Digital Feng Shui

Despite being a life coach and sometimes being called upon to help others conquer their clutter, I am prone to collecting clutter myself. Yes, unlike many American life coaches, I do not pretend to have solved all my own problems yet!

But while I have learned some new habits to reduce the build up of papers, books and magazines, a whole new pristine space has opened up for me to make a mess of - and that's the digital world of my phone, PC and other personal gadgets.

As an example my Sky+ hard disc is full of stuff I must watch before I can record anything else, my mobile phone is filling up with the kind of dreadful snaps only a mobile's plastic camera lens can produce, my iPod has 1000 albums on it about 8 of which I listen to with any regularity (and all those are labelled wrongly), my email inbox needs more weeding than my garden, and I have so many favourites stored in Internet Explorer I'd need Google just to search through them!

Now all this cyber-clutter is terrible Feng Shui - the ancient Chinese practice has strong words to say on the piling up of such stagnant energy. I'm sure the fact that my mobile phone still has the number of every ex-girlfriend in it is ruining the flow of Chi in my relationships quadrant.

And a note to manufacturers - you guys are not helping. When I got my new Sky+ HD box, I still had 6 hours of telly recorded on my old Sky+ that I wanted to watch. No problem I thought, I'll leave the old one plugged into the TV and when I've had chance to watch the stuff on it, I'll sell it on eBay.

But when I sat down to watch some of my TV backlog, the old Sky+ box said "You must insert your Sky viewing card to watch recordings". I took my Sky card out of the new box and plugged it into the old one. Then the box said "You must have the satellite dish plugged in to watch the recordings". What? So every time I want to watch something on the old box, I have to take the viewing card out of the new one and unscrew the dish cable, put them both into the old box and then reverse the whole procedure when I've finished?

The result of course is that my TV clutter remains. Perhaps if I install a windchime near the telly my Chi will flow again?