Evey thing in its place, and a place for everything. Yep. That’s my workspace. The place for everything is on the return to the right of my desk. The space is piled high with three neat stacks. Want that magazine article on Groupthink? In the second pile, third from the top. The stats for the improvement in the December 18 class? Left stack, in a plaid folder.
Albert Einstein kept a messy desk.
My desk is littered with a collection of receipts, paper ephemera, a mat for my coffee (or water), and my notebook. It is not neat. I know where everything is. The mess gets better occasionally and rarely worse.
When the receipts begin to gather I file them while waiting on hold for a company who wants me to know my call is important to them, but not enough to actually talk to me. I gather the ephemera for my journals (tickets, fortunes I like from cookies, ribbons) when I go to the studio.
Anna Wintour's desk at Vogue. Is that a ewer and basin on the desk? And is she sitting on a metal chair? Yep. It's a $250 zinc French bistro chair. Chic. Hard, but chic.
It’s a personal preference. Some people like neat desks. I’m not one of them. I have six cartons that clutch the contents of prior file cabinets. They are sealed, and I haven’t opened them in three years. Throw them out, you say? Can’t. They contain the paperwork for the sales of my houses, an old passport, and files that prove tax records.
I’m cursed by an out-of-site, out-of-mind brain. A file in a cabinet has vanished from the real world. I can find nothing in file cabinets, because I don’t call items by the same name all the time. Old checks (when I still kept them) were called Canceled Checks, Checks, Old Checks, CBT stuff, PNC paperwork–all the same, all different names, labels marking the names of banks.
There are some advantages to being a piler, not a filer. The important items work their way to the top of the stacks because i use them frequently. The unimportant items move to the bottom. Once a month, I go through the stacks and throw 75 percent of it out. Were I a filer, I’d be building a room onto the house to hold file cabinets. Important items rise to the top of the stacks, detritus gets churned to the bottom and tossed out.
Efficient. And it works for me. What works for you?
–Quinn McDonald is a tidy person who wrote Raw Art Journaling, Making Meaning, Making Art.
Quinn,
Surprised to find another who’s desk work similar to mine, family don’t understand think I’m daft., but I do have everything to hand.
You are not daft, you are a visual person (see Vicky’s comment.) When I’m in the studio, I have to have the pieces at hand, I hate to hunt. It’s spilled over to my work desk, too.
Hi Quinn,
I also “lose” things when I file them, partly because I am a visual person and if I can’t see it, it doesn’t need attention!
I love how stacks of paper and mail, when I finally get to go through them, are mostly junk. Oh why, oh why, can’t I just toss them out to start with? (No need to answer, just a rhetorical question from one piler to another).
Vicky F
I think that’s part of the answer, Vicky. We are visual and need those visual cues to feel busy in the right way. We can’t throw out the junk mail because we aren’t paying attention to it when we get it. We need time to process what it is, then throw it out.
Ideally, everything filed. I hate looking for things, so like to keep the place more or less tidy. do not always succeed..I once had a boss who had a two car garage full of work papers that she never looked at. Legend has it that a former secretary was tidying her office and came across a breast pump…hmmm
That’s really funny–a breast pump? Well, my garage has more boxes in it than I’d like, but it’s fairly neat. Part of the trick is to go through the stack and reduce them about once a month. My stacks never exceed a certain height, but an empty desk makes me feel I have to hunt for what I need.
I was close to laughing when I was reading this post. Handyman always tells me my desk looks messy. I always tell him that I have a well working system in the piles he calls a mess. That’s a huge differens.
Each person hers/his system, that’s a fact we need to accept.
We each have our own style. We each think the other way won’t work. All that is fine, until we try to “fix” others. That’s when trouble starts. And yes, we always marry the other type!
My Father; a successful product designer and inventor had a sign over his desk:
A Clean Desk is the sign of a Sick Mind.
I find now that I have a hard time trusting anyone with a clean desk/work space.
That’s a funny sign. Now that you mention it, my dad was also a piler. It’s in the DNA! i feel comfy around people who pile, too.
Messy…
Yep. And loving it.
Piles and piles and more piles. But the piles are organized, so I know which pile to look through. Well, usually! I once tried to be neat, but “out of sight, out of mind” was so true for me. Once I filed anything, I’d figure it was taken care of, and then find it 10 years later — 9 1/2 years after I needed it.
That is so familiar for me, too. It just vanishes.
My sweet husband who considers the dining table his “office desk” has piles of stuff from his Lions Club years….and can tell you exactly where anything is when he needs it. Me, when I was working, had a fairly neat desk..here at ome my desk and craft table suffer somewhat from the EFSS (empty flat surface syndrome….) Seems I have to fill up pretty much any empty space…and often with stacks like you ! Stacks that my cat Charlie periodically knocks over and I re-stack, throwing away stuff that’s OLD. Works for Charlie and me.
Meredith in NC
Oh yes, it is very important for the cat to knock it over once in a while. Helps with sorting and tossing.
I have a perfectly clean desk. I know it’s clean because I protect it under a foot and a half of assorted miscellaneous crap.
Perfect way to phrase it.