"I'm taking the cure so I can be quiet whenever I want."

--Elliott Smith, "Needle in the Hay"

Okay, so Elliott Smith didn't have the Apartment Therapy Eight Step Home Cure in mind when he penned those lines. Kudos anyhow to those who are joining the group cure, those--in Maxwell's words--"good people who want to reconnect to their home and all that it stands for: reconnection to self, friends and family."

As for me, I've lurked around here long enough to have a fair amount of feng schwing. Except for the slightly untamed id that manifests as a Closet of Doom, my home feels pretty sane and serene.

But the space between my ears is a bad neighborhood, and my digital life is messy in the extreme. There's probably less than one hour a day when I'm not reading something or looking at a screen or writing or listening or otherwise accepting input. My circuits are frying.

If you too need a cure for the noise in your head and on your broadband--all those projects, tasks, wish lists, concepts and widgets that are the kudzu of the mind--here are a couple of tried-and-true resources that might help:

• 43 Folders, Merlin Mann's excellent mashup of GTD and the Buddhist practice of mindfulness. The mind that lists is the Buddha's mind. There is no other.
• The Lifehacker procrastination thread. There are some interesting posts here on the intersection of physical and mental spaces, e.g.: "Clutter is delayed decisions."
• Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies, available both digitally and physically. These are a set of cards for finding detours for mental roadblocks.

Of course, if you're like me, what you really need is not more productivity pr0n, but a good old-fashioned offline weekend. Good luck with that.

Photo credit: Schemie Radge