Macopinion

Where has Marc been? Part 3

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

For the past few columns I've been discussing Getting Things Done, a terrific book on increasing personal productivity by David Allen. For years I've felt frustrated by my disorganization and feeling like I was swamped with work but not seeing much in the way of results. This feeling peaked recently and inspired me to buy and read Allen's book, and the book has inspired me to clean out the cobwebs in my life and get organized.

I'll begin with a confession: I have a disease. I'm not sure of the official name, but it's informally known as Junkitis. I inherited this disease from my grandfather, who was severely infected. Neither of us can throw anything away.

I've moved a half dozen times in the past two decades and with every move I bring boxes and boxes of miscellaneous junk. I keep thinking I'll sort through the stuff, but never do, and it just accumulates. My garage was filled with hundreds of boxes, and so was my house. I moved to Oregon nearly three years ago and still have dozens of unopened boxes.

As long as I'm confessing, I might as well admit another problem, one which Allen's book has helped me realize the cause: a tendency to leave clutter everywhere simply because the items serve as reminders of things I need to do. Under Allen's program, these things are put away and you add the reminder as a task in your management system. In the past I've occasionally cleaned and reorganizd, but clutter soon returned because I did not have a system in place to keep things organized. It was half of a system.

Reading Allen's book inspired me, but his revelation that I need to close all the open loops in my life -- every single unfinished task nagging at the back of my brain -- made me realize I needed to begin by processing all the junk in my house. Not just some of it, but all of it. Every single scrap. I resolved to do a complete clean-up, a complete home reorg.

Now I knew that my cramped office needed serious revamping. I work from home so a structured office is critical. But when I moved here I barely had time to get settled before I had deadlines looming and had to get work done, so I never really finished my office. Then, when I took in my grandfather, my spare bedroom became his room, so I had no place for guests. I tried fitting a small loveseat-bed in my office, but the room was really too small: with the bed unfolded there wasn't even room to change clothes!

Inspired by GTD, I decided as long as I was planning an office redo, I might as well do an office swap: move my office to the larger spare bedroom and make the smaller back room a guest bedroom. The new, larger office would have room for the fold-out bed if I needed it for additional guests.

That was the beginning. I knew this was going to be a huge project, but I didn't realize just how much time it was going to take. I think at first I said "two weeks" but really was thinking of a week or so. In reality this massive home reorg has taken three weeks of dawn-to-dusk labor, working on little else.

Of course pictures speak louder than words for something like this, so I'm going to share some photos of my recent experiences. Unfortunately, I don't have enough "before" pictures for you to see the true magnitude of the changes, but hopefully there's enough you can get the idea of what I've done.

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This is my bedroom before the change. As you can see, I had stuff "to get to" piled everywhere. I don't have a shot of the "before" closet, but it was floor to ceiling boxes and full of clothes that didn't fit me (since I lost weight).

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The transition was chaotic as you can see by the top picture, but the transformation was well worth it. I now have plenty of free storage room in my closet!

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This is the new guest bedroom that used to be my office. It's not large, but nice for overnight guests. The old closet was floor to ceiling storage boxes -- you couldn't hang any clothes. I installed some shelving in the closet and the closet now houses extra bedding, blankets, pillows, and such for guests. I also put up a full-length mirror.

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In three rooms I replaced three ugly "faux gold" ceiling light fixtures with new dual-bulb brushed nickel finish lights that are brighter and much better looking.

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I spent a lot of my time revamping the office. There's a lot you can't see under the surface, for everything inside the cabinets and in boxes is also well-organized. That desk holds two computers and four printers and unbelievably there's room for more storage for the future!

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A key aspect of my magazine business is fulfilling orders for back issues or CD archives, so now I've got an incredible mailing center with easy access to all my magazines, CDs, CD cases, envelopes and mailers, packaging tape, etc. This pegboard system is brilliant -- totally customizable and expandable for my future needs.

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In my old office I had four 11x17 boxes of nothing but cords and cables all so tangled together it took you twenty minutes to extract one! Finding the right cord was next to impossible. It was easier to buy a new one. Now I've got an amazing storage system in my closet: I built shelving for office supplies and historical information (all carefully boxed and labeled) and I sorted through all my cables and organized them into plastic bins by type. Even more important, each table is wound and tied so it won't get tangled!

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I used to have a "tool drawer" in my kitchen, but it was much too small and I always had tools scattered all over the house and it made doing home improvements frustrating. Now I repurposed this plastic six-drawer storage container into a neat tool box. The drawers are even labeled so I can find things and know where to put things back. I even took a few hours to organize all my loose screws, nails, and little bits of stuff into a divided organizer.

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My garage was a mess of storage, junk, empty boxes, and chaos. (Fortunately, a good portion of the stuff here belongs to my mom. I'm going to help her go process her stuff next.)

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I'm still working on the garage, but I've made huge progress. One entire wall is nothing but garage sale stuff, so next spring I'll be able to get rid of things and in the meantime, as we sort through items, we'll have a place to put things for the sale. Other areas are at least more organized and more efficiently packed.

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There's a small storage room at the back of my garage and there I've got my magazine archives and I installed several new shelves for accessible storage.

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I even organized my little pantry shelf so like items are together.

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My living room was filled with clutter and I've mostly gotten it cleaned up now (I'm still working on a couple areas). A couple of weeks ago you couldn't even see that coffee table.

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The top photo is a stack of a few of the boxes I emptied in this process. This is only about a quarter of the boxes I actually emptied. The other photo is what I set out for recycling in one week. I took one load like this to the recycling center myself and had another similar load for pickup (our recycling is every two weeks). I also took one load of trash to the dump.

Well, that's my adventure for now. I've still got more to go as I have yet to fully implement GTD into my life, but I would say this is a great start, don't you think?

Next Time: Marc reveals the electronic side of his GTD reorg.

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