Year-end Desk Organization
It’s December 2nd, and I’ve begun to implement my annual year-end discipline of sorting and organizing all my paperwork. This usually involves confronting multiple stacks of poorly arranged beshoven piles of paperwork, books, articles, advertisements, newspapers, ad magazines, and leftover popcorn bags. It’s not that I mind the appearance so much, but it’s almost cost prohibitive to add another room to our home to store it all. And my wife wouldn’t let me anyway.
I understand that the younger generation stores everything on their computers, the cloud, thumb drives, and peripheral hard drives. In our family, we are not there yet. My wife, as much as I love her, requires that every receipt or interesting article be copied and typically triple filed in at least three separate places. That must be for in the event our house burns completely down there might be at least one of the several files that will survive. I’m thinking this redundancy must satisfy some womanly innate desire for propagation. She would have done very well in the military where everything there has to be done in triplicate.
I tend to be of a bit different mindset. My desire is not to feel some sense of accomplishment by filing three of the same pieces of paper in separate files, but to be able to “find things.”
Because of this desire, over the years I have developed a rather sophisticated process of organizing and filing the things that I need very quick access to. I try to keep it simple and streamlined, believing everything should be at my fingertips at ready notice.
Rather than file articles and paperwork in skinny folders, hidden in a cabinet, I prefer to use my desk surface. Rather than having 48 or more separate folders, I have simply 7 piles of paperwork on my desk. Admittedly, I’m not always certain the article that I’m looking for is in which pile, but I know that it’s in one of the seven piles. For this reason, it’s only fair that you have a relatively large desk. My favorites are those desks which have pull out sideboards to add further temporary piles if needed. Additionally, it’s always wise to have your desk close to a wall surface to keep the piles from falling over. A room corner is perfect because it supports your filing system from two sides.
Now, a bit about the organization of these seven stacks of very important paperwork. It is imperative to realize that the seven pillars of data on your desk are only for “high priority” material which you have had some exposure to over the past five years or so. Anything other than that can be relegated to the floor or on shelves in front of the books on your bookshelves.
Please don’t think that these columns of receipts and articles upon the desk are static. It is an ever dynamic process of moving information from one stack of paperwork to another. This serves a couple of very important purposes. The most important is that while awaiting the football game to come on television, you can go to your desk and move papers from one stack to another, clearly demonstrating to your wife that you are doing some purposeful activity. This at least buys you some brownie points for watching football the rest of the afternoon and into the evening and Monday evening if you’re lucky.
Furthermore, there is something innately gratifying about moving paperwork from one stack to the other without having to actually “file” it anyplace. I am of the firm conviction that once filed, it is forgotten. With the desk surface system that I have, I know exactly where it is, on my desk…somewhere.
Another major benefit of my desk surface filing system is that if a person needs to move some of the top 50 sheets of paper or so to get to something residing at the very bottom of the stack and places the upper sheets on another different stack of data, you don’t need to worry about replacing it exactly where it came from. One doesn’t have to be worried about messing up the prior organization of your system because there’s no organization to disrupt anyway! Those papers can just stay where they are, and that can save a lot of time refiling stuff.
There are some limitations of this system, ceiling height, and floor load bearing restrictions. Dust can be a problem but I use a leaf blower for that.
Another caution I would express after years of experience is to never, I repeat never, place a full cup of coffee on your desk surface. I am convinced that there is some mysterious magnetism between stacks of paper and a full cup of coffee that soon leads to a real mess. Be forewarned!
Some wives might have a problem with this system…mine does. One suggestion is to wait until all of your magazines and ads stack up on all of your seven piles. You can wait until things get almost unmanageable, or when your wife says something, and then you can throw away all of your magazines quickly. Start with the magazines because they’re thicker and tossing them lowers your stacks substantially, appears that you’re actually doing something productive, and fills up the waste basket. That way your wife thinks you’ve actually performed some task that day, and you can go on to watch your football game with a sense of accomplishment and hopefully some measure of your wife’s blessing.
Speaking of football, on the other hand the game is about to start and I think I’ll just start an eighth pile. I’ll do the sorting “tomorrow,” it’s my favorite day of the week.