An office decluttering post

Whoops, I almost went to bed without posting. The main reason is that it is Wednesday night and I had to clear space for the cleaning people. Please, save your jokes about cleaning for the cleaning people. The issue is that they clean surfaces - sinks, toilets, floors, etc. - and if they cannot reach a surface, they don't clean it. They do a certain amount of stacking things up and making them neat, but I want them to do the real scrubbing that I don't want to do. Plus, I own too much stuff and leave it around too much anyway, so getting rid of trash, emptying and loading the dishwasher and putting away the clean laundry is something I should be doing on a regular basis. It's just that Wednesday nights give me the kick in the ass I need to get it done.

I have been thinking since my rant the other night about my DWP (designated writing place) and I think I’ve got a game plan for clearing some mental space to write by clearing some physical space. My goal is to take one box (the kind copier paper comes in) of stuff out of my office every day. Tonight, I threw away a bunch of miscellaneous junk that was piled on my reading chair – a comfy Queen Anne chair and ottoman from my previous life - including a power cord to a printer that is long gone, a pair of jeans that have seen better days, and an old kid Halloween costume. There is no good reason for the last two items to even be in here, but there they were, keeping the chair from its primary mission of giving me a place to hang and read, or do cross stitch, or just close my eyes for ten minutes.

I also jettisoned office organizers that just encourage piling stuff up on the desk – a little one for envelopes (because I have so many letters going out every day) and a big vertical stacking one. In fact, I took the same kind off my desk at work today, too, because it was just encouraging me to keep stuff “just in case” on my desk, when what I want to do is just look at one project at a time. Back in the home office, I cleared off a shelf of loose pictures and memory stuff from trips and piled it up in a box in my closet on a shelving unit I put in there a few months ago to hold all this stuff I don’t want to look at. Eventually, I will get those pictures in albums, or not, but I needed that shelf to put some of the many journals (see earlier post, below, concerning the many, many journals) that were hanging around on my desk.

Just now, I moved the speakers down off the top of the desk, too, and put up just the beehive ginger jar Scott got me for my birthday. Wow, it’s like having a whole new piece of furniture, the kind I wanted when I saw the display at the store.

Sorry, I know this wasn’t really a writing post, but sometimes the process is about getting to the place where one can write. Now I need to see about getting a new chair. This one is killing my butt.

~Noelle 07/09/08