Tag Archives: clutter

Clutter. Ask a better question.

21 Friday Feb 2020

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Clutter. Clutter of the mind, clutter of the desk, clutter of the computer. All of it gets in the way, and all of it is our fault.

Edwin C. Bliss, author of time management texts of yore, suggested that people made a big mistake when deciding whether or not to keep something, like a document or file. The erring folk asked, “Will I conceivably ever need this again?”, and because ‘conceivably’ is always, er, conceivable, it gets filed away for ever. Clutter.

Bliss suggested asking a different question. He proposed asking the question, “If I lost this, what would I do?”

If the answer was ‘shrug’, he’d bin it. Alternatively, the mind would be directed towards finding a solution to finding the potentially lost, and the imagination would present answers as to how to minimise the need or facility for retrieval.

Of course, we now have The Cloud (a.k.a. someone else’s reliable and secure – honest – computer), and memory sticks (my preferred option). But the problem with these can be the same if we aren’t careful – we just gather sticks and clutter them, instead.

So the time management advice of the day is to manage your retrieval system by first of all only putting into it what you absolutely know would be irretrievable if you didn’t, but also to name the files in such a way as to find them easily when you do need them.

In the front office at Newport Central Police Station in Gwent, there was a computer. By virtue of its location it was used by everyone who needed to write something quickly for prisoner handovers, reports, whatever. Anyone using this desktop was presented with a screen containing shortcuts to Doc1. Not just one Doc1, but somehow to a plethora of Doc1s. Notwithstanding my confusion as to how many Doc1s a computer could create, how and why they managed to save them to the Desktop screen instead of the document folder I will never understand: but the question also arose as to how long anyone would take to find ‘their’ Doc1 if they needed it again?

Giving a saved file a searchable, relevant name is important, and there is no limit to how long that name could be (within reason). Once the immediate need for access is over, stick it somewhere safe, accessible but out of the way. Stick, cloud, external drive, whatever suits. Learn how to use the search function on the documents and other folder windows (you’d be surprised how few people know how that works).

But don’t have your file icons cluttering your folders, desktop or laptop screen or desk (in the case of paper), dragging your attention away from the truly important, needed stuff. Your mind is for thinking. Not for managing files.

Do it Now.

 

For more on the subject, and other time management advice, buy this book, available from Amazon.

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Be like Elsa. Even you boys.

07 Thursday Nov 2019

Posted by in Discipline, Time Management, Uncategorized

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An interesting email from professional speaker Michael Heppell, this afternoon, described how leaves fall from trees. It was all scientific and stuff, and repeating the detail would be cheating, but the content made me think – “How much clutter do I possess?”, which in turn made me decide to ask you the same thing.

How much clutter do you possess?

As I sit in my office (third bedroom, annexed in a familial putsch which resulted in the inability of vagrant children to return home more than one at a time – which they have done, in shifts), I can see a pen holder chock-a-block with pens, letter trays full of stuff, chargers for various devices and a myriad of relevant files.

And that’s just the stuff I have to keep – the remainder of years of decluttering. I have two bookcases full of (mainly) my Seven Habits ‘collection’ that includes three autographed books and most, if not all their audio products and course workbooks (thanks, E-Bay), which is actually a testament to the hundreds of other books I have returned to charity over the years.

You see, my office is a relatively full, but nevertheless tidy reflection of my attempt at adherence to organised, principle-centred living.

But the rest of the house is testament to my spouse’s inability/unwillingness/stubborn refusal to get rid of the memories. Or tat. It’s subjective.

But my computer is full of e-clutter that I have to dispose of. So that’s tomorrow’s house-clearing task.

Anyway – is your home or workspace the same?

Have you kept everything you’ve ever recorded, completed, built, bought, written and read?

There is a theory that when we hoard clutter – and if we are honest a lot of what we retain is clutter – then we don’t own it.

It owns us.

My computer, for example, contains a hoard of old, written Personal Mission Statements and Value Statements. I have had terrible difficulty disposing of these and (probably) will only move them all to a memory stick when they ‘go’, tomorrow.

But they are holding me back because I keep rewriting them, only to find they haven’t really changed in tone or content since 2013. And because they are all there, I keep switching between them. It’s a silly, wasteful pastime and a small example of how retention of the ‘old’ can have an impact on the ‘now’ while also preventing, or at least hampering, the ‘next’.

A lot of the things we keep are ‘incompletes’, as many coaches call them. Things we intended to do but never did, but retain just in case we get back to them – where the reality is that we fear losing them, or at least fear the loss of time we’d have to expend if we DID, suddenly, decide that those three pages of the book we intended to write had to be rewritten from memory.

Look. All that tat? It’s like a password for an account we haven’t accessed since 2010. We haven’t needed it for 9 years, so its loss won’t be that much of a challenge. So as far as all that clutter is concerned, be like Elsa.

Let.

It.

Go.