This little secret of mine could have stayed with my Papers in their Place workshop group last night, but no. Here I am typing away for the world to see.

It’s about a little fantasy I’ve had over the last year. “Would others enjoy it? Could I pull it off?”

I’m talking about a workshop where people actually bring a file box of their papers to the event.

Why just talk about the concepts of filing when you can do it?!

Could be everything that’s been hiding the surface of the desk for months. Could be a box that’s been sitting under the desk for the last two years. Could be the stuff that’s been sitting on those bookshelves making it impossible to put books there.

Each piece would get assessed, pondered, discussed, decided upon and then filed, recycled, or shredded.

I can see moments of fantastic joyous release bursting out across the room — hallelujah! I’m no longer slave to this chaos!

Sparks of encouragement would be fanned to flame. By the time they left, the fire of “I’m empowered to deal with my papers!” would be raging…

(sigh)

I think it’d be fun. Is that weird?

By the time we are done, you’ll have a cleared off desk, your foundation containers set-up (Easy Access Station, reference binder, etc) and “defined”, a maintenance system, and a file map to whip your files into shape.

On-site: (2) three hour sessions (Nevada County area)
On-phone: (6) one hour sessions

6 hours @ $60/hour would normally be $360. Special $300

Offer ends on October 31st.

Call Shawn @ 530.205.5775 or email.

He writes: “I was inspired by you to organize my office. It took 2 days, 8 double lattes, and 7 garbage bags—I thought it would never end, but it did and it looks great! Problem is, now I can’t find my computer. Where did I go wrong? Please help!!”

Sincerely, Joe

Dear Joe,

That’s a big problem! I need a little more info to help you solve this whopper. First of all, how messy was your office when you started? I mean, is it possible that your computer wasn’t even in the room when you started?

Second, do you have a desktop computer or laptop? Is it a Mac or PC? MY hunch is that you have a PC laptop. If so, this is probably what happened: since your office was in total disarray during your 2 day organizing binge, I’ll bet you took your laptop with you on one of your 8 double latte runs in order to check your email.

Subconsciously, you’ve been wanting to make the switch from PC to Mac, so you “accidentally” left your laptop at the café.

Well done and rightly so! Make the switch and congratulations on a clean office!

I hope that helps,
Head Simplifier

No matter how much circling around we do, when we finally hit spot on the bulls eye, a satisfying “a-ha!” is sure to follow. The other day at an initial client appointment, I heard plenty of circling. He was saying things like, “I’ve been working like this for so long (papers scattered everywhere) and I mostly know where stuff is. It’s not pretty but it works for me…”

My response was “Do you want to continue as a solo-flyer just getting by? Or do you want to be the leader of your company?” Badda-boom! That finally did it. His eyes lit up, his head lifted, “A-ha! I’m investing in myself!” With that realization, his tolerance level for his mess dropped and we dove in with a vengeance!.

That’s what “they” say, anyways. Let’s see what a Google search turns up, shall we?
Search: clean desk symptom sick mind

Lanfranco Muzi of Italy (and now of Oregon) uses the phrase, “A clean desk is the symptom of a sick mind…” as something of a tagline on his website. Mind you, this isn’t a blog but the C.V. of a person who appears to be quite intelligent. Considering the title of one of his publications, “Experimental and computational validation of BDTPS using a heterogeneous boron phantom”, one has to wonder if a sick mind is really the result of a clean desk, or the result of reading too many papers with 5+ syllable words. (Scusame, Lanfranco, sto scherzando. Va bene?)

Mesa Vista Press makes bumper stickers and vinyl lettering that you can design online (and that surely isn’t ecologically friendly as I’m sure our friend Lanfranco’s heterogeneous phantom borons are). Our saying du jour shows up on their “mental health” page. Since these are design-your-own stickers, I have to wonder who entered this saying on the site. Someone looking to get a rise out of a co-worker, perhaps? I mean, it’s not something you’d have printed up for yourself as a badge of honor. I’ve had a clean desk all month and I’ve no desire to run out and tell the world that I have a sick mind. (What you choose to deduce is entirely up to you.) If I’ve in any way inspired you to go have a bumper sticker made, I should hope it’d be something more positive like “I’m simple” or “I like clean desks!” (Thanks for playing, Mesa Vista!)

A little over a year ago, “Trundling Grunt” entitled his blog post with our popular saying. I like the Grunt (who is 251 years old, a Taurus, and of the year of the Rat (any amateur, or professional for that matter, Chinese astrologers out there who can name which years he might have been born into in 10 seconds or less?(just in case he isn’t actually 251 y.o.)) according to his blog profile)–because he has a picture of his office in his post, just like I’ve been doing! In fact, he scientifically proves that a cluttered desk is not healthy due to surface germs (source: cartoon). Hmmm, have to watch this one. The blog is called “secrets and lies“…. maybe that’s not actually his office in the photo…?! [kudos to you if you survived this paragraph's crazed and insensitive grammatical twists and turns!]

As far as I can tell, Gary Singh, in this MetroActive article is looking to raise some bru-ha-ha with some barnyard animals as a result of his passion about this subject.

Oh geez. Look at the time. almost 11pm and I’m signed up for the Toastmasters evaluation contest tomorrow morning (meeting begins at 6:30 am). Must begin beauty rest activities immediately. (Sorry to give you the short paragraph, Gary.) Good night!

Being a total newbie to the Bluetooth headset technology, I was actually quite shocked to learn (from the nice guy at our local Verizon store) that it’s supposed to call someone after I speak the person’s name. V. cool–but like I said, not happening.

Back to our idea of fun around here. I’m leaving for a family vacation on Thursday and will not be in the office or at my desk to messy it up, clean it up, or take more exciting pictures of it. Thus, the month-long Clean Desk Challenge ends on Wednesday evening. And you can bet I’ll be leaving town with a cleared off desktop!

Have a few things to add to the like/dislike list for the new Palm Treo 755p:

Likes:

• A kind reader wrote in and got me to look at the search function again in the Contacts mode. Turns out I have to push the alternate function key button before hitting the search button. Oops. (Thanks for the help, S!)
• After test driving several “smartphones” at the store, I’m very happy to have chosen one with the keypad on the face of the phone rather than having to slide the face up, or pop it open like a pocketbook. Mostly I liked the cleaner look of those, but functionally, not so efficient.
• Since I had to program numbers into the old phone, and since I carried around a separate PDA which sync’d to my address book, I didn’t carry all that many phone numbers in the phone. Since the old phone (just like the new one) displays names of people it sees in the address book, the old one often didn’t call up a name. Since the new phone syncs with the address book, the majority of the calls are recognized. Works just like caller ID. Cool!

Dislike:

• No time display when the device is in sleep mode. I don’t like to wear a watch so I used to use my phone as a time piece at meetings. Turning the Treo on everytime I want to check the time isn’t so cool, so now I’m wearing a watch again until another brilliant idea comes along.

That’s about it for now. The days have been full and I’ve been out and about mostly, away from the computer. Have a great weekend!

After months of moving in this direction, getting a “smartphone” finally moved high enough on the priority list to happen. I got a Palm Treo 755p and so far, I’m quite pleased with it.

For one, this one device replaced my five year old phone and a low-end Palm PDA with a very squirrely writing pad.

What I like about it:

• touchscreen navigation
• having access to my full address book for phone calls – yay!
• no stylus writing
• stylus tapping when convenient
• almost identical interface to my PDA
• have a basic camera (especially while my camera still out for the count)
• in Contacts, I can start typing first or last name
• the menus make it pretty easily customizable. For example, adding speed dials to the phone interface
• I can program the short cut buttons to call up 2 different commonly used applications (button or alt+button)
• it syncs in less than 30 seconds (previous Palm Zire took several minutes when transferring images

What I’m not liking–and this may be that I haven’t figured out how to do these, but I think it just doesn’t do them:

• in Contacts, typing in the company won’t connect with the record (for real!!). You have to know the person’s name. As far as I’m concerned, this is sheer madness! Forever being the optimist, I’m still holding on to a shred of hope that I’m missing something. There is a system-wide search function which will turn up a contact by business, but not through Contacts.
• Verizon disabled bluetooth connectivity for sync-ing to my Mac. I resent having to carry around a cable, and I don’t want another cable hanging around my desk. Bad call, Verizon. [2/26/08 update - Yes it does!]
• I can’t find how to rearrange the icons in the Home view. I’d like to position them by my own preference.

That’s it for now.

I was out of town without the second brain (i.e. laptop) over the weekend, hence no clean desk report. I was in Oakland, California for the 20th Anniversary party for the Celebrator Beer News journal. More specifically, I was helping out with a silent auction that raised funds for the California Small Brewers Association (CSBA).

While there, I tried a couple of beers. My favorite by far was from the Duvel booth. It was a sour stout–I’ve never had anything like it and I should dare to hope to have it again =).

Which is saying something as I haven’t been much of a beer drinker in my years. That must have come across to the auction coordinator, Tom McCormick (also the Director of CSBA). At one point, probably in response to my ignorance of the brewery names he was talking about, he asked, “Do you like beer?” pause… “I like goodbeer,” I replied, thinking about the kegs of nastiness that flowed freely during my college days. His response, “That was the correct answer.” Booya!

To wrap up the clean desk report, today I spent all of 5 minutes at my desk, and the second brain is downstairs for some tech logistical issues, hence a super clear desk.