Clearing my desk: clearing my mind.

New Year is often a time when I make changes in my life, as many people do. This year I’m working my way through Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen.

While I think there’s some hype in the whole “stress-free” part of the title Allen does seem to have some very good advice on handling the “stuff” that work and life throws at us.

My own weak spot is dealing with paper, and that’s where I’m most looking for advice. While I can have incredibly neat, efficient filing systems on computers, I tend to accumulate piles of paper. I remember visiting an old workplace a couple of years after leaving and someone asking me where something was filed on the computer — I immediately knew because my filing system was very logical.

Now, while I’ve learned how to use a filing cabinet for long-term storage of bank statements, notes for talks, important documents, etc, no one has ever explained to me how to use an in-tray system, and how to deal with those bits of paper that you don’t need immediately but which need to be dealt with in the next few days or weeks. My tendency is to leave them out so that they’ll act as visual reminders that they need to be dealt with, but that system frankly sucks. For a start it creates an atmosphere of clutter that’s stressful in itself, but also things tend to accumulate in piles and the things that are hidden cease being visual reminders because I can’t see them!

This is the kind of thing I’m looking for help with. I need to learn to be more mindful with paper. It’s early days with the book and I’m still at the stage of getting an overview of Allen’s system, but already my desk has been free of papers and other clutter for two days now. Of course part of that is because I’ve moved everything onto a heap in my in-tray, but the next step (gotta keep reading that book — haven’t got to this bit yet) is working through the pile and process it. That’s the mysterious bit.

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