Sysadmin Field Notes - Getting Organized Archives

December 23, 2006

So here we are, a couple of months after declaring war on the clutter? How have I fared? Pretty good I think, all things considered. You can see some pictures of my room without any special preparation. In the original entry's pictures, you can certainly see a big difference.

I followed most of the steps in the getting organized book fairly closely. I did have a real storage problem though, and until I went out and bought some Ikea office furniture (not my favorite visually, but functional) I couldn't quite get over the hump. I still have work to do (notice the overflowing bookshelf), and there's an unorganized drawer or two, but overall I have a lot more workspace, and my photo stuff isn't lying around all over the place.

So now I just have to get rid of that terrible ceiling fan, paint, and add some decor.

October 23, 2006

So life definitely intruded on my plans. I didn't have time to really drive through and categorize and analyze everything, and my room became pretty cluttered again. Not as bad, but still pretty ugly. This time though, there wasn't a paper explosion, and cleaning it up went very quickly. I ended up with a large box of "stuff that needs a home" and a big box of photography equipment. The photography equipment is a big part of the clutter, so I'm currently trying to figure out a storage solution for that.

October 9, 2006

So i should preface this by saying I've always known I have a filing problem. Whatever my "inbox" is always overflows. Whether that be a to-file-pile, a folder in the files...I always put it off until it's totally overwhelming.

So this process is about figuring out why. As I think about it, and look at the kind of papers that are out and the folders I have, I suspect it has to do with my brain that tries to normalize everything. I've always tried to reduce the number of categories in my files...thinking that broad categories would be easier to maintain.

The problem with that scheme for me is that it causes me stress (which turns into avoidance of the task) when there's no place to put things. With broad categories, I find myself conflicted about the locations of things..."Okay, car insurance; does that go into the 'insurance' folder or the 'car' folder? So I have to decide, and I tend to make the decision differently between filings.

So my files are a mess and hard to find anything, which makes me not want to file the stuff that's out. Plus, the practical matter is that my 'credit card' folder gets overrun with statements and is huge, so it's a pain to deal with.

This is my best guess about why I have trouble filing. Before I had dismissed those sorts of feelings as just being excuses, etc... Maybe they are, but according to the first book they are very common reasons people fail to organize. So rather than fight them or be made to feel worse about those little 'quirks', I decided to try and adapt to them.

So with tips from the book I attacked the existing files. I decided to make very specific folders for just about everything, with nice computer printed labels (to make myself feel better about the categories). This required my first purchases, sheets of Office Depot brand Avery Labels (printed to with a free Mac Avery label program), green hanging folders, and colored insert folders. I picked colors for overall category, made hanging files for broad categories, and then put very specific folders within them. If something doesn't have a folder, it can be placed in the hanging file for the right category until I can make a folder for it.

I think this will help quite a bit, because there will be less file-time ambiguity about where something goes, which was a chief cause of procrastination I think. I also picked up bankers boxes that accept hanging files for my old files. So pre 2005 is organized and in the garage now.

So now I got to sort through that box of fear and test out the system. It worked very well. I'm left with a very small pile of pending stuff (which is my next task to figure out how I want to organize that stuff), and everything went pretty easily into the files. It was a big box; probably took about and hour and a half to go through it. Hopefully I won't have to again.

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.

October 6, 2006

Hah. Shen weighs in with "geeez your room is really messy!".

You can say that again.

I haven't been home with time since I posted those pictures, but I'm planning to begin the tackling of it tomorrow morning. The book from Amazon came and I started reading it.

I definitely am starting to see the overall categories...we have work, general computer usage, photography stuff, and household files. That really fills the bulk of my room (this by the way is the analysis phase of getting organized).

In thinking about how I might solve some of my problems, one roadblock I think I'll encounter is space around the computer. Since I use the computer for just about everything, and there's only one of them, it makes it hard to follow the advice about breaking your area into work "zones" for each task.

I think I might try to find some rolling storage containers that I can roll over when I work on that particular task, that contain everything I need for a task.

Hopefully tomorrow morning I should have some progress to post.

October 2, 2006

So it began with a google search for getting organized. I saw an article on getting organized by Steve Pavlina, a software developer turned personal development speaker and writer who I've listed to/read before. That seems like as good a place as any to start.

I usually start learning new skills by reading. He recommended Getting Organized from the Inside Out as the book he started with, so I ordered that.

Clearly his suggestions involve the moving to a different layer to think about the problem. I have to recognize my disorganization as a problem, and attack it methodically and relentlessly, just like I'd attack any technical problem. So I'll start by following all the directions in his article as I clean my room.

I've enclosed some seriously embarassing photos so you can see the magnitude of my problem. The typical pattern is that it gets this messy, then I get fed up and clean it, and two weeks later it's this messy again.

The funny part is that shooting the pictures for this, I managed to lose my lens cap in 3-4 minutes. It took 2-3 minutes of searching to find it. Perfectly appropriate. Even more appropriately, if you take a look at the picture:

Is that it's on a shelf with a water bottle (no doubt missing at some point), missing masking tape, and a missing belt. If only this were the only shelf of lost items in my house. I obviously have a problem with this.

So tonight/tomorrow I'll clean, purge and report back with what I find according to the questions that Steve asks in his article, and try and gain some insight as to exactly what I need to fix.

October 2, 2006

So the process of organizing really comes down to having a system for automating decisions about where everything goes. Disorganized people have few or no systems, so they must make every decision on a case by case basis. Eventually this becomes overwhelming, and clutter begins to pile up.

-- Getting Organized by Steve Pavlina

Here's my public admission (for those who don't know me). I am a seriously disorganized person. Hopefully this admission won't make me un-hireable by people in the future reading this after getting here from a link on my resume. If, future potential employer, you are reading this, you should take into account that I'm publicly putting myself out there right now to try and change this, because it bothers me greatly.

My disorganization manifests itself in many ways:

1. I miss meetings
2. I forget where I'm supposed to be at any given time
3. My room is filled with clutter>
4. I can never find anything
5. I lose things almost instantaneously upon setting them down.

In short, I suspect my life is much more stressful than it needs to be. That bothers me, so I'm changing it. What's more, I'm doing it out in front of everyone here, even though it's embar. I'm also hoping that maybe you guys might find something I do interesting, useful, or instructive for your own personal causes.

Is this the most important thing to change about myself? I don't think so, but I do think it makes a great starting point.

So I don't know exactly where it will lead, but I'll keep working at it and posting here. So at the end of 60 days I plan to be a lot more better about managing my time and being able to locate things I need.