24-hours ago I was in the clutches of one of the big tech behemoths: Microsoft.
Now?
I’m just about free.
Cancelled my Microsoft 365 subscription. And soon will be waving bye-bye to Windows 10 on my main computer.
A couple of days ago I wasn’t thinking of doing this at all… at least any time soon.
But because I’ve been doing a massive simplification exercise in my business… it kind of naturally went that way.
And although I wasn’t paying much per month for the subscription… I was barely using it. A bit of Microsoft Word here. A bit of Excel there.
And of course I had my main cloud storage using Microsoft’s OneDrive.
But, after my Marie Kondo-esque intervention… I realised I’d overcomplicated a lot of things.
And that overcomplication had led to… massive distractions (no surprises here).
So — ironically, I know — I diverted my attention from writing emails… to getting some of this stuff simplified.
And it’s a big story… but the guts of it is:
I put all my files into Dropbox, which I’ve been using for the longest time.
I also did some de-Googling efforts and consolidated files from Google Drive into Dropbox as well.
(The story of me and Google is for another time.)
But now I can still get at my files, much as before. But now I have the option of moving operating systems. 🤓
I was going to go full-geek and move back to OpenBSD. (Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it.)
But because I have some stuff like Dropbox and Logseq (my second brain) that has to run… I’m going back to the next best thing: Linux Mint.
I keep saying going back… because I’ve seriously used these operating systems as my “daily driver” in the past… and loved them.
But there’s always some need to use Windows… so just kinda went that way for my last job. And it continued into freelancing.
Anyway…
I’m getting into a ramble. But just wanted to emphasise that…
Taking a little time to remove complexity from your business can be a great thing.
For future productivity. For peace of mind. For cost savings, sometimes.
For me…
The main focal point of simplification is around niching down more on a speciality. Namely: daily email.
More to say on that another time.
I’d love to hear if you use an operating system on your desktop or laptop other than Windows or MacOS… and why?
And happy if there’s any questions coming my way about this stuff.
Have a great weekend!
Chris “geeking out” Milham
P.S. Kinda related… I’ve also done a rework of my website. So https://chrismilham.com is now the hub for everything once again.
And my LinkedIn profile had a little spring clean too. 🧹
Ready to build your email list? Go here…
EmailForTheWin.com
Chris Milham