Disorganization at Work: The Paper Problem

Deborah Living With It Deborah Gray lived with undiagnosed clinical depression, both major... Send Message Subscribe: Deborah

Wednesday, September 02, 2009
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I'm looking at my desk at work, trying to figure out what to do with this sea of paper that is covering every one of the three counters that make up my cube in the Office of the Registrar at UC Berkeley. I have a pretty large cube, and as usual the paper has expanded to fill the space allotted to it....

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piles are organization
adult ADHDave
Thursday, September 03, 2009 at 02:15 PM

I have always piled, and I know what is in every pile, and how deep it is in the pile. I also share the frustration of the mess I really dislike, but it is of my own making. I have made some headway by realizing that file cabinets are just piles, they are piles on end, and in fact then they are piled on top of each other. Filing cabinets are where good piles are in heaven. Then the next step is to make your folders have names that make sense to you, then put them in an order that makes sense to you. If others need to use them then they will need to ask or learn your system.

piles everywhere....
Barb
Thursday, September 03, 2009 at 04:18 PM

lol... all I can say is, out of sight, out of mind....   I actually OWN filing cabinets.... but if I put something in there, I forget about it! Like you mentioned, I can find anything you want in the piles.... very quickly.... but put it away? It's like the black hole.....   Think it's associated with creativity? hmmmmm.....

re: piles everywhere....
Dandelion
Thursday, September 03, 2009 at 06:34 PM

I do not only have piles of papers, but piles of books, piles of books and stuff, piles of mails things I might want to look at. Since my boyfriend is a neat-freak, I shove what looks bad inside cabinets and lol I can say I lost them because I forget them....till I start looking for something and then take a look at .....my treasure!

I remember my Dad having a large cabinet where you could find....anything! I laughed then, and my Mother would keep asking him when he was going to get rid of .....SOMETHING ..      But she had piles of magazines and piles of books and like me...1/2 the time she wasted time trying to find what whe wanted, and the other half... well, she knew (like me) at least, what pile IT was in.

Before I decided to put everything in my computer I had about 5 different pads with information, very important information. I loved computers since they came out. I always wondered if I could put all that was in my head (info) in it, but I was no pc engineer. And I knew before they diagnosed me that I needed one electronic device that I could carry around, that Ive FINALLY heard of..a PDA. My boyfriend and everybody who is not ADD/ADHD have been trying to persuade me from getting one. They are not as practical as you think it is.....well what do u know? Someone who was assigned to me to help me with organization showed me what I really needed: A PDA!   And my computer has become my memory. If something is wrong with it...I have to run and get a way to use one. So the most important information I need to read, I send it to myself thru emails, then I go ahead and make a folder to store by categories.Shows we do know what we need, and we can become good inventors as well!

I think that we are so scattered and so resourceful that we have information gallore in our brains...we want to learn so many things! and who stores more info than us? So piles of papers just say how scattered we are, not how resourceful or creative we are.