My desk is the holding tank for nearly every item on my to-do list. Real and imagined to-do's, present and future to-do's, things to look at or read or projects to start "one day"; they all reside on the surface of my desk. Making it a very chaotic place to try and get any actual work done.
With Spring in the air, the magazine racks at bookstores and grocery stores everywhere are filled with articles about how to organize, prioritize, purge and clean all the crowded nooks and crannies of your home. I think it's time for me to pick up one of those magazines.
Most of the rest of my life and my house is decently organized, but my desk has always been the bane of my organizing existence. For me, if things and tasks and chores are out of sight, it usually means they're out of mind. Not permanently, mind you; calls I was supposed to return or things I meant to pick up next time I'm at the hardware store will eventually get remembered, usually a long time after I intended to do them in the first place. But I think that's why I feel the need to have everything somehow visible on my work surface. If I put it neatly in a clearly labelled manila folder, it gets piled in with all the other clearly labelled manila folders, meaning it gets basically lost again in the shuffle.
And this is kind of funny for me because I'm known as a pretty highly organized individual. For years I carried around a paper daytimer where I could write down every thought or idea that came to mind of things I need to do or look into or think about one day. Now thankfully I've made the transition to a BlackBerry for most of it, although I'm still glued for at least a good portion of my day to my computer screen on Microsoft Outlook, shuffling tasks and to-do's and watching the list grow ever-longer. Yet for every item I check off as "done", I seem to add another three in its place.
And my desk continues to pile up.
A few times each year, I take a giant chunk of day and vigorously go through everything on my desk. I file, sort, handle or trash everything, and then I vow to never ever let it get that bad again. To maintain it and stay on top of it on a daily basis. My resolve usually lasts for about three days, at which point in a harried bluster of activity I find myself tossing brochures for some trip I want to maybe go on someday onto the desktop, along with that day's mail and my son's school newsletter that I really must read but just don't have time for that day.
I think one of those organizational magazine articles could help right about now, at least to see if there are any ingenious ideas I haven't already read about or tried on how to manage your paper flow. Of course, the way my week is going that magazine would likely end up on a corner of my desk too, underneath a pile of clearly-labelled manila folders.
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