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February 19, 2005

"The Pile" - Project Complete

I cleared away the last remaining papers in the pile last weekend...

and found a local non-profit that would pick up my books... They came this past Thursday night.

Here's a slideshow of the process from start to finish.

Thoughts on the process:

The public nature of this project (blogging about it...) provided an incentive to finish the job. That this blog is still in beta, and only a few people know of it's existence is irrelevent. Also, the process of documenting each step along the way helped to break a potentially overwhelming task into manageable chunks, as well as provided me with visual incentive along the way. (I really looked forward to presenting that Flickr slideshow of "beginning pile" to "no pile".

One of the goals of this project was to analyze my clutter to see exactly what was in there, and find ways to eliminate the need to blog about another pile a month from now. The biggest thing that I learned was that it's terribly important to have an effective collection system in place for all of the stuff in our lives. "A place for everything and everything in it's place" so to speak. This is especially true in NYC, where every bit of square footage is at a premium, and we don't have garages or attics to hide our junk away. One of my biggest issues is paper clutter. I discovered is that there are specific "meta-tags" to my piles of paper:
Teaching Notes
Book Notes
Personal Notes/Concepts
Acting Notes
Bills & Statements
Receipts
Phone Numbers/Addresses (usually scribbled down on bits of paper or in the form of business cards)
Junk Mail

Alot of these notes tend to end up on legal pads, wire binders, or miscellaneous scraps of paper. Usually in no particular order, which left me with a bunch of stuff that I couldn't throw away because there might be something valuable in there and would have to sort thru later. (Which never happened, because it was such a mess that I avoided it and created another pile...).

To keep this from happening again, I've begun keeping all notes of value in a single Moleskin notebook, which I keep in my bag at all times. These are great little notebooks...They fit well in your bag, open up flat for easy writing, and look quite handsome on a bookshelf when you've filled them up with all your master plans. (There seems to be quite a buzz at the moment about Moleskin notebooks... either that or I'm way late to the party. It's quite fashionable in the GTD set.) I also meta-tag each entry so that it's easier to locate ideas later.

Receipts I keep in an accordion file in my newly redesigned studio space (possibly more on that later...). They're stored right next to my binder for Bills & Statements. Phone Numbers I enter right away into my computer and trash the original. Any websites scribbled onto pieces of paper go to del.icio.us. The thing that seems most necessary for me is to develop the habit of putting things into my collection system(s), and then be ruthless in the application of this habit.

All in all a very illuminating process!

Posted by Thomas at February 19, 2005 09:58 AM

Comments

Posted by: dav at February 19, 2005 12:38 PM

Posted by: Thomas at March 16, 2005 12:48 PM

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