clean my desk

I spent a hunk of my day just working through one of the piles no my desk, and realized that the reason everything lasnd there is that it has nowhere else to go – so if I’m going to solve the desk problem, I’ve also somehow gotta solve the organization-of-the-whole-apartment problem. Not as easy as it sounds (and it doesn’t sound easy. Tough to tell if my progress today was genuine or merely cosmetic, but I’d like to think I got somewhere, so I’ll lean on the side of progress. :-)

so busy coping with the rest of my life, (and working on my other goals), that my desk is a piled-up disaster. Next chance I can, I’m gonna try to take off a layer or 2.

Though, on the other hand, there’s this great book out there, something like the positive power of mess which described a genius guy who just kept putting a layer of paper over the wreck of his desk to keep working and then he was one of the guys who made one of the great discoveries of the 20th century or something. It’s nearly 4 am and the details are hazy, but maybe having a clean desk isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Though it will keep the mouse off my desk, so that might be an important thing to consider…

I’m still working at it, and trying to keep coming back to it every time I get bounced away. Hardest thing to fight is the tendency for stuff to just get put back there :-( but I’m being as persistent as I can, hoping to build a habit.

I cleared a lot of stuff off the desk just to have a place to start. The plan is to only put back essentials and to have some kind of logical way of organizing. I need to be able to reliably put bills somewhere thy’ll get paid, and put the kids various info somewhere it’s retrievable, and have different storage spots for materials for my 3 different jobs. In an too-small apartment it quickly gets apparent why I’m drowning when I’ve usually been a pretty effective organizer. I’ve spent large hunks of the day staring at the desk and its surrounding space trying to solve the problem. I believe that if I can just solve this, life will begin to feel much better, though maybe not.

I think that the first step to fixing my life is fixing my desk – but the very things that are getting in the way of pulling my life together are also getting in the way of clearing and maintaining my desk, which in its turn is getting in the way if me living my life the way I want – basically a vicious circle, or a chicken-and-egg problem. This week no progress on the desk despite my best intentions. Gotta concentrate on preparing for Shabbat, so the desk will continue to wait…