Recently some respected bloggers & geeks have written about backing up your computer files … calling for the need to buy extra hard drives by the half dozen (example), regularly schedule backups and off-site transfers and much more.

This is the old-school computer expert lecture, and if you enjoy doing those kinds of things, that’s cool.

I actually don’t, and so I don’t do it.

What do I do instead? Here’s a simpler method:

• store files online (Google Docs or Zoho for documents, Picasa or Flickr for photos, code in github, etc.)
• keep working files in Dropbox (including my 1Password file, Notational Velocity notes, drafts, and more)

Using this method, I’ve never lost an important file.

There’s an off-chance I might lose a scrap of information, because I’m not as anal about backing up as others. However, I’ve also realized that my data isn’t as important as I once thought, and letting others worry about backing up my files (Google, Zoho, Yahoo, Dropbox, et al) means letting go of control and letting go of those worries.

Will I lose something someday? Sure, maybe. But will it be the end of the world? No. If it takes 20 minutes to recreate something, that’ll be less than the hours I would have spent cumulatively backing things up or buying hard drives and USB thumb drives and off-line storage. If I lose a dozen photos of thousands I’ve taken, it’s not a big deal.

I’ve let go of the need to obsess about every bit of data, and with it I’ve dropped the need to obsess about backups.

Today I deleted 1,031 friends from Facebook. It was liberating.

As I talked about before, having a ton of friends on social networks is a major pull on your attention, and results in superficial relationships anyway. I prefer deeper relationships when possible.

Facebook hasn’t worked well for me as a social network in the past. I loved connecting with close friends and family, and old friends from high school. But as I added friends without any criteria, it became too much — a stream of people leaving updates, sending me “gifts”, inviting me to all kinds of things, leaving things for me on my “wall”. I couldn’t stand it, and rarely checked Facebook. Twitter became my social space.
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Nothing.

Twitter started with a brilliant idea of simplicity:

• Keep tweets to 140 characters or less, forcing people to be brief and to the point (unlike emails or blog posts).
• Have one stream to read, as opposed to multiple things to check on.
• Make it simple and easy to tweet or reply, from anywhere.

And people loved the simplicity, and 3rd-party developers used it well to make great apps. Twitter’s simplicity is one reason it’s a better user experience than Facebook or MySpace.

Now Twitter has added lists and the new Retweet feature, and it seems they might be looking to add more. Others are calling for them to remove the 140-character limit, allow more customizations to profile pages, and add a whole host of other features.

No. Please, Twitter, don’t give in to the feature requests, the tendency towards feature bloat. I will live with the lists and retweets, but please stop adding new features.

Instead, focus on making what you have better. Improve your infrastructure so you don’t have the Fail whale ever appear. Make your search better. Get rid of spam. Make it easier to unfollow people. Make the site even simpler.

Even better, move towards an open protocol — allow interconnectivity with Identi.ca and other services so we aren’t trapped into one service. People don’t like being trapped.

Keep it simple, Twitter.

Although I can’t claim to have mastered this technique yet, it’s something I’ve been considering and I thought I’d throw it out there for discussion.

The technique is “unfriending”, which was the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2009 (actually it was “unfriend”).

Why is this important to a minimalist? Because some of us would like to participate in the emerging social web of Twitter, Facebook, blogging and the like, without being overwhelmed by the huge stream of information that’s almost inevitably consumed when you participate.

The trend seems to be to follow or “friend” thousands of people, regardless of whether you know them or not. I’m guilty of this: when I signed up for a Facebook account, I began to automatically add people who made friend requests, and ended up with well over 1,000 friends — most of whom I don’t know. On Twitter, I began to do the same thing, but recently began to unfollow people I don’t know, probably offending a few people in the process.

The trend of following lots of people has its pros and cons — one of the pros is that you get to know more people than you normally would have. You also spread your influence and have your content spread more widely, if that’s something you care about.

But the con is that it’s hard to keep up with so much social information. Another con is that the relationships you do form become necessarily thin and superficial, because you can’t form deep bonds with thousands and thousands of people.

And so, consider unfriending or unfollowing people you don’t know. Or at least know of — it’s fine to follow someone whose content interests you, if you keep that within reasonable limits.

Here’s what happens. When you unfollow or unfriend people, you might offend them. But you’ll also greatly simplify your incoming stream of information, and be able to actually closely follow the updates of the people you are friends with.

And even better, you’ll start to have some real conversations, and form real relationships.

I don’t know what a good number of friends would be, but I’d guess it would be in the dozens — definitely below 100. I’m not there yet, as I said, but it’s something I’ve been considering.

Unfriending might offend people, but it’s greatly liberating.

Comments? @zen_habits me.

It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn. ~Robert Southey

Emails, to some of us, are like a plague. They spread rapidly, infect you until you’re covered in sores and can’t do anything useful, and ultimately fill the streets with corpses.

OK, maybe emails aren’t exactly like the plague.

But they can take up your entire day if you let them. Enter the art of brevity (not to be confused with this site).

Master the art of writing concise emails, and you communicate essential information without taking up much time – yours or the recipients’ time. You also encourage the responder to be brief, with your own brevity. And by eliminating chatter, you also become a better writer.

Some tips for writing brief emails: Read more »