January 29

Today I spent nearly four hours on one kind of work: danshari, the Japanese idea of letting go. I tackled a sluggish phone and a chaotic collection of browser bookmarks by asking, at each step, what I actually needed. As the work ended, my irritability subsided and my thoughts felt clearer.

Here is what I did:

1. Phone: I record a lot of everyday life. Photos and videos take up about 200 GB, though there are only around 20,000 items. I often shoot at the highest resolution. Many originals remain on my phone even after I have uploaded them to cloud storage, and I seldom have time to look at them. I had wanted to clear them out for ages and finally began.
2. Browser: Three or four years of bookmarks had accumulated because each page had once seemed useful. One group held enough tabs to crash the browser. I spent the afternoon opening and sorting them. Some were useful in theory but irrelevant to me; some duplicated other sites; some no longer opened. I cut roughly a hundred links down to a little over twenty and arranged those in clear folders.

I then removed apps I did not use and updated what I could. After a restart, the phone felt lighter and smoother. I still want to improve how its interface looks and works. That will take time, but it could make my future study and work easier.

The same principle applies to my mind. I want to keep clearing out unnecessary commitments and improving the tools I use. The question I return to is simple: What matters more?