rdewald's Journal: .6k: Discipline Practice

I did not want to do this project today. It started off poorly, I spilled some shredded paper. Great, now I have 2000 items right in the middle of the floor to throw away again.

So, I stopped, took a deep breath and made a deal with myself. I had downloaded the new Bruce Springsteen CD from iTMS, why not just fire it up on the iPod-boombox and hang with the project at least through until the end of the album.

I ended up forgetting that I had the iPod on "Repeat All" and I got about 2 hours in. Great album. Just a damned fine example of American music. If you don't like this album, then you don't care for music much, do ya?

Anyway, it was back to the desk. I think I accumulated 15,000 items on top of the desk since I last was working here. It was mostly mail. The magazines are consumables because I take them to work for the waiting rooms after I read them. I wonder what the job-seeking think when they see National Geographic, Texas Highways and The Nation on the reception area tables at my hospice? Anyway, into the backpack they go. I read periodicals at lunch and while waiting for meetings to start at work.

Anyway, I had a lot of mail that was bills that I had electronic copies of, so I got out the big scissors and just opened envelopes and fed the shredder for a while. I thought of Ollie North. God, the amount of paper we generate as redundant information media in this world....

Ah, then the real challenge. The [shreeking noise] right-hand top drawer. This is my place where I put stuff I don't want to lose but I haven't decided where I am going to keep. I imagine that on some periodic basis a clone of mine will sit down and sift through this drawer and find reasonable and convenient places to store all this stuff.

My clone sucks at this. It never gets done.

So, I start by just throwing stuff away. Lots of credit card transactions receipts. Some months/years old. Note to self: I need a tickler file for these. I can file them according to date and get rid of them once I have an electronic record of the transaction.

I'm asking the clone to do this one, too.

In the meantime, I am throwing this stuff away (actually recycling). MOMENT::CLASS="EXTREME MENTAL CLARITY";You know what? This stuff is all going to the landfill (or recycling) anyway, no matter what I do or don't do, the choice I have is--how much of my life do I want to live without having to manage it? /MOMENT.

Ah, easier throwing stuff away now. There you go. Find a nice little place in the landfill, you're getting there way early, find a nice spot. Keys, old namebadges, broken tools the clone was supposed to fix, the question I kept asking is "Is this useful to me now?"

E.G.: I found a cell phone charger for my Motorola V330 for which I paid about $40 about a year ago. I no longer have the V330, I never plan to have another one (nice phone, but I'm a Treo Man now), BUT, I hang on to the damn charger because I paid so much for it so recently.

What am I doing? I'm storing some stuff for a while before I send it to the landfill. I am subsidizing the garbage costs for the great city of New York no more. See ya, charger. Damn that feels good. That's liberation from my own tyranny.

Holy crap! I have two full packs of full-sheet labels. I need these for work. They aren't even open! Into the backpack. There's an old US Robotics Courier V.everything modem. Damn, that is still one fine piece of engineering. Hmm, that's going to have to go to the second pass. Oh look, yet another answering machine! Now I have four! Yea! I will take this to work, patients need answering machines sometimes. I bring the other two in later.

Oh, THAT'S where I put those cable ties. No wonder I couldn't find them.

At the end of the two hours I am feeling light and cheerful. I got a lot done. At the beginning of the next session, the desk will be completed. That's a big deal. I like this desk a lot more now. Its airy and roomy, lots of open surface. The few items on the desk are either things I use every day or things I am reminding myself to take to work tomorrow (Hmm, need to find a place for that stuff). It's really a very serene feeling.

So, I didn't want to do this tonight, but because of my rapidly increasing social schedule I had to do it tonight or wait until Friday. So, I made myself do it. It got hard right at the start, I negotiated with myself and did it anyway. I did the practice.

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

Practice.

cool man...

[Em Emalb]

I have a sort of similiar rule of thumb for my clutter:

If I haven't used it in a year, it's gone.

There is no reasoning (aka theory) behind it, mainly my OCD kicking in.

But hey, to each his own.

Keep on keepin on.

Re:cool man...

[rdewald]

There is a subvariant of OCD known as hoarding/collecting disorder. For these people, buying acquiring and collecting things is a way to manage their feelings. They end up having to buy larger and larger homes in which they can barely move around because of all the stuff stacked in them.

I used to aspire to the "haven't used it in a year" standard, but I am now settling on the "Is it useful to me now?" standard. For example, I used the V330 charger less than a year ago. I used it as late as last October.

Re:cool man...

[The Fun Guy]

I never throw anything away. Everything is raw material.

Just last week, I went down into the basement, and saw the drain pipe from our new air conditioning system pouring a thin stream of water onto the basement floor. It was close being right over the sump, but not quite aligned. The water was splashing into a fair sized puddle. What to do?

Why, go over to the "raw materials" crate I keep under my workbench, to see if I had a piece of tubing, or flexible pipe, or old guttering, or conduit, or *anything* tha

thank you

[elmegil]

I have had similar experiences recently with my garage and my basement, both of which were out of control.

The basement has a long way to go, but it's relatively clean and the tools are segregated from "the stuff tools do stuff to". The latter being what I presume must be an obvious dividing principle for organization which only recently occurred to me. The garage was thankfully a much smaller job.

I find I always have a lot of inertia trying to start these things because they seem so insurmountable fro

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Wait,

[Shadow Wrought]

I thought it was chop wood, carry water, enlightenment, chop water, Kerry Wood. Hmmm. Yeah, your way sounds better;-)

Congrats on getting the desk done, we just cleaned out the storage shed this weekend and I found a box of stuff that I hadn't seen in nigh on 5 years! Most of it, surprisingly enough, is headed for the Salvation Army.

storing lots of stuff

[robi2106]

I had similar revelations while moving out of my apartment a month ago. Mounds and mounds of credit card receipts and the associated clutter of a computer guy's desk..... ugh

jason