Do you want your life to be rich rather than full? I do.

For several months now I have been trying to figure out how to live with less (less possessions, less commitments, less worry), and one voice stood out from all the material I was reading about it: Leo Babauta's Zen Habits.

I could not describe this website better than the way the author himself does on the Zen Habits 'about' page:

'Zen Habits is one of the top blogs on the Internet, and covers: achieving goals, productivity, being organized, GTD, motivation, eliminating debt, saving, getting a flat stomach, eating healthy, simplifying, living frugal, parenting, happiness, and successfully implementing good habits.'

I have been finding Zen Habits inspiring on several occasions recently, and full of tips for so many of the areas in my life demanding my attention. If you find yourself on a similar quest, I encourage you to head over to Zen Habits and start by sampling the most popular content listed at the bottom of the homepage.

Leo Babauta has recently written a book entitled 'The Power of Less', which tagline embodies exactly the kind of skill I want to develop:

'the fine art of limiting yourself to the essential… in business and in life'

The Power of Less by Leo Babauta is out now on Amazon.com, and is available to pre-order on Amazon.co.uk (publication date in the UK is 12 February 2009).

And if you order the book before the end of January 1 2009 you also get to choose a free ebook or audio podcast.

The publication of the book has also been marked by a the Power of Less New Year Challenge that you can join to commit publicly to develop a new habit next month. I have chosen to focus ten minutes a day on establishing and maintaining a badly needed bedtime routine, so that instead of falling asleep more often than not while reading or watching TV I will focus every night for ten minutes on:

• taking out my contact lenses
• brushing my teeth
• flossing
• laying out my clothes for the next day
• …and going to bed!

I will report my progress daily here and on the Power of Less Challenge forum. I tried to pick up this habit last September but it did not last. I am now confident that committing and reporting publicly will help me succeed.

To my horror, I realised that I am guilty of every single attitude that can only make things worse when someone obsessed with putting things away (me) lives with someone with a, how shall I phrase it, 'more relaxed' attitude towards tidiness (Dr B.):

• I nag;
• I get judgemental;
• If I reorder myself, I either do it with a 'How great am I?' or with a martyr attitude.

Major fail.

The post offers some useful tips and also lists some ways to make joint tidying up sessions fun, but I just cannot see myself wearing the suggested maid outfit.

Every Saturday an automatic backup kicks in. I configured it to be an incremental backup of all my image files (I would be devastated if I lost any of the pictures I have been taking during the last ten years or so).

The automatic backup asks me to label and insert a disc (I use 4.7GB DVDs). And then another. And another yet. Over the weeks I have collected a fair amount of discs that need to be labelled and stored if you ever need to restore any of the files.

Trouble is, 1. it's a pain, and 2. if the flat was to be damaged (fire, flood, magnetic wipeout) so do the backup discs.

I looked around for online backup systems and I chose to use Amazon's impressive S3 system together with JungleDisk (a simple interface that lets you both see your storage as a network drive for ad-hoc manual backups, and set up regular automatic backups if you wish to do so). You only pay Amazon for the storage and data transfer you use every month, and JungleDisk is a one-off 20USD to install on how many machine you need, and comes with unlimited upgrades.

I have started backing up all my pictures – around 15GB, it is going to take some time to upload them all. Once that is done, I will probably stop backing up on DVD but am thinking of setting up a just-in-case additional backup on a local network drive.

Knock on wood, I have so far never had to face the nightmare of losing data because of failing supports. Better not to push my luck too far though.

While performing my investigations I signed up for nearly every single available service, until I lost track of what I was feeding into what else, and created quite a fair amount of duplication along the way.

Then a few weeks ago I started using FriendFeed, thinking it was going to be yet another lifestream/aggregating service. I fed it all my other services' feeds and left it alone for a bit.

After a couple of weeks I noticed that there was something unique about it, namely the possibility to merge together your friends' feeds in a river of posts, then comment on their activities or simply give them a thumbs up (a 'like') on what they have written.

It would be fantastic if these comments were saved alongside the original posts (in Twitter, Google Reader shared items, or blog posts, for instance, instead of within FriendFeed as it happens now). Apparently, you can do so with Socialthing (I have not yet checked out Socialthing myself).

So now I feel that my research is going somewhere, I can forget about certain aggregators I have used but that I do not need to track any more – and I definitely do not need to include in FriendFeed, unless I want to create a self-referential infinite loop. The casualties are:

• Tumbler
• iStalkr, which seems to be down at the time of writing
• intuuch, which now shows a message in German saying that the project is closed
• Suprglu
• profilactic
• tumblr
• Jaiku

This is a very big step for me, and there are three reasons behind it:

1. it is taking up far too much precious time to maintain it,
2. logging what I eat does not stop me from overeating occasionally, especially under stress, and
3. I have come back from two and a half weeks in Australia with a list of everything I have consumed in local weights and measures, and I do not think I have the animus to sit down and figure out what schooners and kilojoules are.

I will from now on only record my weight once a week. I will probably miss looking at all my complex charts illustrating weight fluctuations over the years. I will also probably gain some time to do something a little more useful.

Another reminder has been prompting me every month to delete tags that I only used once, and therefore considered to be too detailed and of little use.

I do use del.icio.us extensively to keep my bookmarks organised and synced across machines with the del.icio.us Firefox extension. It is therefore natural that I like my tags to be organised.

This is however taking away precious minutes from my life every week, and when my life flashes in front of me on my death bed I don't want it to be dotted by Saturday mornings spent renaming all the instances of 'weblog', 'blog' and 'blogs' to 'weblogs', just so that my world could be a tidier place.

I have therefore deleted the recurrent Outlook task and related reminders. What I thought was tag decluttering ended up cluttering my life with unnecessary obligations, and that is plain ghastly.

I trust the technology to become more and more intelligent and one day, hopefully soon, to be able perform these tasks for me. In the meantime, I accept to live in a little bit of a disorganised sea of data. It is not the end of the world. I can already set del.icio.us up to only show tags that have been used a minimum of 3 or 5 times anyway.

The stuff in the left half of the picture can go.

Stuff in the middle can go in my opinion, but it's not mine and I need to ask Dr B. permission to throw away (I so want to hear why a household where hair clippers are used once a week on a number two still needs to have a comb and a brush).

I intend to keep only the stuff on the right:

• 4 mini plastic ducks from Virgin Atlantic (hanging inside the bathroom cabinet);
• travel sewing kit;
• travel ear cleaning buds, wrapped;
• small metal box (now used to keep paper clips), branded with the company Dr B. used to work for;
• small plastic box (now used to keep earplugs);
• old Pit Rock deodorant, perfect travelling size.

At the bottom in the photo, the three phones I am keeping. The one on the far right is my current one, the one in the middle is my first smartphone with GPS, the one on the left is a back-up handset.

During the Christmas break 2002, the friend I shared a flat went to see his family in Ireland and came back a captured leprechaun in a can for me:

I only had a vague idea of what a leprechaun was, so I thanked him politely and read the instructions on the tin that said:

DIRECTIONS:

1. Close all windows in room and pull across curtain
2. Open can carefully keeping your eyes fixed firmly on his face (blink and he's gone)
3. Make him promise to behave (leprechauns must keep their word)
4. Extract secret location of crock of gold

GOOD LUCK!

I shook the can, it made no sound, it felt empty. I asked my friend if there really was a leprechaun inside, he replied 'Of course there is'. I was none the wiser, his answer may very well have been ironic. I decided that one day I was going to open the can in the dark and make a wish.

Five years later, the can was still unopened, and kept in a box out of sight! So the other day I took it to our windowless bathroom, closed the door, switched off the light, removed the plastic top from the can, unsealed it by pulling on the ring… and I felt something fluffy and fuzzy brushing at my hand:

I switched on the light. There actually was a leprechaun in the can:

And damn, I was so startled I forgot to make a wish. If it works retroactively, how about 'I wish I was not such a gullible git?'

In September 2002, when I moved into the flat I shared with a friend in Tooting Bec, a friend from NYC came to see us. He is an artist, and after an afternoon spent sightseeing he came back and gave me three postcards that I put into standard Ikea frames and placed just above my bedroom door.

Since then I have moved twice, and never found a place to display them. I cannot believe they I have kept them in a box for four years and never once did I think that perhaps I did not need them. So bye.

The fourth frame is from a charity shop and I like the fact that it is made out of a carpentry ruler (I am sure there is a more accurate technical name for it, but you know what I mean I hope).

I am hesitating a lot about it because I still like it, even if it goes with absolutely nothing we have at home. However, not only has it been kept in a box for four years, but the back stand is broken and useless.

I am going to keep the postcard (a reproduction of the old Vauxhall Gardens refreshments price list, with a theatre invitation from a friend on the back), then bye to this frame too.