As is my habit, my desk at work has been accumulating cruft for quite a while, and it’s finally reached critical mass. Time for me to clean it up before the gravitational well generated by all the junk threatens to suck me in forever. I tend to be a packrat — I hate to throw anything away. To me, a “filing system” is a pile of printouts, arranged chronologically. Which is to say, whatever I looked at most recently is on top of the pile.
At work, I take to heart that old saying, “A clean desk is a sure sign of a sick mind.” But sometimes, it gets too messy, even for me, and I have to nuke everything and start over. At home, I’m a little neater. Susan is much more organized than I am. It’s started to rub off on me a little. That’s probably a survival instinct on my part. If I tried to maintain my sloppy habits to their fullest, she’d surely kill me.
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6 Comments
Man, I feel you on not knowing where your desk is. My work desk is about to get cleared, though, since I’m moving … again.
Must be something in the air…. I found myself straigtning up my desk today as well…. I eve put some books away in the developer’s bookcase too! GASP! I nearly fainted. Still can’t see the desk, but at least the piles are now straight.
I blame feng shui.
TG
“But sometimes, it gets too messy, even for me, and I have to nuke everything and start over.”
I can sympathize with you. I take this approach with the books on my main bookshelf. The term “bookshelf” is actually a bit of a misnomer — thanks to its previous life as an entertainment center, the shelves are *quite* deep, perfect for stacks of junk to accumulate. A more appropriate title for my bookshelf would be “the book, pop can, model, change
and miscellaneous paper repository.”
Every year or so, it spirals out of control and I begin a frenzied effort to organize. When this happens, I go all out: taking every book out, deciding whther or not it makes it back on the shelf, organizing books first by size, then by genre, and finally alpha by author. It doesn’t help that I am constantly buying books, either.
I was the same way “leave it messy, at least I know where everything is” which was a lie to hide my laziness. The problem with filing systems is that people half use them, then they don’t trust that things are where they should be so the filing system becomes less than useless as you never know whether items are in the filing system, on the desk, somewhere else or lost. Get a filing system. Have the system close enough that you can start new files and/or file things without getting up (even when on the phone). Make sure EVERYTHING goes in the system. HAve a file for “Everything Else” to save you putting bits and pieces on the desk “until you find a spot for them”. Once you do this you know everything is filed, so you know if you file it you won’t lose it. There begins to be more pressure to “file it so you don’t lose it”, rather than the old system of “don’t file it so that you have a vague idea of where it may be”.
True freedom can come only from thorough discipline.
In web site design most of my bits and pieces of info come in email so I have the same complete filling system. This is not just limited to website designers of course, most people have a better computer filing system than they do a real world filing system, even if that means deleting every email!
I’m always appalled when people tell me that they delete email
There aren’t many things that I delete — not even spam. I keep them to run statistics on from time to time.
But that’s a good idea to consistently use a filing system. I have pretty bad short-term memory, so I have to use a similar technique to keep track of some things. I have to make sure I put my wallet, keys, etc. in the same place every evening. If I were to just toss those things down wherever, I’d never remember where I left them last, unless I paused to make a conscious effort to remember it for later.
I finished cleaning up my desk yesterday afternoon. I’ve taken Gus’ suggestion and created a bunch of new file folders in which to store the various printouts that I accumulate. The only papers that will stay out on my desk will be for projects that I am currently working on.
If I had a decent digital camera here at the office, I would have taken before and after shots.
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Some good advice if you need to get your desk (life?) in order geek ramblings � Desk? What desk?