Cleaning My Office is Like Dieting 

  
It just couldn’t be avoided any longer. I had to tackle cleaning my office today. I did not have anything else on my calendar that I could use as an excuse to escape my house and pretend that I had not used my office as a dumping site since Thanksgiving.  
At the start of the holiday season I shun my responsibilities and just have fun. That means the only mail that gets opened have hand written envelopes, projects that I have spent the previous ten months working on get shelved, or piled as is more likely the case and work, what’s work? As if all that avoidance is not enough, my office then also becomes the gift holding and wrapping center, Christmas craft making site and major menu planning and research area for all things holiday.
Around the first of the year I undecorate the whole rest of the house and that task is so horrible that I take a few days break from organizing because, quite frankly I can close my office door and pretend it is not there. It is kind of akin to wearing sweat pants after the holiday. You don’t really want to face the reality of what the holiday has done to you, or you have done during the holiday.
Well, come to Jesus time it is. I had to start to work on my office. First I knew that mail had to be opened or I might piss off some banks. Before I could open mail I had to find it, “Wow, how did this pile get stuck between the red and green tissue paper?” Then it he to be sorted, opened, (I really could have used an OPEX machine today), most of it got thrown away, then some of it had to be acted on.
Then there was the entering of new addresses from friends who sent cards this year. I did not send cards so I did not need the addresses for this season. Who knows if I will get around to doing a card next year. That might have been an unnecessary job, but I am old enough to think I need everyone’s address.
Then came my least favorite job, filing. I really need to clean out my files, but even if I had more organized files I would not like putting things in them any more. I finally put away the Christmas wrapping supplies. All this work and it hardly looks like I did a thing. There are still piles to be dealt with, bags of old hand bags to go to the goodwill, boxes of 30 year old photos to be, I don’t know what with, buckets of change to be sorted and deposited, hundreds of cook books to be reorganized.
I know I have at least a month’s worth of work in that room, but the thought… I also know that when it is done I will be so happy and will be much better at keeping it organized. My proof is my bedside table that I cleaned out last year is still neat. But cleaning out and keeping it clean need to be like a diet, done faithfully everyday. Somehow my diet is like my office. Overwhelming and a mess. The rest of the house is great, including every closet. Well, not the attic or garage, but really, everything else.
I think if I make a big push to do an hour a day in my office I can take care of business and in the end feel better about my life. Now my diet needs the same discipline. On Valentine’s Day, a month from now let’s see where I am.