After a 5 day holiday hiatus, I have resumed my office reorganization project. This time I’m tackling digital files. I need to make space on my primary drive so that I can be working on two Schlock books in parallel. (An amusing coincidence: one of the books will be titled Massively Parallel.) My computer is out of date and needs replacing. This is item number one on the list of Things to Do Once We’ve Opened Pre-orders and Have a Buffer of Money Again. Until then, I shuffle files, burn data to disk, and make dual back-ups on external drives.
On it surface this data shuffling does not seem to do anything to forward my office reorganization, but this reorganization is not only about optimizing my physical space. Even more important than making the things I need easy to find is the mental process of looking at exactly how I work. My work processes have grown in response to necessity, usually in the urgency of the moment. After that I was a bit afraid to mess with a system that was working in the middle of a crisis. (Something always felt like a crisis) Now I am questioning if some of the way I work is helping to create a feeling of crisis where none needs to exist. This is similar to the mental adjustment I’m attempting to make in how I worry about/ trust in my children.
It is time to reorganize, re prioritize, and re-evaluate. I know what my goals are, they haven’t changed any, but my mode of travel needs to improve a lot. The physical organization let me see that mental organization was necessary. The mental organization is helping me see how the physical organization can work even better. In the end I don’t know that I will reach any of my goals more quickly. That’s not the point. The point is to be less tired and more happy as I travel.