I wish I were the kind of person who knows whether I should say “I wish I were the kind of person” or “I wish I was the kind of person.” A former employee, Sarah, had this area of grammar down pat and used to keep me in line.
But I digress. I mention this only because I want to say that I wish I were (or that I wish I was) the kind of person who doesn’t mind spending hours filing papers in color coordinated file folders with neatly printed labels. (Sarah used to put all my company contracts in matching purple folders with beautifully printed labels. I used to admire those purple folders every time I opened my bottom desk drawer.)
But I digress again. I no longer have employees, but I still have papers. In fact, I have a garage and an office full of papers that I’m trying to decide whether to file, toss, or shred. These are papers related to my previous business, to my writing, to my life, and, um, to I’m not sure what. My previous method of dealing with this, none of which involved Sarah, did not work at all well. It mostly involved looking at all the boxes, becoming depressed at the impossibility of the task, perhaps half-heartedly moving a few papers from a box to the top of my desk, and then giving up in despair. It just seemed too hard.
Stay with me now. I’m about to share my amazing discovery. But first I must share something a bit personal. Thanks to genes from my mother and grandmother, I have what must be one of the world’s smallest bladders—a bladder matched only in smallness by another former employee, not Sarah, who shall—in the interest of privacy—remain nameless. Adding to my problem, I love coffee.
But I digress again. Where do I spend much of every day, thanks to this minuscule bladder? The bathroom. Voila! A couple of months ago I had a brilliant idea. I put one big box in a place where I wouldn’t trip over it but would definitely see it on my way to the bathroom. Then I made a rule that, on the way back to my desk after each trip, I had to stop and take one thing from the box and deal with it firmly. If it needed to be filed, I would make a label and file it right then and there. One folder, one label—that I could handle.
It worked. Over the past few weeks I have emptied at least 10 big boxes of materials, taking papers to a facility for shredding and moving the rest to actual file folders with actual labels in actual file drawers. I admit to using folders of any color, in any condition, not matching purple ones, and my labels aren’t prettily printed. But THEY ARE THERE! THEY EXIST!
I have many boxes to go, but this method is really working, and it is relatively painless. Progress may be slow, but it is progress nonetheless.
I humbly share my revolutionary Bladder Filing System in the hope that it may work for another soul who hates organizing as much as I do.
