Celebrating Independence From Clutter

(Also see: The Ad Hoc To-Do-List for comparison.)

How am I spend­ing my Inde­pen­dence Day? I’m clean­ing and orga­niz­ing. Most­ly clean­ing. As you can see in the pic­ture, my inbox is piled with paper in a stack three times high­er than the sides of the inbox itself. And my fil­ing box­es have anoth­er pile just as big. But they are dis­crete stacks, not spread all over my desk.

This is a far cry from what any­one would call a clean desk, but it’s a huge improve­ment for me. Sit­ting here typ­ing I’m more relaxed than usu­al. The stacks of unre­solved things still nag at me, but the psy­cho­log­i­cal feel has changed. Instead of a moun­tain of «stuff» to be ignored, I have a stack of things yet to be worked on. In some ways, this is much more acute; the stack of things is tug­ging at my atten­tion con­stant­ly. It’s pos­si­ble that what I’m observ­ing as relief here is the lack of a feel­ing that I have to ignore my envi­ron­ment in order to exist in it. The stack of things to be done actu­al­ly trou­bles me, but I need­n’t run scream­ing from it.

I can see why David Allen sug­gests tak­ing at least an entire week­end to do this sort of col­lec­tion. This is just my desk. There are oth­er areas where I have items that need address­ing. Get­ting this far has tak­en me six hours, and I haven’t got­ten to the part about actu­al­ly pro­cess­ing what’s in the inbox. I’m prob­a­bly not going to even get start­ed on that today. Tomor­row? Maybe or maybe not. The impor­tant thing is to get the space cleared so that I can start get­ting to work more pro­duc­tive­ly and eas­i­ly. I have a lot of work to do that does­n’t involve any of the things that are in either stack. Hav­ing set some goals and dead­lines for myself, I’m feel­ing under the gun not to fall behind— — and those goals and dead­lines don’t leave me with much wig­gle room.