Confessions of a pack rat

In a couple of weeks my company is moving to a new office building. We need more space, so from that standpoint, the move will be great. However, we are transitioning to an open floor plan where we will all have workspaces instead of offices. Supposedly it will foster a more collaborative environment. I am a huge believer in the effectiveness of collaborative teams, and I work really hard to encourage it on my projects, but I am also a huge fan of walls, and privacy and being able to concentrate. However, I am keeping an open mind, and we’ll see how it goes.

Part of moving to a new building with no offices means less room in which to keep all my crap. I’ve been with the company for eight years now, in the current building for five years and in my current office for at least two years, possibly longer. The stuff, it has piled up over the years, and I’m not going to have nearly as much space in the new place. I actually made “the list” of people they are concerned about as we get close to the move. Of course, during the week I’m way too busy to deal with sorting through files and reorganizing stuff. So on Saturday afternoon, after the haircut, shopping and lunch with my mom (all of which were fabulous), I headed in to the office to get a little work done and to start my cleaning out process.

Yeah, it took me FOUR HOURS, and I’m not even done yet. I did achieve my main goal of compressing the contents of my four large file drawers in to two drawers. I filled my recycling bin and half of the large one out in the hall. I maxed out my trash can and the very large one out in the hall. I rediscovered projects I had forgotten that I ever worked on, and realized that I was hanging on to a bunch of stuff that held no meaning whatsoever anymore. I have a habit of saving notepads for a while so that I can refer back to old notes as necessary. That is actually not a bad idea for a notepad I have just finished using, but I had 22 pads filled with cryptic notes that don’t mean anything to anyone, including me. I’m a terrible note taker. I get too caught up in the discussion and the ideas to take proper notes. And when I do have a complete write-up or summary, I typically tear the sheet off the pad and stick it in the project folder.

Apparently at some point I was worried there would be a shortage of interoffice envelopes (which, by the way, I almost never use) because I found two separate stockpiles of them. I had two rolodexes that I had inherited from employees who left the company taking up space on my bookcase. I found the Franklin Covey organizer that I quit using ages ago because it just didn’t work for me, plus a pile of pages for it from 2004. I found massive amounts of samples that I really did not need. Why did I have all of the print PO’s for a newsletter we haven’t published in years? No one will ever want to see those! I had binders that carefully documented processes that have changed so much over the years as so be completely unrecognizable. What the hell is wrong with me?

I come by all this packrattiness honestly. If you think I sound bad, you should see my mom. She hangs on to everything. And when I say everything, what I mean is everything. Her house is crammed with books, papers, magazines, business cards from some person she met 12 years ago at a party, random files, knick-knacks and more. John and I once figured out that she had 13 different versions of the phone book in her office. We started sneaking them out to the trash when she wasn’t looking.

I make fun of her but secretly, I get it. Part of me is convinced that in six months I’m really going to want something that I threw out on Saturday. Every time I have to do something like this, I vow that I’m going to be better going forward. And I am, for a while, but I always backslide. Perhaps life in my luxurious new workstation will finally cure me of my packrat ways.