As you know, the great office clean up has begun.
There is a big blue, yellow-lidded “confidential waste” bin sitting in my office and whenever I need a break from marking (which is most of the time) I try to find a few more things to throw into it.
There is always a brief nervous moment just before letting things go through the slot, because the bin is locked and once something has been disposed of it is doomed, never to be retrieved.
Being the type of person whose memory these days seems to be more external than internal, it can be a little scary getting rid of documentary evidence of things that have happened.
It can also be quite cathartic, however, to get rid of stuff, despite the fact that it played an important (or not so important, in many cases) part in your life, once upon a time. In many cases, though, while the consequences of the stuff matter — and are evident in the here-and-now — the stuff itself can go.
So, I am saying goodbye to a few things, and feeling both free and fearful in case I throw out something I’ll regret.
Of course, you remember those maths notes I threw out on Saturday? (The ones that went into the confidential waste bin despite the fact that the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra is not particularly confidential … although perhaps some of my doodled faces and graffiti comments need to be kept secure!)
After years of neglect I needed them yesterday!
Fortunately the slot of doom and catharsis hasn’t (yet) been introduced to my library and I still had other sources of information that could help.
In libraries, it’s called ‘weeding’ – so think of the process as pulling out the weeds to allow the flowers to flourish. Have you discovered any gems you’ve been looking for for years? Are you being tempted to just rearrange the Stuff into a neater pile and put it back where it was? That’s what usually happens to me – or I’ll remember why I wanted to read that article in the first place and keep it on the top of a nearside pile to ‘get around to’!
Unfortunately I can’t just shuffle and rearrange since some of it must go. My next office will be smaller and is not a TARDIS. And there are already so many piles of “things in progress” that although I keep finding extra items of the “Ooooh! I must look at that soon” kind I have to force myself to refile them or throw them out.
Aaaaah! Tough decisions.