![]() I had a decent collection of old Life Magazines, vintage MAD Magazines, historical newspapers and over a hundred Playboys from the time when Playboy was great. Then there was the memorabilia to deal with. Slowly but surely, I could see the evidence of movement as the excess space in my basement grew progressively larger and the boxes of crap shrank in number. ![]() ![]() I haven’t lost interest in the historical records-I just no longer need to have the physical objects. They are still available to me as digital files and are much easier to find. I learned from my basement purging party that by scanning and discarding, one is able to reduce piles and have a much “cleaner desk” which is essential for my productivity.īy scanning things I am not discarding them. This “best practice” has stayed with me through my professional life. ![]() At the end of the business day, EVERYTHING, including family photos, had to be off your desk. When I worked for IBM they had a “clean desk” policy. By the time I was done I had eliminated over 12,000 pages of crap (I know this because there’s a counter on the scanner). I went through household receipts for things we still owned, tax returns, mortgage papers, medical records, school records-and scanned everything on a sheet feed scanner (the metaphorical laxative in this story). Old bank records, financial statements, insurance records-anything that I clearly didn’t need was thrown out. But once I had the time to do it, I discovered that it was remarkably liberating and has cleared a lot of clutter from my mind as I think about my next ventures. It is simply not possible, while running a venture-backed business, to do something as ordinary as cleaning out your basement. My stated goal was to get rid of everything in my life that had mass except for my wife and kids. So I started a massive elimination campaign. Instead of being a collector (some might say a hoarder), my consciousness flipped a bit and I came to be bothered by the weighty feeling of being tied down and anchored by all the stuff. While packing I found books, records, memorabilia and old toys, which had been packed in boxes years before and had never been unpacked in the eight years I had the loft, plus all the remnants of my barbecue sauce business including about 40 cases of 11-year old barbecue sauce. Then I got married, had kids and eventually had to move from the great bachelor pad to a split level in Champaign, Illinois where I worked as Entrepreneur in Residence for the University of Illinois. It’s one thing to play Frank Sinatra tunes as a prelude to romance, but playing a 78 rpm disc of “Someone To Watch Over Me” by ‘Ol Blue Eyes on a hand cranked phonograph slayed them every time. My apartment looked like a high class junk shop. As an adult I had a vintage loft apartment in Chicago that was filled with my collection of autographs of movie comedians, a working Victrola, two working Philco radios, a working crank telephone and a working candlestick phone just like Sam Spade might have used. In fact my very first startup, a gourmet food business based on my grandfather’s famous barbecue sauce recipe from his pre-World War II restaurant, was an outgrowth of this fascination. As a kid I was in love with old movies, old books, comics, toys-anything nostalgic.
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