Decimal Diary: Not-Kondo and deleting Canva

Dear Decimal Diary,

The other day we had breakfast in a cafe with a TV showing an organise-your-house type of program.

This is right up my alley. Ten years ago Johnny gave me a book by a Japanese author called Goodbye, Things that had a big impact on both of us. So given that we're in Japan I was excited to see the end of the show.

When the 'experts' were finished the residents pulled lots of zany shocked delighted faces. But I was disappointed. They didn't throw anything out! It was more like a sliding puzzle where they just moved stuff around.¹

I don't see the point of a re-organisation project if you're also not going to get rid of anything. I'm too addicted to that fresh-start feeling.²

Canva stress

This was my state of mind as I began a long-avoided P3 task labelled 'Decimalise Canva properly'. There was more than 2 years' worth of work-related mess in there. Some files had IDs, most didn't. And the IDs pre-dated the Small Business System that we use now.

I really like making things in Canva. It's easy and fun. But I don't really like being in Canva, all the buttons make me dizzy. So about 10 minutes later I thought "bugger this" and deleted everything in the account.

Canva calm

All that's in there now is an empty area folder called 50-59 Portfolio of creative outputs, ala the creative pattern. Ready and waiting to hold new folders labelled with IDs for future creative jobs.

I could have spent all day re-naming old files and creating links in our current JDex for them. But I was honest with myself and knew I'd never actually re-use those files again. And so I purged. It felt great.

Procreate refresh

This inspired me to do some organising and tidying in the Procreate app on my iPad.

Again, I deleted a lot of old stuff (freeing up at least 2GB of storage). I grouped existing files into logical 'stacks' of similar work. I made filenames clearer and added IDs where there were none. And I've promised myself that when I start a new creative job in the future, it will be labelled with its ID from 50-59 (pinky swear).

It's far from perfect, but it's a lot better. I tried to:

• Be realistic and make an improvement in the time I had,
• Get some 'comfortable awareness'³ of what's there and could be re-used,
• Give myself a bit of that fresh-start feeling.

I know I can't delete all my old files because that would be madness. But I do think it's good to delete some files on the reg. It feels healthy. And I think that tiny Japanese apartment would have looked way better if they'd had a proper purge. So I'm going to keeping poking around my digital life, neatening and deleting as I go.

Hot tip: circle masks

I just learned how to do this – if you've ever wanted to crop a regular photo into a fancy circle, you can do this really easily in Canva:⁴

• Upload your photo in to the 'Uploads' area,
• Open a new blank canvas in the dimensions you want,
• In the 'Elements' tab search for 'Frames',
• Find the circle and drag it on to your canvas,
• Go to your Uploads and drag your photo onto the frame,
• It automatically crops it into a circle,
• Make it the size you want and hit download.

Canva is fuuuun.

From Lucy

100% human. 0% AI. Always.