We all know the markers of a cluttered academic office. Publishers’ catalogs from last year. A pile of essays that students never picked up. Some scattered flyers promoting campus events that have already happened. A colony of paperclips huddled on the corner of the desk. Orphaned intra-campus mail envelopes, waiting to be called back into service. A few pens whose ink has long since run out. And stacks of exam copies of books you never ordered and will probably never use. If you have a cluttered office and have no problem finding needed material or feeling like it’s an appropriate work environment, then there’s really no need to change. If, however, you’re starting to feel like your office is stuffed with things that you never use but can’t bring yourself to discard, then it might be time to unclutter.
Although I certainly cannot claim to have a neat and well-organized office--I’m great at cluttering. Uncluttering? Not so much--I do enjoy reading the tips provided by Unclutterer, “the blog about getting and staying organized.” Their tagline notwithstanding, one of the most important themes on this blog is that organizing your stuff is not enough: you have to get rid of stuff you don’t use and don’t need. Obviously, some of us have a harder time doing this than others.
As for me, at the end of each semester, I try to do the following:
- Ethically dispose of any unwanted desk copies publishers have sent me,
- Shred any student papers that are more than a semester old,
- Sort through (and process) any unprocessed snail mail I’ve received (this involves throwing things away, for the most part), and
- Put my bookshelves back into some semblance of order.
One thing I’d like to improve is my ability to keep my office from getting cluttered in the first place. Sometimes it feels like there’s a constant tide of stuff pressing against the door, trying to get inside. At home, I’ve had great success cutting down significantly on the number of commercial catalogs I receive, thanks to Catalog Choice, which I first read about a few years ago. I wish there was something similar for academic publishers; I hardly ever read through the printed materials they send to me (but if they each had an RSS feed to which I could subscribe I’d be much, much more likely to keep up with their new publications). Similarly, I’d really appreciate it if publishers stopped sending me unsolicited exam copies: I usually just put them in a corner of the office until the end of the semester, when I try to find them a new home (see above).
How about you? How do you keep your office from getting cluttered? Alternately, when your office is unacceptably cluttered, what do you do to unclutter? Let’s hear from you in the comments.
[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Kate Ter Haar]
