Awash

I am awash in a sea of paper.

I just sat down at my desk and cast my eye across it and all I see is paper. White paper with printing on in and yellow paper with fine blue lines and scribble across it. The odd paperclip. The occasional staple. And sometimes, peeking out from underneath, an actual edge of manila folder or, heaven forbid, actual bit of strange brown substance which I think might be actual desk-top.

This is at work of course. At home it�s clothes that haven�t been put away and random stacks of books. But that�s a story for another day.

And if I look slightly floor-wards, that�s where I find the folders. Files upon files in not so neat little and big stacks. Stacked right in front of the filing cabinets in which most of them actually belong. And on my other side the magazines and articles and journals and random bits and pieces in not much a stack as an ever expanding organism of glossy paper threatening to take over the whole floor space. The whole floor space in front of the cupboards where they actually belong.

Do you see a pattern here?

Now the files on the floor are there for a reason. Well, one of two reasons. Either, I�m waiting for something to happen on them and if I put them away I�ll forget, but they don�t actually need to be on my desk because they don�t require any immediate action by me. Or, I�ve finished with them and thrown them on the pile because I need to remember to bill them or I�m just too damn lazy to put them away.

The journals and magazines are an entirely different issue. If I can keep them in a neat stack at home, why can�t I do it in the office? Basically I need to start filing the things away on a regular basis, say, once a fortnight, otherwise one of these days I�m going to stand on the glossy equivalent of a cartoon banana skin and knock myself out.

But really neither of these stacks are a real problem, they�re in the periphery. The paper on my desk, on the other hand, is really not good. For the last few weeks I�ve been blaming my assistant who hasn�t been getting to the admin stuff because she�s been too busy with real work and so wasn�t actually opening the files for me to put the paper in. I actually completed work on an entire, albeit small, project and billed it without ever seeing an actual file cover to put it in. But now all the files have been opened, so why the hell do I have all these random bits and wads of paper all over my desk?

Some of it is definitely the aforementioned laziness. I get the email in, I print it out, I know the project file is in the pile on the floor, but I can�t be bothered reaching down to sort through the pile and pull it out. The file is sitting there, waiting to be removed from floor purgatory to the dizzy heights and the full attention of the desk-top, or to pleasant semi-retirement in the cabinet, or to the full death of storage. And I�m too lazy to pick it up.

Some of it is stuff that doesn�t really have a file folder. One-off phone or email enquiries that never go anywhere, small things for larger clients that aren�t really project specific. Or unexpected questions on projects that have already died and gone to storage. Storage being one block over and three blocks down. And that�s ok. They get put somewhere eventually.

But I suspect some of it may be to allow me to live in a little chaos. Show how busy I am by the clutter. And I am genuinely busy. And soon it�ll get so cluttered that I�ll be forced to take half an hour out of work just to tidy up and file, and thus calm down and focus a bit better. So maybe that�s why I do it, to give myself a built-in break? Just like I�m doing by writing this now. Built-in break.

Well, it�s a theory anyway. A procrastination-based theory. Which are the best kind.

I�d also like to point out that there is no such thing as the mythical paperless office, and I don�t think there ever will be.

Oh, and, reading Sars' latest piece has made me hungry. Going off to look for a snack now.