There’s a rule they teach you in management courses – the only paper on your desk should be the one you’re working on. Everything else should be out of sight.
That rule was invented before the electronic era – it focused the mind on ONE piece of paper, ONE task at hand, ONE thing.
With email and twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and most of the documents of your current high priority interest (or your boss’s!) open on your computer, my guess is this rule is being violated out of all proportion. I know I am guilty. It is not unusual for me to have a few emails open, two or three documents, be it word, excel, power point, something else and a webpage or two. My virtual desktop is a mess and so is my physical desk. Every now and again I do a bit of tidying up and then the whole process starts again.
OK, for those of you or are reading this critically, I promise I will never teach time management! On the other hand, perhaps I should. They say you teach best what you need to learn most!
But when I REALLY need to focus, I can.
Perhaps you are thinking ‘You are fooling yourself, Riana. With so much distraction, your energy is scattered, your thinking is not clear and you are probably drowning in feelings of overwhelm.’
Hmmm… you may have a point… at least some of that is true…
So every now and again, I do a clean-up and tidy up and thank Microsoft for the search function on my laptop otherwise the likelihood of finding anything ever again is too real and too dire to contemplate.
If only there was such a function for finding those all-important physical things that are so near and dear to me!
Yes, you’ve guessed it. I am a hoarder. Just like my virtual space, my physical space fills up easily. I can find a space for anything that I absolute have to have easy access to and still have the living space around me that I treasure. I amaze myself at how well I can utilise space. And when I am stuck, I call in the cavalry, my daughter. She’ll make a space in no time for the thing that needs its own space. Job done. Great!
So far so good, until you want something specific and you have no idea where you put it. So you start looking through all your stuff, your secret storage places and you come across all sorts of interesting bits and pieces. I actually enjoy looking at it all, reminiscing and remembering why I kept the thing and wow, how interesting an article was, and still is, the one I cut out and filed away five years ago…
Before you know it, a couple of hours have passed and you still haven’t found the thing you started looking for. That is, if you can still remember what it was you started looking for in the first place. Suddenly you’re fed-up with the mess you’ve made and you start shoving things back; not necessarily where they came from. And of course you’re left with overflow because The Law of Expansion was at work.
The Law of Expansion
Scientists tell us the universe expands all the time. You really don’t need a scientist to tell you this. You only have to observe The Law of Expansion. This law states that an object, once it’s left its place of storage, stretches, expands and renews itself. The upshot of this is that it can never occupy the same storage space again. This is a common holiday phenomenon. You go on holiday, pack your bag to the requisite 20kg allowed on the plane, go and have fun, then when you re-pack your bag for the return trip, you cannot get it all in without a struggle. And would you believe it, sometimes it even weighs more! And this is WITHOUT the mementos and extra bits you acquired during your stay.
Now imagine the havoc when you have been looking for something for hours, cannot find it, start shoving things back and is left with a pile of stuff that now needs its own space and place!
What I need is a system. A system to file and pack things away, so I know where to find it; something that’s hassle free; quick to do and free from emotional distress. That’s right, I don’t even want to be faced with the decision ‘keep it, chuck it’ when I rediscover those aged ‘Mommy I love you’ letters and start drooling about how sweet they were all those years ago.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was such a system?
Photo credit: Loretta Humble
