Many years ago, when I was just about 7 or 8 years into my career, at the corporate I was working in, I had to entertain a senior visiting executive till such time as my boss came out of the meeting he was having with his boss. One small remark made by this visitor has remained in my mind and guided my way of work for the rest of my career and even in personal life. He said that one attribute he used for appraising his subordinates was what he called their 'bravery' in getting rid of paper!
We were having this conversation in the cabin of my then boss, who was a notorious accumulator and whose desk and room always looked cluttered. In the same organisation, I was transferred later to another department and the new boss was the complete antithesis of the first one. When he got a request for a new filing cabinet, he strode briskly to the existing one, pulled out all the files inside and distributed them to his various subordinates based on what each was handling. He then gave each of them an hour to decide which to keep, the main criterion being that any file which had not been referred to for the last 18 months was to be scrapped. At the close of this exercise, he found that about 70 % of the files had to be discarded. He asked his team to pull out all the papers from these files and reuse the files thus getting some brownie points too for cost saving.
I have used similar logic to keep my work space and home clutter-free and am lucky to have a life-mate who thinks likewise. I really can't understand why people find it so difficult to get rid of junk. Why, I even had an elderly relative who would preserve wrappers of bathing soaps - God knows for what purpose. While we do make sure that important papers like say bank and tax documents are properly preserved, we also take care that junk gets discarded at regular intervals, be it paper, plastics, appliances or even furniture. For furniture and appliances, my wife and I have a simple formula - we do not buy a new one unless we have figured out how to dispose of the old item.
When I went into Academics, about the first thing I did in my cabin was to move as much of the furniture as possible against the wall. This left a very useful open central area and gave the cabin a nice, inviting, informal touch - needed as very often students or even younger colleagues dropped in for some advice or consultation, more so when I acquired Resident Dinosaur status! I can now confess that I used to almost detest going in to the cabins of some colleagues as one couldn't even find a proper place to sit amid all the books and papers. One of the biggest culprit space-occupiers in academic institutions is bundles of evaluated papers. These are to be retained statutorily for, I think, three years. However, there is no stipulation that this has to remain with the professor. Once the current academic year's results are announced and especially the convocation is done, the papers can be safely sent to storage, duly bundled and labelled. Again, for some inexplicable reason, many profs in the place I worked in, wouldn't do this. I don't know whether this was out of a misplaced sense of importance or a feeling of close mindedness or an attempt at creating an impression of being very busy. My table at work would never have more than a paper or a book on it - usually the one I was reading at that moment and a pad for scribbling down ideas, reminders and important information. If this gave people the impression that I had nothing to do, I wasn't really bothered. Similarly, even on my computer and official e-mail, I would run periodical checks to ensure that all irrelevant stuff or that which had lost its importance didn't find a place. This was the reason that the final cleaning of my computer and personal space just before I retired took less than an hour.
People are either accumulators or disposers and in my reckoning, at least 80 % fall in the first category. I am happy to be one of the minority !
We were having this conversation in the cabin of my then boss, who was a notorious accumulator and whose desk and room always looked cluttered. In the same organisation, I was transferred later to another department and the new boss was the complete antithesis of the first one. When he got a request for a new filing cabinet, he strode briskly to the existing one, pulled out all the files inside and distributed them to his various subordinates based on what each was handling. He then gave each of them an hour to decide which to keep, the main criterion being that any file which had not been referred to for the last 18 months was to be scrapped. At the close of this exercise, he found that about 70 % of the files had to be discarded. He asked his team to pull out all the papers from these files and reuse the files thus getting some brownie points too for cost saving.
I have used similar logic to keep my work space and home clutter-free and am lucky to have a life-mate who thinks likewise. I really can't understand why people find it so difficult to get rid of junk. Why, I even had an elderly relative who would preserve wrappers of bathing soaps - God knows for what purpose. While we do make sure that important papers like say bank and tax documents are properly preserved, we also take care that junk gets discarded at regular intervals, be it paper, plastics, appliances or even furniture. For furniture and appliances, my wife and I have a simple formula - we do not buy a new one unless we have figured out how to dispose of the old item.
When I went into Academics, about the first thing I did in my cabin was to move as much of the furniture as possible against the wall. This left a very useful open central area and gave the cabin a nice, inviting, informal touch - needed as very often students or even younger colleagues dropped in for some advice or consultation, more so when I acquired Resident Dinosaur status! I can now confess that I used to almost detest going in to the cabins of some colleagues as one couldn't even find a proper place to sit amid all the books and papers. One of the biggest culprit space-occupiers in academic institutions is bundles of evaluated papers. These are to be retained statutorily for, I think, three years. However, there is no stipulation that this has to remain with the professor. Once the current academic year's results are announced and especially the convocation is done, the papers can be safely sent to storage, duly bundled and labelled. Again, for some inexplicable reason, many profs in the place I worked in, wouldn't do this. I don't know whether this was out of a misplaced sense of importance or a feeling of close mindedness or an attempt at creating an impression of being very busy. My table at work would never have more than a paper or a book on it - usually the one I was reading at that moment and a pad for scribbling down ideas, reminders and important information. If this gave people the impression that I had nothing to do, I wasn't really bothered. Similarly, even on my computer and official e-mail, I would run periodical checks to ensure that all irrelevant stuff or that which had lost its importance didn't find a place. This was the reason that the final cleaning of my computer and personal space just before I retired took less than an hour.
People are either accumulators or disposers and in my reckoning, at least 80 % fall in the first category. I am happy to be one of the minority !
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Very insightful read. I do a major decluttering once a year and it lasts me 8-9 months. I recall your office in VCMCS. Small, minimalistic and inviting with the wafting smell of incense. While I am definitely not an accumulator, whatever little tendency I have in this regard is ruthlessly curbed by my spouse.
ReplyDeleteThanks Sindhu for reading! My cabin at IBS was even more cosy and even less cluttered as I had tons of storage space - never used at least 30 %!
ReplyDeleteEntirely agree more than 50% stuff is useless
ReplyDeleteThanks Shiv
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