however, it had started getting grumpy and insisting the hard drive was full, even after I dramatically culled ancient files and moved my iPhoto library entirely online.  And yesterday morning, as I was trying to browse Air BnB, it started its death throes.  You know the ones.  The ones when the hard drive starts frantically whirring, the spinning rainbow ball starts in multiple apps, and suddenly everything grinds to the speed of molasses.

And, to be honest, I thought I should just struggle on.  I really resist the idea that technology is disposable and I like to get as much use out of my devices as I can (for reference, my iPhone ownership history is 3G, 4, 6).  But it seems I had forgotten exactly when I bought my Air, and it turns out it was in mid 2012!  That realization tipped the scales and within the hour I had ordered a new machine.

View fullsize

May I present my pretty new laptop: the 12" MacBook, in rose gold because I'm predictable.  We're already getting along famously.  I picked it because it's basically the new Air: even smaller, even lighter, and importantly with much faster modern wifi.  I pretty much exclusively use a computer for email and blogging, so I really don't need the massive storage and processing capabilities of a MacBook Pro.

I set aside today to get everything set up.  I use cloud storage exclusively at this point (pretty much all my media is on iCloud and I also have my documents in Google Drive since that's where most people I work with share things), so the whole process really only took an hour or so start to finish.  And that includes dumb stuff like setting up my work email in the Mail app and resetting a lot of my passwords in LastPass while I was at it.

Now is a great time to make a fresh start to the new year and organize your digital life.  I talked about some great tips here - what strategies are you planning to use to stay on track this year?

LMW