[rescue] OT: Clutter???

[vraptor at employees.org]

On Sat, 3 Aug 2002, Leslie Connally wrote:

>A friend lives a cluttered desk.. His uncle makes him go tto an
>organizational consultant, who tells him to clear his desk. He puts it all
>in his desk drawer, and 4 months later, he's missing [ie: lost.. never
>entered into system] two orders for custom Board Room tables that take 4
>weeks to make!!

The real question is, why did his uncle do this?  If he was getting
the job done, and wasn't stressed by the clutter, don't bother.

As to the failure, the organizational consultant forced a system he
didn't create on him--so he didn't use it.  You have to tailor the
organizational system to your own needs, and to do that, you have
figure out what your reasons to organize are, what your needs are for
the particular space, etc.  Morgenstern's book addresses these issues.
(One anecdote in fact addresses the above--the boss hated the clutter,
but the workers got their jobs done and felt completely comfortable
with the perceived "mess".  Morgenstern advised the boss to get
screens to hide the clutter from clients, and leave them be.)

>Question.. any packrats on this list? Do you come by your packratness
>honestly? was eg (like mine) your father or mother a packrat?.. is
>packratness learned or inheirited?

Boils down to is personality learned or inherited.  Both, I suspect.
My mother is an imaculate house-keeper (now that dad is retired she
has him vacuum twice a week :-), my dad is a packratter.  She has a
lot of stuff too, but it's all carefully organized and hidden in
closets.  She's trained him, for the most part, though--all his
*ancient* (60's) photography mags are carefully org'd and shelved
in the basement.

I'm a packratter and hate house-keeping.  I was a firm believer
in my ability to maintain a mental "stack" until two months of
out-of-state travel every weekend turned my living room into
just another stack-overflow heap.

I put it down to my personality type--Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

I'm an INTP--internally organized--external stuff has no "reality"
for me, in many respects.  My computers are pretty well virtual,
so until recently (lack of attention), their filesystems were
mostly well-organized.

My SO is also INTP, so we have the problem of reinforcing each
other's bad habits.  And we are both avid readers, so our paper
collection (books, papers, etc.) is much larger than a lot of
folks.  And, then, there's the computer equipment collection
problem. :-)

I can't tell you how much cast-off equipment I kept out of the
trash heap while working at that "hurtling network juggernaut".
ISDN routers, anyone? :-)

=Nadine=