04.21.08
Piles, piles, and more piles
The last few weeks have been so hectic I can barely find a place on my desk to do my work. I was off for just half a day last Friday and the remaining white space on my desk was consumed by stacks of books and interoffice mailers that landed there in my absence. It was doubly hard to concentrate last Friday because I was awakened early in the morning by a rare Midwestern earthquake. A few hours later, an aftertshock shook us at work, as if we didn’t already have enough to chat about. It seems there have been too many distractions lately, from people in the office to the moving ground beneath my feet.
This week I face the challenge of cramming 5 work days into 4. I’ll be out of the office for most of next week while I attend IUG in Washington, DC. I’m dreading in advance the amount of stuff that will clutter my desk while I’m out. I feel more than the usual pressure to clean up the piles so I’ll know what’s new when I get back. No point in having old problems mix with the new. When I return, I’ll have to write up a report summarizing what I saw and learned (unless I can cobble it together in the airport on the way back).
Maybe I need for a crack to open in the ground and swallow my desk. That would certainly solve my immediate problems of having a messy desk- both before I leave town and after I return.
04.14.08
Has anyone seen my desk?
I’ve lost my desk to paper piles and disorganization again. Somehow, all of my grand attempts to keep paper clutter off my desk and filed away have completely failed me. Stacks of papers, problem books, and partially completed projects have crept up from the depths of Paper Hell and spread themselves across my desk. Some papers blend into two piles simultaneously, which means if I bother to throw anything away, I’ll have read it and evaluate it before I pitch it.
I know what the problem is– I’ve not been filing papers as soon as I touch them. I caught myself throwing a piece of paper on a pile today and thinking, “I’ll file it later.” Bad girl! That’s how I got into so much trouble in the first place. Too much procrastination makes for a huge project later.
To make matters worse, I haven’t been cleaning off my desk at the end of the day. I’ve been too exhausted and overwhelmed to organize my papers at any point in the day, which means I start the next day exhausted and overwhelmed just looking at the mess when I walk into my office. The paper gremlins seem to multiply when I’m distracted by a crisis or have too many meetings in one day.
Cleaning off my desk is like working out– I know it’s good for me and I know how good I’ll feel after my workout, but some days it’s easier to lie on the couch and watch TV while grazing from a bag of potato chips. It’s painless to let the mess build up, but stressful and unhealthy to live this way in the long run. (Too bad those papers aren’t really potato chips– I doubt I’d let them pile up!)
Maybe the vacation day I randomly scheduled for this Friday is the medicine I need to take. I will make it my goal to clear off my desk (and not just pile it in a corner), so that when I return next Monday, I’ll start with a clear idea of what next week’s problems and priorities will be.
04.13.08
Love that nonfiction
One of the best things about reviewing vendor cataloging and processing is that I get to see all of our new nonfiction titles. Nonfiction is my favorite genre to read. I love to learn and almost everything interests me, from Attention-Deficit Disorder to Zoology. Quite often, I hear about an interesting book on our local NPR affiliate, then I check for the title in our catalog and place a hold on it. Other times, I discover an interesting book or two (or three) on my truck and flag them with my hold. A day or two later, I’m walking away from the circ desk with an armload of knowledge.
Our database vendor EBSCO has released a new product called NoveList Plus, which will profile narrative nonfiction. This means it would list a book that was a personal account of travel, rather than a travel guide. Our library will subscribe to it in the near future and it’ll be interesting to see if it profiles any of the nonfiction I like to read.
I also saw a post in the Everything is Miscellaneous blog, written by David Weinberger, about a beta website for book lovers called Booklamp. Booklamp expects to analyze patterns in writing and recommend books to registered users, much like Pandora analyzes patterns in music and delivers music according to your profile. My nonfiction reading interests jump around so much, I don’t know if there’s a reader’s service out there that can recommend new nonfiction to me, but I’m willing to try them all. If I find a good one, I’ll be sure to share it here.
04.10.08
Tornado hit my desk
We were under the threat of severe weather all day, although none developed, if you don’t count my what happened on my desk. After dealing with network problems that affected access to our ILS and unexpected employee issues, my desk looked like a tornado hit it. There were stacks of books I had requested for corrections, unfinished statistics, unfinished reviewing of vendor and in-house work, and problems brought to my attention by the director and other employees. As I prepared to leave my office at the end of the day, I was frustrated to my inner core. I wondered if I should try to clean up my desk or leave it as it was and hope for a better day tomorrow. I mean, tomorrow is Friday, so how bad can it get?
I wondered what would my desk look like if a real tornado hit the library after I left. Would I be able to piece together my work or would it be so scattered that I’d never find any of the important stuff? How would I pick up the pieces and determine new priorities after a real disaster struck? I think that thinking like this from time to time allows me to put into perspective extremely frustrating days like today, where I thought I had my projects all lined up, then unexpected events took over and became my top priorities. It helps me to better deal with the challenges of management when events careen wildly out of control, because the problems that develop can’t be as bad as I perceive them to be and really do have solutions. As Robert Burns said: “The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray.” A perfect quote to sum up many of my work days. But it’s nothing a glass or two of wine can’t fix.
04.07.08
More digital storage
I opened the Best Buy circular on Saturday to get a peek at Sunday’s sales and spied a wireless Western Digital external hard drive with 1TB (terabyte) of storage for $239. Wow! A packrat’s dream! Now I have a place to store all of the digital pictures, video, and songs clogging up my laptop’s hard drive. One TB will allow me to store up to 285,700 digital photos, or up to 250,000 MP3 songs, or up to 76 hours of digital video. I’ll never have to delete a less-than-perfect picture ever again. I can keep ‘em all. Muha ha ha ha ha!
The sales guy at Best Buy thought I was overshooting my storage needs, but I forgave him. He had no idea he was talking to the Packrat Librarian. Come on, Dude, I can’t pitch anything– digital or physical. Of course I need 1TB of storage. Heck, I should probably buy 2TB. It’s just another $200 more on Buy.com.
I hope to set it up sometime soon and begin moving files off my laptop, where my tiny (in comparison) 40GB hard drive has very little free space left. I was doing all right with the hard drive’s capacity until I had to get a digital camera last year. Ever since then, I’ve been filling it up with pictures and videos of kids, cats, and nature.
Oh well, I guess having digital pictures beats having boxes and boxes of prints stashed in the corner of our bedroom, where they never made it into photo albums. They gather more dust and guilt with each passing year. Same for our video cassettes– they’re overflowing our media cabinet in the family room and I find them scattered about the house in odd places. I ought to digitize them someday… now that I have a spacious new external hard drive gathering dust atop the desk in the den.
04.01.08
Paper panic
I couldn’t find two very important pieces of paper yesterday and such a feeling of panic arose in me. I’ve been working very hard to file papers as soon as I got them, not touch them more than once, and not stack them in piles. I’ve really grown to like the clean desktop concept and the feeling of calm that comes with it. Then when I couldn’t find these two pieces of paper, my first thought was, “Eeeek, I’ve thrown them away by mistake! How could I have done that? It was such a bad idea to get organized. I knew where everything was when it was in piles.”
I frantically searched what remained of my piles and files: my nearly empty in-box, a pile of stuff left over from the big purge awhile back, and a folder marked “DO.” I found some interesting stuff I’d forgotten about squirreled away in those places, like those darned appraisals I was going to do a few weeks ago. But I didn’t find the papers I was looking for.
In a fit of desperation, I checked the green conference bag I bring to work every day, sure I wouldn’t find them in there. Why would I take them home with me?, I asked myself. They were part of a larger group of papers, so I wouldn’t need them by themselves.
Surprise! That’s where they were. I was relieved I found them, frustrated I couldn’t find them, and aggravated that I forgot where I put them. Some days I feel like I wake up and have totally forgotten everything that happened in my life up until that morning.
