The Sieve

 One thing may people do at the start of a new year is to get rid of much of the clutter that has accumulated over the previous months.  I actually try to do that multiple times a year, to varying degrees of success.  One problem this year is that I don't have as much to go through.  For instance, I would go through the older book catalogs my distributors would send out, note what books I was still interested in that weren't ordered, and then get rid of them.  However, that can't happen the same way any more.  One company stopped sending catalogs months before they left the retail market.  I had been printing them off, but I didn't have access to printers for much of last year.  I had been downloading the digital copy instead, so there is nothing physical to get rid of.  Something similar goes for the other distributor.  They stopped sending the store catalogs for much of last year, until we reached a minimum sells threshold.  We started getting the catalogs back, but delivery has been spotty at times.  Many of their catalogs were downloaded too.  This means I don't really have the space problems yet to get rid of many of the older ones, from either place.  I also go through my old issues of magazines.  This isn't happening as much either.  I wasn't able to get many of my favorites last year, as most aren't available locally, or they may have been cancelled. Still, a was able to get a few.  I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly.  In fact, I have been for almost thirty years.  I used to go through them every four to six months, usually when I started to run out of space for them.  Since they started to go from "weekly" to once a month, I haven't been needing to go through them as often.  Instead of scanning them one last time to see if they were right about what would be popular and/or good, I just barely give them a passing glance.  In my last go through a few weeks ago, I went through over a dozen issues, barely noting what was on the cover or the articles.  I still have two year's worth of issues, with plenty of space for them for maybe another year before I will have to worry about sorting them again.  Another magazine that I got was Muscle & Fitness.  I had been reading it since the late 1990s, when I first decided to start exercising.  I had been looking at other titles, but I settled on M & F as my favorite, especially when many others stopped publishing.  At its height, the mag had over three hundred pages per issue.  Of course, at least a quarter of that was ads, maybe a third, but there was still a lot of great information in there.  The mag quit publishing a physical last year, going all digital.  I have looked in on it a few times since then, but I don't like the format.  Practically from the start, I would save exercise descriptions and workouts for my own personal library.  I didn't get every issue over the years, due to unavailability or money, but I still have at least something from most issues since June 2003. I use a process I call "the sieve" when going through them.  First, I would tear out all the ads and features that were no longer of interest, usually interviews or women's workouts.  This would leave just the exercises and information I needed.  During the early years, I would discard those exercises involving machines or other equipment I couldn't get at home, because I was to self-conscious about joining a gym.  I was also trying to save money.  I have since started to keep these exercises, just in case I do join a gym.  As the descriptions started to pile up, I would see if any had a newer version.  I would usually keep the newer one, and mark the other one a ready to be gotten rid of, once the rest of the page was done as well.  If there were any major differences, I would right them out next to the version I would keep.  By doing this, many of the oldest issues are down to a few pages, many no longer attached to the spine of what once was the magazine.  Sometimes, I would keep an article until I was sure I could remember the information.  This could take a few years until I get rid of it.  For the last few years of its publication, M & F would shrink down to about one hundred twenty pages, even after it combined with a sister publication Flex when it was cancelled.  The magazine had a habit of reusing old articles for new issues.  Sometimes, it was only a photo or illustration.  At other times, it was an entire exercise description, photo and words.  Sometimes only a few months after it was first seen!  They were even known to run entire workouts or other articles, verbatim.  Only long-time readers could notice, seeing a selection of recipes or discussions of exercises being reran without a single change.  Both happened during the last months of the magazine.  I'm in the middle of going through the mags for the final time.  Once I remove the last of the duplicated parts, I will start the final indexing.  I would list the exercises on a legal pad to make sure I knew what I had and when I got it.  The first index was started in the middle of my collection.  Since it wasn't completely in chronological order, I started a second index to replace it.  This time, I made sure it was in the order I got the mags.  The index is divided by body part.  However, I made few mistakes.  I didn't leave enough room for each part, so I wound up adding extra pages at the end, making it harder to find the exact location of some exercises.  Worse, while I made notes of when an exercise was updated, I never removed the original post from my list.  This would become confusing when I didn't go over an entire year at once.  There would be multiple listing for an exercise per year.  I corrected that by putting motes about multiple appearances, even after I got rid of duplicates, but it still makes for a difficult read.  When I finish the last sieve, I will compile a new index, this time with the appropriate changes:  extra pages for each part, cross-references to accessory parts and alternate names, dividing my "Other" category into "Total Body" and "Combinations" for a better flow.  I still get one last health magazine, Men's Health, but I am not sure for how much longer.  Many of the early features from when I started reading it have been removed.  The number of pages are down to one hundred twelve per issue, also down to ten or so a year.  I barely scan many of the articles any more, as I no longer feel that I am in their target audience.  Sure, I never really get it because of the exercise options, but it now has the monopoly on what is on the newsstand.  At least I still have my collection.  Now if I only I joined a gym to actually use them all.