Welcome to another addition of Coffee Talk.
The subject of this month’s writing challenge is as follows:
Use a Household item as a Metaphor to teach a life or personal finance lesson
In addition to an article of my own, at the bottom of this post, I will be linking to other great bloggers who have stories of their own. Come back in a day or two and I’ll have a complete list posted. Also, see how many metaphors you can spot in everyone’s writing.
My Desk Is A Clutter Magnet
For as long as I can remember paper has been my nemesis. Even when I think back to the simpler days in high school when my financial life wasn’t as complex, I remember what my desk looked like. It was still covered with random papers and clutter. Why is my desk such a magnet for clutter? Well, I suppose if I had a therapist and we were to talk about it, the desk is where “work” happens. It could be school work or bills or job work. It doesn’t really matter. It seems like other horizontal surfaces have more pleasant lives. Tables are used for eating, counters are used for food prep, coffee tables are to put your feet up on. The desk however has always had just one primary purpose. WORK.
So what do I do when I’m cleaning the house and don’t want to deal with something until later? It goes on the desk. As a result, after a morning of cleaning, every part of my house will look neater and cleaner, except my desk, which looks worse. Sometimes the magnetic force of my desk is so strong, that the paper clutter starts gravitating to adjacent horizontal surfaces, like the guest bed or the floor at my feet. That is usually when I know things have gotten out of hand…again.
Luckily I’ve made great progress on the desk front in recent years. As they say in those 12 step programs, the first step is admitting you have a problem. I attacked the problem head on in 2008 with my war on junk mail. I felt that if I greatly reduced the amount of incoming paper into the house, there would be less opportunity for clutter. (You quality nuts may recognize this as DPMO -Defects Per Million Opportunities). You may think you don’t have a junk mail problem, but have you ever been away for 2 weeks and come home to a 3 inch pile of mail? That happened to me one too many times. You may not notice the effect of it day to day, but coming back home from a vacation or a long trip, suddenly it’s apparent.
Can I Change My Behavior?
I realize that reducing the incoming paper is only half the battle. The other half is actually putting things in their place more often so that the desk is not a holding area for countless things. For example, as I was moving my bedroom around, I had a pile of dead watches that needed batteries. Where on earth do I put those? The desk of course. Today I actually put them in a baggie in my car so their presence reminds me to stop at a jeweler as I run errands this weekend. I know that watches are for old people but I miss wearing them. Despite being in sales, I’m not like your average teenager that has to have my cellphone permanently attached to my hand.
I’m going to digress for a minute. Last weekend I took my cousin sailing on an America’s Cup Yacht in Newport as a 50th birthday present. It was awesome but I couldn’t believe that this girl in her early 20’s just could not put her i-phone down. I mean, we were on the ocean chopping through waves, moving all around and I thought it was odd that she never put her phone away. I actually told her I’d be paranoid about dropping it in the water and she assured me that she learned her lesson and now has insurance on her phones. Sometimes I feel old when I do things like leave my phone more than an arm’s reach away from me.
I’ve been picking away at my behavior changes over the last couple of years and here’s what I’ve implemented so far. Note this is a work in progress, so if you have your own tips, I’m all ears.
- Shameless Use of Folders – I try to keep manila folders of my frequent categories handy. I have one called bills, one called Junk Mail to Be called, Travel Receipts (which I try to carry in my briefcase now), and my favorite of all is called “To Be Filed.” The “To Be Filed” folder is great because it keeps me from having to sort through the same pile of paper I want to keep multiple times. In the past I’d try to file it as things came up and that just wasn’t working for me. I hate filing and so I wait til it builds up a bit and then file once a quarter.
- Productive Procrastination -Sometimes it’s hard to get going on an unpleasant work task. For some of us Monday mornings may be a drag. If you’re going to procrastinate anyway, instead of surfing the internet, tackle a small pile of papers on your desk. You’ll feel less guilty and the pile will be all that much smaller the next day. I feel less guilt if I’m procrastinating in a productive way. In college, my desk was always cleanest during finals time.
- Start with a Clean Slate – For me, I find it hard to shuffle papers around on a cluttered desk. When I decide it’s desk cleaning time, I take everything off my desk, put it on the floor, clean my desk thoroughly with pledge and then slowly start adding stuff back onto it. I allow myself to be inefficient in my organizing. For example, it’s okay to take 100 trips in and out of my office so that I can put things back where they belong. It’s especially satisfying when it’s easy, like looking at an empty coffee cup and saying “I know where that goes.” If you just do it, you’re that much closer to being done.
- Save The Hard Stuff For Another Day – At the end of your organizing, you’ll have a much smaller pile of stuff that requires action. Forms that need filling out, phone calls that need to be made or other reconciliation activities. These are best left to be done in moderation. The last time I had a real deep clean, it took well over a week to get through my smaller pile. If you tackle a couple of items a day, it’ll eventually go down to just a few things again.
- Tackle the Pile More Frequently – I think this has been the biggest help. A few years ago, my desk had to have a Mt. Everest sized pile on it before I tackled the task of cleaning it off. It sometimes took days. It was always a job and a half to get it sorted. Now, if I have an inch stack of papers on my desk, it drives me nuts. Hopefully over time I’ll get to that point where I can have a clear desk at the end of every day. That would be my nirvana.
I’d love to share some tips from Babci but her filing method is to just save everything in one big leather zipper file and have me sort through it once a year come tax time. It is far from ideal and unfortunately these are the filing skills I started with on my journey to a paper free world. By the way, Suba has a great article on going paperless. She is my idol when it comes to a paper free office.
Please share your tips on paper clutter. It’s still an area I struggle with on a daily basis and I would love to hear what works for others.
Other Coffee Talkers Across the Web
Here are some other great articles from your friendly neighborhood blogging community. Enjoy!
Mike and Molly’s House Shares How Molly’s Sewing Machine is a Wormhole to Another Dimension
Baking the Budget tells us how her Electric Kettle creates a rift in the Space/Time Continuum.
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