The Girl-Geek Anthropologist

Over the last ten+ years, I have accumulated an incredible amount of clutter. Since I had been so busy with school, I just put everything into piles, until I had a few hours to work on clearing things up. Trying to find pieces of paper was sometimes quite challenging. And, to make it worse, even after I would put everything in order in separate folders, because of a lack of time, I would always end up with piles of papers accumulated in random places, especially various bags, purses, boxes, etc. I have used moving time as an opportunity to get rid of as much clutter as I could. While I started on that before I left Tallahassee, I still managed to have at least six boxes full of papers. I decided this week that the time has come for me to clean things up once and for all. I'm sick of the clutter, and I really want some clean space (which I was really missing because of the accumulated papers).

So, armed with about a hundred manilla folders, I used a severely modified Noguchi Filing System to organize my papers. However, violated one of the key tenets of the system, and that is to actually alphabetize my folders. But, I ended up breaking them up into three categories: personal, financial, and archive. Within each category, I labeled the folders according to what makes most sense to me.

Here's documenting the actual process. I started out with four boxes that were full of papers that have been accumulated for at least ten years. This is the second box that I was working on. It had a combination of personal papers, and academic articles.

This is the second box I cleaned. Luckily, it was mostly academic articles, the majority of which are already in Endnote. All I have to do now is to find them in Endnote, make labels, create folders, and then file them.

This is the shelf where I put all the folders. I used to have a bunch of binders and notebooks, but I decided to move those out, and make room for the folders. The binders contain lecture notes, and some lecture articles. I'm still torn as to whether I need to create a separate folder for each lecture, or just keep everything in a binder. I've been experimenting, and so far, I just want to get this organizing over with. I might have to do a second run-through to clean things up a bit. This will have to do for now, especially since I will not be accessing this material for quite a while.

These are the two crates that I moved the binders and notebooks to. It looks a whole lot more organizing than what I started with.

So, that's it for now. I have two more full boxes full of articles, and I'll be done with the first round of cleaning. This phase, I hope, will not take too much longer to complete.