Monday, June 18

Getting Things in Order

Well, I recently ran across a blog post about "just getting started" on personal projects (hat tip to blogging bird-dog Merlin Mann for the link) that got me thinking.

My wife and I are approaching the first anniversary of owning our first house. That means I've been sitting in an utterly disorganized, jam-packed home office every evening for the last fifty-one weeks. Well, our friends are saying, didn't you wait to move in until a couple weeks after you bought it? OK, well, that's not the point. Ignoring the fact that I haven't actually been sitting there for a year doesn't change the fact that the computer room started getting cluttered the moment we began bringing boxes over from the apartment.

You see, when we moved we were kind of rushed. Due to that rush, I told Lauren that we were just going to "throw everything in boxes and move it over," and that we would sort out our possessions as we unpacked them in the new place. Well, it's been almost a whole year, and I still haven't gotten around to going through all the Frito-Lay cartons of our stuff.

So the upshot is that I still sit among piles of boxes as I surf the Web and fiddle with my home Linux server. So I've decided to "just do it" once again and clean up my room. (In the intervening time I've also started on a weight loss plan that seems to be taking hold and working well, just in case you thought I'd gone more than half a year since starting anything new.)

Here are a couple of pictures of what I have to start with:


I'll keep this blog updated with photos as I work on it; my plan is to have things cleared away and neatly organized by September 20—the end of the summer, since Fall starts on the 21st—hold me to it!

4 comments:

Harry J. Sachz said...

wow, that's an impressive amount of stuff... i wish you the best of luck, but fail to see why this should take you until the end of september. a couple good hard-core weekends should take a chunk out of it. :)

oh, and good job of maintaining a weight loss routine. that is the hardest task of all.

augmentedfourth said...

Well, as you can see from the fact that it's stayed like this for a year, I tend to work slowly. I gave myself a long time to work on it because I intend to do just small bits at a time; also, in addition to cleaning up I intend to really organize everything... go through all that paper, set up a filing system, etc. Maybe I'll even find a way to tuck away all those cables under the desk!

Lauren said...

It hasn't been like that for a whole year you know...I had it looking fairly decent for awhile as you'll recall.

augmentedfourth said...

Yeah, you cleaned it up that time, and it did look really good for a bit. Unfortunately I had so much crud in there to begin with that some of it had to go in the hall for things to get straightened up!

In addition, I never added any organizational order to that cleanliness, which is the reason things got so cluttered again so quickly. This time I'm going to make sure that a) there's a place for everything and b) I throw out (or donate) everything for which I can't find a reasonable place.

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