No Place Like Home…Office

After I de-cluttered my mudroom, I found that walking into the house was a lot more pleasant. I was instantly reminded of how I’d worked so hard to make this small space clean and organized and it felt good. Then I walked up the steps to my family room and saw this:

Oh my! My second project sprang at me! This is my desk. Now, I’m not sure I’ve ever sat at my desk and done any work, because as soon as I put it there, it started to accumulate stuff…and now it is basically a collection of unfinished things. Unfiled papers, unsorted mail, and who knows what else.

When I bought this desk, my husband was not too pleased…more junk coming in the house was all he saw. I explained that it would be my go-to place to use my computer when he was home and wanting to go to bed. He liked that idea, but I think his initial reaction was spot on.

My husband took a job a few years ago that required him to move halfway across the country for a year and a half…even since he’s been home, he travels so much that I spend most nights alone with the kids. Our bed has become my breakfast table, bill paying station, paper-sorting area, and is where I keep my computer most of the time. Then when I go to bed, everything gets quickly moved to the floor. As a consequence, there are many, many piles of paper on my bedroom floor. So, if I can not only clear off my desk, but keep it cleared off, maybe I can stop using my bed as my home office.

Over the last week, I’ve tried not to put anything new on my desk. I also picked up a few things from it each day and put them away. But even so, when I got up yesterday morning and started to tackle the desk, there were a lot of papers and miscellaneous stuff on it. I started by taking all the papers and putting them on the floor. I sorted through them and every 5 or 10 minutes I’d get up and take a stack of paper to the recycling bin and try to grab something else that I could file or put away. I found papers that were up to a year old!

I ended up with a lot of papers left over, most of which required me to perform some task to truly get them out of my way. So, I decided to do all those little tasks. This is a step forward as I normally get to that stage in the process and re-pile the much smaller amount of paper, thus germinating an all new paper problem. Instead, I finished the paperwork for two of my younger daughter’s summer camps and I signed her up for religion class in the fall. I stitched up a torn glove and put it away with its partner. I even found an unopened DVD and catalogued it before putting it away.

The problem with paper is that I’ve got it piled up all over the house. It’s like that giant fungus that covers many square miles underground and its mushrooms pop up all over the countryside in unexpected places. I actually have a lot of really good paper-management systems in place and yet I still get overwhelmed with paper. I figure that if I can conquer it once and for all, and keep up with my systems, I’ll be free from paper clutter forever! (A girl can dream…)

Among the more ironic things I found on my desk were a copy of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen and an unread copy of March 2011’s O, The Oprah Magazine with a large banner across it stating: De-Clutter Your Life! Say goodbye to the stuff that’s weighing you down. Oh, how I do like to think about being more productive!

Well, having tackled the papers yesterday, I took everything else off of the desk and cleaned the desk. I was able to find homes for a lot of the items and threw a few away. Many I just re-organized and put back onto the desk. I know I could spend more time on this project, but in working on it I realized that the main thing was to have a clear space to work and to keep from piling things onto the desk in the future. I also did get through a lot of paper clutter, even in other areas of the house, during this project and I need to keep working on that. Here’s what my desk looks like at the end of this project:

In many ways this project was more difficult than the mudroom. At least with the mudroom I was dealing mostly with large objects that I could easily categorize as “outgrown” and get rid of them.  I’ve also realized that it’s easy to keep the mudroom clutter-free right now because it’s summer! There are no coats, hats, or boots being dumped there every day. Winter will be the real challenge! But all-in-all, these last two weekends have gotten me on a roll with de-cluttering and I have some time coming up to work on a few more projects.

Walking into the house and seeing a clean and orderly space is wonderfully de-stressing. It makes it a pleasure to be in my home. It’s so much better than getting home at the end of a hectic day and walking into a messy room and thinking how much more work I still have left to do.

Find the Joy in the Journey!