Areas of Unrest

20 August 2006 - Big Boxes

I'm tired and stressed out - news at eleven.

I had forgotten how overwhelming starting a new job is, even though I'm not only working for the same company but am in the same department with the same boss. There's a steep learning curve and, while it will all be good and is what I wanted, it's still a lot to deal with. I'm still sort of going between the old and new and I'm also getting ready to go on vacation and I've got my usual backlog of projects at home and, sheesh, I am exhausted.

One of my major projects is my ongoing quest for organizational nirvana, which would probably go better if I just did one thing at a time instead of starting a project and losing interest in it halfway through. So, for example, I should probably finish the whole thing of labeling photographs and putting them in the nice pretty photo archival box and filing all the negatives in sleeves in a notebook. Or going through storytelling tapes, i.e. listening to them and deciding not to keep 90% of them. Or reorganizing any of various collections.

Instead, I have decided to tackle the box of shame, which is my name for the box into which I dump mail and newspaper or magazine clipplings that I want to read or file but aren't urgent. Not that I was actually going to handle everything in the box once and just once like all the books on organizing your life tell you to. My moment of inspiration was to get a file box and use that and a bunch of hanging file folders to make the box of shame more organized and, hence, less shameful. This proved harder than it had to be because there are no real office supply stores anymore, just the bland and useless big box stores which don't sell whatever it is I happen to be looking for at any given moment. I did, eventually, find the file box of my dreams at The Container Store, which is also a big box of sorts but a better one. So now I am transforming a stack of papers into hanging file folders for calendar items (e.g. adult ed schedule from the county public schools, various calendars / newsletters from local venues etc.), shops and services (including restaurant reviews), and folders for each drawer to eventually file things in. Of course, I'm only halfway through that and a bit bored with the project, but so it goes.

Oh, well, things will get done.