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.
01.28.08
To file or to pile?
I laid a piece of paper on my “to file” pile today. Yes, that’s pile. I’ve let it grow into a pile, rather than file it as soon as I get it. Out of curiosity I measured the pile. It’s six inches tall. Pretty impressive, especially when you realize how thin a piece of paper is. That means there are lots and lots of papers in that pile, all waiting to be filed. I wonder when I’ll ever get around to filing them…
It’s time to get back on track re-engineering our TS department. Last fall, after a consultant made recommendations for sweeping changes, I’ve been frantically trying to put them all in place. Somewhere in these piles is a piece of paper with a Gantt chart and my progress (frozen in time) on each recommended change. Thankfully I have a computer file with that same chart and it’s proabably more up-to-date than the buried piece of paper. And I think I know where the thumb drive is with that file…
It’s going to be a busy late winter and spring. I have job descriptions to revise, statistics to compile and re-vamp, outsourcing projects to set up and monitor, and a SCAT table to create from scratch. This doesn’t include setting up OCLC holdings for our print and e-serials, giving employee performance appraisals, and cross-training my staff. Oh yes, and then there’s committee work, and conferences, and conference write-ups.
Sometimes I wish I could have a free day where I could come in and just go through my papers. Nobody would be allowed to call me or come into my office. I wouldn’t read email or blogs. I would have a large recycle bin handy to encourage me to lighten my load. I could wear comfortable work clothes, maybe even running shoes, to get me in the mood for action, rather than inertia. If I could bring in my husband, he would chastise me if I picked up a paper more than once and he’d keep me on track so I wouldn’t get bogged down or buried under the weight of the project. He’d also be there to remind me that if I had just filed the paper the first time I touched it, I wouldn’t have a pile to file and an huge project on my hands…
01.25.08
Packrat mind
One of the good things about being a packrat is that I usually can store a lot of “stuff” in my brain as well as on my desk and in my file cabinets. Today one of my coworkers asked me if our easy readers that were being selected by a vendor were also supposed to be cataloged. She couldn’t remember and had checked with another coworker, who also couldn’t remember if they were supposed to be cataloged. The answer was a quick and definite ”yes.” Good thing it was squirreled away in my brain (although it was also on the Outsourcing Wiki on the staff intranet).
Sometimes a memory like mine can be a liability, rather than an asset. I can remember something hurtful someone said to me in high school or what I wore to a Christmas party five years ago. It makes for some ugly fights with the spouse when you remember too much and they remember too little. This is not to say my memory is perfect or that I am one of those people who remembers EVERYTHING they ever said, did, ate, wore, etc., and is nearly crazy as a result. But having a good memory for what goes on and what has happened has certainly come in handy at work more than once in the last fifteen years! If it’s not in my memory, then it’s probably in one of my piles, or files, or somewhere in this mess….
01.24.08
Goodbye piles
Yesterday was a good day. I was tired of the piles of books and papers on my desk, so I decided to act on them, even the challenging stuff (okay– all of it was challenging!). I was chugging along and making great progress (which lifted my spirits and encouraged me to keep going) when my husband surprised me with an invitation to lunch. Not one to pass up a free lunch, I couldn’t refuse, even though I knew it would break my momentum. But he’s a fast eater and was motivated to get back to his job, so I was back working on my piles within an hour. The best part? I was beginning to see white space on my desk! Do you realize how calming white space is? Piles of stuff are inexplicably stressful, even if they don’t contain challenging problems.
Unfortunately, I was derailed a second time. I had an afternoon committee meeting to attend and the meeting dragged on for 1 1/2 hours. It killed my momentum and I lost steam when I needed it most. I salvaged the last hour of my day by tackling the easier piles and cleaning out my in-box– no small feat itself! Then I re-wrote my to-do list for the next day, which I thought was Friday, so I was in a bit of a panic. I couldn’t help feel as though I would have accomplished even more if I had not attended that meeting.
In all, I was still fired up knowing I dealt with stuff that was either on my mind or on my desk and got it done. I’m continually working on the “pick it up once” method of dealing with papers and problem books, but packrats have a hard time not stroking their treasured piles. It comes with the territory!
