Monday, February 11, 2013

Rearranging the Office

I got the office mostly rearranged over the weekend. Now comes the real organizing, which is going to take more time. I have an L-shaped desk and already had a filing cabinet at one end. I moved the second filing cabinet to the other end, so I can reach both of them while sitting in my desk chair. I moved the two bookcases behind my desk, one to where the filing cabinet used to be in front of my desk and the other to the opposite wall where I had a cart/shelf thing. The cart got moved behind my desk to hold mailing and filing supplies and will also eventually be my incoming mail center. All this means that the area behind my desk where I sit feels a lot more open. I got most of the books reshelved, as well, moving the books I tend to refer to into my office. One of the bookcases is deep enough to get multiple layers of books, so I got most of the to-be-read books off the bookcases in the loft, where they'd been stacked haphazardly. There was also some purging of the shelves, and I may need to do another round of that. I was just getting the TBR books off the shelves so I could get other books shelved, so there was no evaluation as to whether I'd ever want to read any of those books. I think I need to do an honest assessment there.

Now comes the hard part. For one thing, I need to drop a lot of books off at the library for their book sale. Most of the books I'm getting rid of, I'd barely get anything for them at a used bookstore, but if they can help the library, I get more benefit. For another, now that I've rearranged things, I need to start putting together a system and putting things away. This is the point when I tend to lose interest in a project, but I can't stop now because the stuff from the office is spread over the rest of the house. The area around my desk is currently the neatest, most organized part of the house.

Unfortunately, all that furniture moving and book rearranging stirred up some serious dust, which kicked in the allergies. Or else I've got another cold or a continuation of the last cold. At any rate, I'm all stuffed up and sniffly. I gave myself yesterday off from the organizing and just took allergy medicine and lay around all day. I may try to set up the filing system today, if I can focus, since that shouldn't be too dusty. I got most of one filing cabinet purged of "why am I keeping this?" stuff over the weekend. The other cabinet may be rather more challenging. I'm afraid if I don't do any work on it today, I'll lose momentum, but I'm not sure I'm making my best decisions while on allergy medicine. I can just imagine trying to find things later in a filing system devised while on Benadryl.

So I think today there may be some purging of files but mostly some reading and resting while I try to breathe.

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