Simplify the Internet

After reading The Happiness Project for several months now, I decided to put some of her theories to the test, starting with the idea of “simplify things.” I am a fairly organized person, but I often go about the process of getting organized in a random, time-consuming way. I watched myself for a few days, and noticed I had two major time wasters. First, I tend to keep things in the house far from where I will actually use them, usually for some impractical reason such as “it looks good there.” It took 30 minutes and a little shuffling, and I had a much more streamlined and logical home. Second, I tend to waste loads of time on the internet sort of trolling sites because I’m convinced there was “something” I wanted to read today, if only I could remember what it was.

Enter Firefox. Firefox, which is an incredibly stable and versatile browser for Macs and PCs, allows you to set your home page to a bookmark folder. I created a folder, copying links from within the incredibly complex (but organized!) system of bookmarks that I have developed over the years. That system, while thorough (and organized!), is not exactly useful from 7am-7:15am, which is the time I have while my son eats breakfast and I sip coffee to get my morning Internet fix. My new bookmark folder, entitled “AM list,” has 24 links. Every morning, I click open Firefox; thirty seconds later, all the sites I really like to check are up and waiting for me. If I find interesting articles that I want to read later, I open additional tabs and save them for my son’s first naptime.

This may seem like a small, insignificant thing, but it really isn’t. It’s like having a personal assistant deliver all my need-to-know mail to the breakfast table every morning. I get a fix on the news, on my work, on my friends and family, and on what I will need and want to read later on. I waste less time and feel less stressed in the mornings as well. But the most important lesson this endeavor taught me? How vast the difference between things that are organized and things that are simplified. Thank you Firefox.