One of the unexpected side-effects of owning a dog is how many pictures I now take on a daily basis. I use Dropbox’s Camera Upload feature, so — as you might expect — I quickly ran out of space. Right now there’s a queue of a few hundred photos on my phone waiting to be uploaded to the cloud.
Rather than pony up some money to buy space and prolong the problem, I decided to dive in and start categorizing photos. I basically treat my Camera Upload folder like an inbox and move photos from there into other folders to be processed at a later point (assuming I can’t decide to delete a photo right then
and there).
Another one of my holdups for processing all of this data was that I wanted to write an app to make it easier to sort photos. But ultimately I just need to go through the data — the tools I have are sufficient to make good progress. I need to work on not getting hung up on doing something optimally if I want to make immediate progress. Discerning between immediate gains and long-term gains is a useful skill worth honing — I use it every day in software development and it’s applicable in many other areas too.