Twelve Steps

Not sure what those steps are, yet. But it seemed like an appropriate title.

Yesterday I said I would work on that one section of my desk and try to organize it some. Make some sense out of it. My implied goal was to make it so it can’t get like that again.

I had already gotten some bins to put stuff in. I lined them up on the recliner and started tossing stuff in.

My mail
Writer stuff
Lorna’s mail
Bills
To-Be-Filed
Cables and Doohickeys

My mail was easy. Most of it I will open then chuck. But I didn’t want to spend the time doing that now. First, I needed to see what was in there.

A LOT of to-be-filed stuff. A lot. Bunches. That bin’s lid won’t shut.

Into my Writer Stuff bin went my new business cards, my new return labels, some official correspondence from my publisher (I have files for that somewhere…) and then I put in some of my official ham radio stuff such as membership cards and a certificate. I have a box for those somewhere….

I tossed catalogs I knew I’d never get around to looking at. I found an issue to “Poets & Writers” that I don’t even remember getting.

Oh, and I found a LOT of “Hershey’s Really Nuts! Milk Chocolate Cocoa Peanuts” packages. Empty, of course. I also found several handfuls of soda bottle lids, some aquaria rec’ts, and ATM rec’ts from, like six months ago. And no, it was not just from that one section. I pulled papers out from under the monitor and from the shelf above it. My keyboard tray is raised (resting on Animal Wise by Ted Andrews) and underneath on both sides were bottle caps, twist-ties, and mutilated metal paper clips from when I needed to insert something into the router reset switch.

As a reminder, this is the before:

and this is the now:

The two bins in the crate are the Writer Stuff and the Cables and Doohickeys. The one in front is my mail that I am going to go through in the morning. I had Lorna empty my trash can so it has plenty of room. Also tomorrow, Part B of Step One, is to finish clearing out stuff from between the crate and the monitor and to do something with those cables!

For those of you who are now convinced I haven’t the ability to not only organize the professional part of my life, but certainly not capable of maintaining it, I present Exhibit A.

This is the stand for the 25 gallon fish tank. We added boards to the bottom and made a shelf. I then took all of my fish stuff and put them into the bins. The only fish stuff out (other than the tanks and fish, of course) are the wet cleaning things, the food, and a few meds that will spill if laid down. This organization has worked well for both me (where’d I put the….) and for Lorna (your fish crap is everywhere). This is basically what I will do to the desk space. Only it won’t smell like fish.