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.
03.05.08
The big purge
When a vendor sales rep stopped by this morning and asked if I had received a packet he had sent me last fall, I couldn’t remember if I had it. I went back to my office to look for it, but when I saw the huge paper piles and thought of the stuffed files, I knew that if I had it, I’d never find it before the meeting got started. We gave him a new assignment to research for us, so I wasn’t worried that I couldn’t find his packet (I don’t think he ever sent it to me in the first place). But after he left, I was so disgusted with myself for having so much paper junk that I began a massive paper purge.
I was heartless. I thought about the fact that 80% of what gets filed never gets looked at again. I upped that number to 90% by the time I finished purging. I started making a stack of discarded papers. Everything went in it– old committee papers, old conference proceedings, old vendor promotional pamphlets. Most of it was 2-12 years old– gaahh! How could I keep that stuff so long?
By the time I finished, the paper stack was a whopping 18″ tall. It probably weighed 15 pounds or more. One of my employees stopped in my office to ask me a question and saw the growing pile. She jokingly asked if it was for her.
The pile was so big I couldn’t carry it, so I placed it on a book truck and wheeled it to the recycle bin (where I filled it to overflowing!). Another of my employees noticed all the paper and asked if I was doing a little spring cleaning. Yep– that and more.
I still have plenty of files to empty, so this project isn’t over yet. It’s hard to believe that I did a similar paper dump before moving into my office nearly 4 years ago. I hate to think I’m already outgrowing my file capacity and shelf space after only 4 years. But I’m involved in so many projects that the paper reproduces overnight. I believe that working in a cluttered, crowded and claustrophobic space every day creates a most insidious stress, which only intensifies when someone asks you if you’ve received something they sent you.
My desktop and office looked so much better by the end of the day. I haven’t seen so much of my desktop since we moved to this building. I can’t wait to go to work tomorrow.
02.14.08
I need a clone
I need a clone. I think that for each day I’m out of the office, my workload doubles. I have so many trucks of vendor cataloging to review that I’m going to have to pass much of it through without looking at it. I know I’m supposed to be evaluating the quality of their cataloging and processing, but when I have 9 trucks of stuff to check, somethin’s gotta give. It’s either my sanity or those books– and I’m planning on keeping my sanity. If I had a clone, she’d split the checking with me, or even take it over entirely, handling problems when she finds them.
Email isn’t any better– it floods my inbox to the point that I lose emails, something I thought happened only to disorganized people– (Oops! that might be me!). I’m trying to do things like color-code email from certain people, like my boss. Email from him is in red text– talk about getting my attention– that does it! I also use colored flags in Outlook to quickly mark and find special emails that I need to act on, regardless of who sent them. If I had a clone, she would be assigned the job of reading all my emails and giving me a summary of what’s really important.
The piles of problems still sit on my desk and some days, they just have to sit there and grow bigger. I have to get tired of looking at them to really act on them. I know that’s not the best way to deal with problems, but some days, it’s the best I can do. There’s always something more urgent that comes up and isn’t on the to-do list. That’s when I decide whether or not I should delegate it, back-burner it, or do it myself. Kind of like plunging into cold water and getting it over with all at once, rather than getting wet one inch of skin at a time and slowly freezing to the bone. If I had a clone, she would handle all the problems, deciding when to delegate them or do them herself.
If I had a clone…we could accomplish so much together…
01.21.08
Introduction to a packrat’s life
The blogging world is great for those of us with multiple personalities, isn’t it! With this blog, I hope to share with my readers what it’s like to be a packrat and a librarian. I’m the Cataloging Manager at a public library, where I supervise 7 people. I make decisions on cataloging and processing functions in my department and take on many special projects, like outsourcing and MARC record loading. I try to solve day-to-day problems that continually land on my desk and I struggle to keep up with professional reading. That’s where the packrat part comes in.
I have numerous piles of papers, books, and binders on my desk and on book trucks parked in my office. My hanging files are stuffed to the gills and ready to explode. I have a fear that if I throw away anything, be it a piece of paper or an entire folder’s worth, I will need it again. Some days I can hardly find the top of my desk and room to work on a current project. I can file stuff, but many times, I cannot find it again or forget that I filed it in the first place.
I suspect I have ADD or AD/HD, but have never successfully convinced a doctor to treat me. I saw a doctor who specialized in it and he told me it was a problem only in young boys, so there was no way I could have it. He said my disorganization was the result of being a busy working mom who has a lot on her mind. But I’ve been reading 4 Weeks to an Organized Life with AD/HD by Jeffrey Freed and Joan Shapiro and everything in the book speaks to me!
I hope blogging about my packrat tendencies will at least let me laugh at myself, even if I can’t help myself. Stay tuned…
