Getting Organized: First observation
October 7, 2006
So on the left is my first observation. Just to get started so I'd have some room, I looked to pick up the papers first. And low and behold, there's a room under all that (believe it or not). It made such a huge difference that I'm truly amazed at how big a problem paper is for me.
Part of that is because the file cabinet is full with old stuff that hasn't been totally archived off yet. So they overran the "to be filed" pile in my inbox. So clearly I need to organize some files, and shuffle some off to the garage. Just to get room to work, all the papers went into a filebox, which is now a big mess temporarily.
With room to work, I moved onto putting everything obvious away, while keeping track of what was where, thinking about why it was there, and keeping a list.
I arrived at this pile of miscellanea. There's curtains I was supposed to hang. Those have no home because I didn't want to make a home, because that would be admitting I had put off hanging them for so long, and long enough into the future that they needed a home. There's my 2006 paper airplane calendar that is still sealed in plastic. Some picture frames (I always need frames and those were on sale). A couple of boxes of photo negatives, a video camera...all stuff with no definite home.
The rest of the clutter cleanup went well, and got us into a much better place (good enough to vacuum today at least).
So I'll need homes for all the homeless stuff. The main thing I learned from this first exercise is that filing is a big problem. So I went to work on that problem next.
