15 Minutes for 30 Days

First for an update. It has been 11 months since I last posted, which means I have not done so well at working on organizing consistently. That does not mean I have not gotten anything done. In fact, this past summer, since I did not teach, I took the time to work with a Professional Organizer, Angie Weid (of Organized Soultions). She came in about 6 or 7 times, usually a week apart. During those visits, we spent 4 hours at a time--mostly going through stacks of papers. Since returning to Grad School, paper work has become my nemesis. Now that it has been over 20 years since I started back to Grad school, it is no wonder I have been inundated with papers! Angie's help this summer was tremendous. We got rid of a lot of paperwork, and I got back a lot of floor space in every room.

Now that school has resumed, I have begun to run into the same problem that I had before--i.e., I find that I still have papers piling up, do not keep them sorted, and still have to spend more time than I would like searching for papers that I need to grade or review for class. When Angie was here this summer, we did put a filing system in place. Unfortunately, I forgot it was here--sort of like my basement (I continually have to remind myself that I have a basement... maybe because I always lived in apartments).

For awhile I have been thinking that it would be a good idea to do what I do for Academic Ladder (AL). It is a writing club that I joined about 3 years ago. The members of AL are other academics who are interested in writing on a regular basis. My goal is to try to write for at least 15 minutes a day (on days that I teach), and longer when there is time. Over Thanksgiving break, I was able to spend over an hour a day for three or four days in a row. I would like to apply the same principal to organizing. So, I began on Friday, November 25, the day after Thanksgiving. The first several days I was able to spend an hour or more doing organizational work. It was great while it lasted. Among the things I accomplished during that time were: updating a Master list of things to do (I can post it for future reference--I want to draw from it for reminders of things I hope to get done, both long-term and short-term); shredded a large garbage bag of paper; sorted through papers on my kitchen counter (that took almost 2 hours); and updated my Organizational Ladder (a journal that I have been keeping since Friday). I plan to use the journal to set goals and report on what I have done each day.

While this will not be a formal thing like AL, I will invite several people to participate. So if you are reading this entry, I encourage you to comment or add your thoughts about what works for you in terms of organizing. Thanks for reading! 

Back on Track in 2011

Now that the holidays are over, I decided to get back on track with organizing. One thing that I left undone this summer was to finish building the book cases for my office. So I decided to make them over Christmas break. After starting the first one on New Year's eve, I finally finished it today, January 2, 2011. It took about 3 or 4 hours in all--a lot longer than a bookcase usually takes for me to build.

There were several challenges: first, I had to drag the boxes into the house from the garage. That was no small undertaking since each one weighed about 83 pounds. After that, I had to do what I could during daylight because it was hard to see with the regular lighting in my office. Finally, I ran into problems with the molding. At first, I couldn't get the sides to fit, so there were huge gaps between the shelves and sides. So I contemplated what went wrong, and figured out that I had put the side moldings on backwards. When I turned them around, they finally meshed and the book case now looks great (imho:-) I am hoping the second book case does not take as long--hopefully I can build it tomorrow!