Things I Carry: Almost Nothing

Life was simple back then. Or so it appears to me looking back to the olden days of, say, five years ago. Of course it didn't feel simple back then, but compared to today? Piece of cake. Those were also the days when I had to have my stuff: I carried an over-sized purse filled with makeup, multiple pens and notebooks, snacks in case I got stuck in the desert and was starving (hey, you never know!), two phones in case one ran out of batteries; an address book (remember those?) and various digitalia. When I traveled, I took wardrobe "options" and shoes for multiple occasions. On my desk were stacks of papers that I knew I desperately needed and had to have at the ready. They lay in piles, files, or in fans across my desk.

Since then the rate of change has accelerated. Life has become infinitely more complicated by the explosion of devices and platforms. We're all sucked in by these distractions -- eh, tools -- but when it's your job to try to make sense of what that technology means for the news business, you have to be all in. It's a 24/7 cacophony of chaos, which has to be sorted through and understood. So when I get asked about what items I couldn't live without, I now flip it around and simply answer: almost nothing.

When I travel, which is now two or three times a week, the goal is to carry nothing with me— or as close to nothing as possible. No laptops, just an iPad; no printouts, no books, they’re all on my Kindle. It used to be that when I packed clothes for a work trip, I'd keep asking myself, "Well, what if I want to wear this? Or this?" and now it's a shift outfit in one, maybe two, colors. (The number of pairs of shoes however, will always be a struggle.) My purse has an iPhone, a comb, wallet, lipstick and a pen— if I'm lucky. I don't wear much jewelry; I've even ditched the watch.

I have this continuous need to shed things and de-clutter. I throw out most everything: printed presentations, old movie tickets, itineraries, memos, even holiday cards (my husband has raised this as an issue on more than one occasion). There hasn't been one instance where I have regretted throwing something away. It's all just stuff.

Our working world has become so multi-dimensional that even figuring out the day to day is a challenge, not to mention navigating the future. It's become so complicated that you can't see the signal for the noise. And stuff is noise to me.

(Photo: Phil Frank)