What follows can only be of marginal interest to anyone but myself; ready your rapid scrolling finger.
Fauxganizing again at work, and trying to turn it into some real organizing. What’s the difference? Fauxganizing makes everything look tidier, but doesn’t move actual work along. So piling everything neatly into my IN box and then washing down my desk doesn’t mean that I’ve made any of the calls I need to make or written the emails I need to write. It just means that I feel a little better looking at my office.
Or sometimes worse, because the process of piling everything together means that I become aware of all the stuff I haven’t gotten to, stuff that i know is just lurking there in that neatly stacked box.
I’m good at setting up systems, but I’m not so good at working them. Especially when I get wound up in tidying. For example , I just spent my lunch hour looking for the right tissue box cover for my office. I don’t even really use tissues (I’m a hanky guy), but sometimes students get emotional or hay feverish in my office and it helps to hand them a box of tissues. So somewhere along the way in the past six years, I’ve picked up a box of Kleenex, that suddenly today looked indescribably ugly to me. SO much would be solved if I could find the right cover for it. I found it at West Elm. So now a discreet and elegant box of tissues sits on my desk, waiting for distraught sniffles to occur. Thus the tissues were fauxganized.
Real organizing means making actual decisions about things and following through on them. Planning a course of action. This morning I on the train I wrote a “to do” list. I’ve checked off one of the fifteen things on it. Better than none, I know. Typing that sentence has made me go on and take care of three more things on the list.
Ultimately I’m trying to develop a collection of tools an behaviors that will allow me to accomplish my goals more quickly and gracefully. I have an easier time conceptualizing and acquiring the tools, especially if it means that I can shop, than I do practicing the behaviors. I generally act as if getting the tools means the same thing as engaging in the behavior. It doesn’t. And those unutilized tools = clutter.
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