Episode 84: Curating Photos, and Curating Life - How To Focus On What Matters Most

When I curate photos, as a photographer, I have to decide which ones are relevant, which ones are beautiful, which ones take me back to a time or place or situation, which ones are most likely to be valued by the recipient or by me, and can I get rid of the rest? 

Curating life is much the same. What things matter most? What are the greatest distractions in my life? If you were to take the experiences of your life and display them on a wall, sort of a panorama of your loves and your losses, the good and the bad, the lifespan of who you really have become, the picture of who you really are on the inside, the picture of what your life has contained... what are the greatest distractions?  

The third thing I would invite you to write down is, "if I am distracted from what matters most, what do I lose?" if you're distracted from something unimportant, you don't lose much. But if you're distracted from those things that matter most, you may lose a great deal. 

We live in a world full of distraction. Some of the distractions are really tasty. Some of them are really exciting. Are you willing to let them go? Are you willing to let the focus be the focus? 

I invite you to curate your life and join me in that exercise.   

Quotes referenced in this podcast are taken from:

• https://www.npr.org/2013/05/10/182861382/the-myth-of-multitasking
• https://www.breakthetwitch.com/minimalism/

Transcript

Podcast episode 84: Curating Photos, and Curating Life - How To Focus On What Matters Most
 

Recently I was going through the software that I use to keep all of my professional photos in one library and many of my random garbage that I just pick up as I'm carrying a camera on my daily walks. I take pictures of weeds and bugs and all kinds of things; none of them really very significant, though I always operate on the hope that I'll find something life changing and get really famous. 

I haven't gotten really famous yet, but I do enough commercial work that--you know--that actually pays me, that I have big huge hard drives that have to hold all of this stuff, and some of them get full. If I told you how much drive space I consume it would blow your mind. So I was looking through one of these libraries that had about a hundred and twenty thousand photos in it and realized I had not curated them. 

Now, curating photos is usually deciding which things are most important and selecting them for display, or for a showcase of some type, or to put in a museum. Curating our lives is pretty important too.  

When we curate photos, we have to decide which ones are relevant, which ones are beautiful, which ones take us back to a time or place or situation, which ones are most likely to be valued by the recipient or by the photographer, and get rid of the rest. Now doing that with 120,000 is quite a nightmare. Ask me how I know. When I'm removing distraction, I'm choosing what to keep, I might start by checking the focus. When I'm looking at a photo, I want the subject to be in focus. Very few times do I allow one that's not perfectly in focus to still be something that I save, and even display. Often it's because the composition or something is so compelling that we don't care too much. But focus really matters.  

The second thing I'll do is check the color balance. I want to make sure that the thing feels like it's balanced and it's not drawing my eye to where it should not be, or the color doesn't feel off. I want balance in the photo.  

Then I'm going to ponder whether or not it's significant. Will this matter to me two years from now, or will I just remember that I was on a morning walk taking a picture of weeds?  

And finally, am I willing to let some things go?  

We need to curate our lives as well as our photographs. We need to decide what the picture of our life is going to look like. If I were to take my life and the significance of my life and display it on a wall, what things stand out? What things will matter most? What things will be ones that I wish I had discarded? How have I spent my time? Was I caught up in too many events, too many distractions, too many places I was supposed to be all on the same night? Too many places I shuttled my kids because they were involved in too many activities as I thought I was giving them the gift of doing everything at once? It's not a gift. Learning to be excellent at something is a gift. Learning to be forever under pressure and distraction by too many priorities, which really aren't, is not a gift at all. 

When you focus on what doesn't really matter, what are you giving up, and how much does what you are giving up matter? One of the biggest impediments to being the curator of your life experiences is an attempt to multitask. Believing that you can multitask is an absolute myth. You reduce the importance of everything included in that multitude of things. 

If you must multitask. Be very, very selective, and make sure it's only a temporary thing to solve a temporary problem. Several years ago, my daughter was having a text conversation with one of her friends and laughing in between, and as she was enjoying that back and forth, all of a sudden, the text messages stopped. She became a little bit annoyed at some point and texted back, "Where'd you go? What'd you die?" The answer was yes. As you might have guessed, her friend was texting while driving. Multitasking is not a good idea, and sometimes the price that we pay is greater than we would wish. According to psychologist Clifford Nass, and I will leave a link to this in the comments, quote: "People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted."  (https://www.npr.org/2013/05/10/182861382/the-myth-of-multitasking)

One recent study showed that some grade school children now have the attention span. Roughly equivalent to that of a goldfish. No, it's not a joke, and no, I'm not making it up. 

One of the things that you can do to help yourself and others of your loved ones focus on things is to apply or teach the 20 minute rule. Decide what you're going to do that really matters for the next 20 minutes. Then spend five minutes goofing off, then apply 20 minutes to the continuation of the task you were on, or to something else you want to get done. In fact, some people use what's called the Pomodoro method that is based on this same thing, and it's really helpful. We're kind of conditioned to 20 minute chunks of time. Those of us who grew up back in the day when what was on TV was what was on TV, saw sitcoms that lasted about 30 minutes. Eight of that was advertising. In general, we had about a 22 minute span of time, and we have been conditioned by those experiences to look at 20 minute chunks as a thing that we can focus on.  

So if I were to give you an assignment for the year, since this podcast is in January of 2025. I would say, get a piece of paper, sit down and write what things matter most. Decide, really, which things in your life are the most important things.  

The second question I would invite you to write down is, "what are the greatest distractions in my life?" If you were to take the experiences of your life and display them on a wall, sort of a panorama of your loves and your losses, the good and the bad, the lifespan of who you really have become, the picture of who you really are on the inside, the picture of what your life has contained... what are the greatest distractions?  

The third thing I would invite you to write down is, "if I am distracted from what matters most, what do I lose?" if you're distracted from something unimportant, you don't lose much. But if you're distracted from those things that matter most, you may lose a great deal.  

I invite you to curate your life and join me in that exercise.  

So start by applying some of the principles that I would apply if I were looking at a photograph. The first thing I'm going to check is, what's the focus? Am I focused on what I really want to see? Is this most important thing the thing that I'm drawn to?  

The second is, pay attention to the leading lines. What kinds of things are leading me toward that that I should be most focused on, and what things are leading me away, or just letting me wander off into the wilderness and get lost taking pictures of weeds?  

The third thing is, ponder the significance of your choices.  

And finally, be willing to let some things go. That's a difficult thing. We live in a world full of distraction. Some of them are really tasty. Some of them are really exciting. Are you willing to let them go? Are you willing to let the focus be the focus?  

An article I saw the other day about minimalism said it is, quote: "...all about owning only what adds value and meaning to your life, as well as the lives of the people you care about, and removing the rest. It's about removing the clutter and using your time and energy for the things that remain. We only have a certain amount of energy, time, and space in our lives. In order to make the most of it, we must be intentional about how we're living each day." I'll leave a link to that one in the comments also. (https://www.breakthetwitch.com/minimalism/)

So for you, and for me, at the beginning of this new year, right now is your best opportunity to begin the curation of your life. 

I'll join you in doing it.  

We'll talk again soon.