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.
04.01.08
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.
03.15.08
Clean desktop
Ever since I purged my desktop and files of several pounds of paper two weeks ago, I’ve become accustomed to seeing lots of white space on my desktop. I can honestly say I’m hooked on it. I can see the smooth, flat, light gray Formica for the first time in years. It brings a feeling of peacefulness to the whole room.
Anything that lands on the desk doesn’t stay there long now– that’s my new goal. I can say it’s almost becoming an obsession to keep paper off my desktop. I want it clean when I leave at the end of the day, which is what most normal people do. But I’m not normal and many times in the past, I’d leave stuff out when I left, because I knew I’d be working on it the next day. As long as it wasn’t confidential paperwork, why bother to put it away? I’d just have to get it out again. I was partly afraid if I put it away, I’d forget the next day I was working on it. You know– out of sight, out of mind.
The best incentive of all is the reduction in my stress levels. Seeing a clean desktop at the end of one workday and at the beginning of the next tells me everything is going to be all right and that I can handle all of my projects, employees, and responsibilities. That’s probably the best reason of all to keep it clean.
