In the past few years, I’ve become increasingly enamored with the voluntary simplicity movement, which builds on the idea that paring away from our lives – be it reducing possessions or reducing commitments – lets us more fully enjoy those that are left.

In some ways, this flies against my genetic code. My parents are such pack-rats that they converted their two-car garage into storage space, then overflowed into a rented storage facility as well. (My father often jokes that, if he and my mother were suddenly plowed down in traffic, my brother and I would need to take the next year off from work just to sift through the piles they’ve accumulated.)

But, contrary to upbringing as it may be, I’ve slowly developed the habit of ruthless de-stuff-ing. A few times a year, I try to view everything I own with a dispassionate eye. A pair of jeans I haven’t worn for over a year? To Goodwill they go. A book on my shelf I realize I’m increasingly unlikely to re-read? Trotted down to the local library’s donation bin.

Still, in moving into my new apartment last month, a process that involved carefully looking at literally everything I own as I boxed and unboxed it, I started to appreciate that the things I own are more than just things; they’re behaviors waiting to happen.

Psychologists call this ‘affordance’: what an object suggests for us to do with it. A well designed door, for example, lets us know to pull rather than push it even before we read the ‘pull’ sign. As I unpacked item after boxed item, I started to realize that nearly all of them, by conscious design or otherwise, seemed to afford a specific set of behaviors. And while I’d previously accumulated and sloughed off ‘stuff’ with an eye mainly towards frequency of use, more recently, I’ve started to look at things in terms of type of use. If, at least to some degree, my behaviors are shaped by what my surroundings ‘afford’, can I change my behavior just by changing my surroundings?

In other words, does the right tool not just help get the job done, but spur on the job itself? I’ve found it certainly does, as in the case of the garbage can under my desk: for the past few years, I’ve had a small one that looked great, but filled up remarkably quickly. And, as it began to overflow, I found myself subtly slowing down my discarding of unneeded work papers. Inane as it may sound, I found that switching to a much larger desk garbage helped me suddenly clear off my often overflowing desk. The problem hadn’t been that I didn’t want to trash papers, but that my little garbage can didn’t ‘want’ me to throw any more away.

Or consider the Look skillet my father (a fellow kitchen gadgeteer) recently sent me as a gift. While I had long meant to integrate scrambled eggs into my breakfast rotation (great, paleo-friendly source of protein that they are), I had somehow never stuck with the idea. The Look, however, with its flawless non-stick coating and slow, even cooking, just begs to be scrambled upon whenever I see it. I’ve taken to leaving it out on the stove, and suddenly scrambled eggs are a regular morning choice.

Thinking about affordance in cooking tools reminds me that this incredibly basic advice – how you behave is based, to some degree, on what you do or don’t have around – is something I’ve long pointed out in the world of nutrition. My first tip for friends looking to eat more healthfully? Go through your cabinets and throw away all the junk. Don’t buy any more. You’ll naturally end up eating better when you only indulge those cravings that can motivate you to put your pants back on to head to the supermarket.

The new thought, for me, was how broadly this principle applies to everything else. In nearly every facet of my life, given a behavior I want to encourage, or a bad habit I want to break, perhaps by very carefully acquiring or discarding the right tools, the relevant ‘stuff’, I can give myself a boost well past will-power alone.

And, increasingly, I’m starting to think it works. Last week, I was having trouble falling asleep with the stress and excitement of starting Long Tail. Each time I found myself staring at the ceiling, I’d pick up some bedtime reading, and end up keeping myself up even later. Despite self-chastising, I didn’t cut it out until I reasoned through affordance to a simple yet powerful solution: I took the bulb out of my bedside lamp.

When I was in elementary school, my mother referred to me as the ‘absent minded professor’. I lost jackets and umbrellas, couldn’t keep track of school projects, and was generally an organizational mess.

Over time, I built up elaborate systems and anal retentive habits to counter my natural state. And, in the last few years, with the help of Getting Things Done and an endless array of trivial hacks, I’ve gotten to the point where I finally have a good sense, at any given moment, of exactly what I should be doing.

Unfortunately, at any given moment, I’m usually doing something else entirely. Even with a list of next actions in front of me, I have an awfully hard time sitting down and forcing myself to work my way through that list.

In part, I blame my job, which is enormously amorphous. There’s very little in the way of procrastination that I can’t somehow rationalize away as at least vaguely productive. Reading an old Malcolm Gladwell article on marketing khakis? Why, a deeper understanding of buyers’ psychology certainly will come in handy selling Cyan and Long Tail’s films!

In other words, the problem isn’t that the procrastination expeditions I talk myself into are necessarily bad; it’s simply that they’re less good than what I should be doing instead. Still, knowing that, rationally, doesn’t seem to help. For me, at least, ‘integrity in the moment of choice’ is tough stuff.

For the past year or so, I’ve tried to push my way through with logic and brute force:

“Listen,” the smarter part of my brain says. “You’d be much better off if you put down that article and went back to drafting the script option term sheet.”

“Absolutely,” the less smart part agrees. “As soon as I finish this khakis article, I’ll get right on it.”

Very recently, however, I’ve discovered a way that I can trick myself into listening to the smarter part: I schedule, on the half hour, tiny little increments of work, then let myself go back to ‘productively’ goofing off as soon as I’ve done each little increment, at least until the next half hour mark chimes.

Let’s say, as I did earlier today, that I have thirty theaters I need to call to check their base screen rental rates. I’ll sit down and break the list into chunks of three or four theaters, and list them out over the afternoon. These four at 1:00, these three at 1:30, etc. I’ve found it works the best to set the first chunk about ten, fifteen minutes in the future.

So, 1:00 rolls around, I bang out the first four, and then get back to whatever I’ve stupidly escaped into doing, like rearranging a shelf of DVDs. Ding! 1:30. I make the three calls, then do another one or two to lighten the encroaching 2:00 load. Ding! Back to calling, so I crank through the remainder of the 2:00 list, then, with momentum building, hit the lists for 2:30, 3:00 and 3:30.

My brain spent, I go back to DVD re-arranging, until the 2:30 ding, when I get back to calling, and decide to just make the last eight or nine calls to be done with it. And now, thrilled to have finished the calling I’d been avoiding all weekend, I crank out a few pressing emails for good measure, and build effortlessly from there.

Holy reclaimed afternoon, Batman! Somehow I’ve gone from a day where my brain seemed permanently out to lunch to one where I’m startlingly productive.

The secret, for me, seems to be the safety of the worst case scenario: even if I’m not picked up by the surge of forward motion, I know I’ll at least manage to slog through each of the small, on-the-half-hour actions. Which, for whatever reason, seems to take off enough of the pressure to perform that, about 95% percent of the time, I do get picked up by the productivity surge, pushing towards the best case scenario instead.

For the first time, I seem to have discovered my subconscious resistance to getting started: the inherent internal commitment to keep going past that first step. Take away that commitment, and the getting started seems far less terrifying. After which, apparently, the keeping going sort of takes care of itself.

Like most internet users, I get spam. Unlike most, I get ridiculous, overwhelming amounts of it: on average days, upwards of a thousand pieces. Consider it an occupational hazard. To find the screenwriters, directors, actors, producers and slew of other collaborators on which Cyan’s (and now Long Tail’s) projects depend, I need my email address flung far and wide through the cybersphere. But, in that flinging, it inevitably ends up on junk mail lists everywhere.

For the past year or so, I’ve been getting around the problem using KnowSpam.net, a server-side challenge-response system. Which basically means that, every time someone sent me an email, if I hadn’t previously received an email from them, KnowSpam would ask them to demonstrate they were human by answering a question on their website. And, on the plus side, it worked exceedingly well in cutting my spam down to zero. On the minus, it also started to increasingly piss off the humans whose humanity was being verified.

So, yesterday evening, I downloaded SpamSieve, a Bayesian filter for the Mac. Bayesian filters (near and dear to my heart from the neuroscience and computer science days back at Yale) essentially figure out the fuzzy overall similarity between two things – in this case, the similarity between an incoming piece of email, and the entire body of previously received email already sorted into spam and ham. Bayesian filtering, in theory, works remarkably well. But, like communism, it rarely seems to pan out quite as nicely in practice.

Which is why I was more than pleasantly surprised by SpamSieve; I was joyously shocked. After training the filters on a stack of old emails, it caught all but one of the 313 pieces of spam I received since midnight. Now, perversely, I’m taking pleasure not in the real email I receive, but in the flow of penis enlargement ads and mortgage refinancing offers, as they pile up, message by unmissed message, in my junk folder.

Finding happiness in watching good technology at work. Further proof that, hide out in the world of film as I may, I’m still pretty much 100% dork.