De-clutter at work

https://www.facebook.com/georgehtakei/videos/1167480966620694/

74. Upstream cost, downstream savings.

Now and again it strikes me that a picture in my house is hanging crooked, and each time I notice this I take a few seconds to straighten that picture out.

Conceptually I know that if I took five minutes, got a hammer, a nail, a pencil, and a level, I could attach a second nail and never have to straighten the damn picture again.

But like most people, I never seem to have the upstream time it takes to realize downstream time savings. Human nature, I suppose.

That is probably the major reason technology is so difficult to get busy educators to use. Convincing someone that learning to create a pdf file of an often-requested document, load it to a website, and create a link to it - thereby saving all the time it takes to locate, print, and send the document manually over and over again - is a tough sell.

About as tough as it is to convince me to go get the hammer. from Machines are the Easy Part; People are the Hard Part (free download)

The short video above does a fine job of showing why decluttering at home is a wise thing. I am personally adopting an increasingly minimalist lifestyle and enjoying it. Clothes, tools, books, dishes, etc. have all been pared down to essentials.

And while I am doing better at work (thanks in part due to moving to a new office this summer) in declutter physical materials, I still have a ways to go in sifting through digital clutter - in my email, on my harddrive, and in my GoogleDocs. But I have been adopting a few strategies that seem promising

If somebody else has a copy, don't save it yourself. I have long used this as a strategy for paper documents. If you really, really need that set of medical insurance guidelines, I'll bet dollars to doughnuts the HR department has one you can look at. If you rarely, if ever look at a school document (or can find it online), don't save a personal copy. That software or equipment manual - I'll bet it can be found online when needed.

Date all folders. E-rate folder? School board presentation folder? Tech minutes folder? Curriculum folder? Do these folders have hundreds of documents saved from over the past 10 years? De-clutter by organizing these documents by year - and then asking the hard question "Will really ever need that set of minutes from 2007?

Create an archive. Or if you don't want to take the time to create yearly folders, just create one labeled "Junk I probably will never need again (but am too nervous to throw away)" and make good use of it.

Use the last 30 minutes of the day to organize. By the time the end of the day rolls around I am usually pretty brain dead. (Some in my organization would suggest that the onset of mental morbidity starts much earlier.) Use it to go through email and file folders. Just for grins and giggles, start with Z and work backward through the alphabet.

Zero desktop. Zero dowload folder. If it's not worth the time to file, it's not worth saving.

Or simply give up. Save it all in one big folder and search. However I still have that "folder mindset in a tagging world." And now it is just a keyword world.

Oh, don't save this.

Comments

[Debra Gottsleben]

I never seem to be able to get everything organized at once. So if I declutter at home my car and worspace are a mess. When I clean up at work, home is a wreck! Someday maybe I'll get it all together!

[Doug Johnson]

Hi Deb,

Good luck. My only tactic is that whenever I get rid of something, I do my best not to replace it with another thing. Eventually, it all becomes more manageable - at home and at work!

Doug