On Mondays The Partner and I get together with The Canadian (and sometimes, The Ginger[1] Who Dates The Canadian) for Pizza Night. It’s a weekly thing we do — and I don’t recommend it for everybody because eventually the pizza sauce will rot your gut — and this week The Canadian exposed us to Heroes. I had watched a trailer for the show and was interested, just not interested enough to seek it out further. I enjoyed the first episode, but The Partner wasn’t impressed so I stayed and watched two more episodes. By very late Wednesday night/Thursday morning I had finished the season. I got hooked and now I’m waiting for the new season to start in September.

This is all to say: I’ve been slacking on the cleaning. Luckily, we all know I’m a world-class procrastinator so we saw it coming. I got myself in gear and started tackling the office this (Thursday) afternoon.

Look at the horror:

It is so bad.

Obviously, I’m a stacker. That’s my method — I just stack things on top of other things. Sometimes they’re related, sometimes not.

Folks, my method ain’t workin’ so well.

A few months back I found a site through a site from another site (oh, Internets) dealing with productivity. I’m a productivity whore, even though the pictures say otherwise. I’m also an office supply pornstar, so I was looking into the hPDA and came across The David’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I borrowed my local library’s copy, read the first four chapters, and then went out and bought the book. Yes, it is a cult. No, you don’t have to move to a compound or be one of fourteen wives to some whacked-out dude with a Jesus complex. You just have to buy a couple stacking trays, a box of manila folders, and a label maker. It’s awesome.

To implement the GTD method, The David says to clear at least two consecutive days off your schedule in which to do it with no interruptions. This is not a problem for me, although the dog needs to go out every now and then. The first part is Collection — one of the stacking trays is your in-box and you collect every single thing (papers, mail, books, the bottle of nail polish that’s been under your keyboard for weeks, that container of peanuts that’s been on your desk since February) that is not where it should be and put it in the in-box. If you’re like me you’ll find you have too much shit to fit into a dinky tray and so you must put all the shit on the floor next to the desk on which the tray sits. Once everything is collected you start part two, which is to Process all that shit, one item at a time. There’s this whole workflow to it.

My problem, well, my two problems are (1) I share the office with The Partner and (2) I have a lot of shit. For my situation, I’ll be collecting and processing at least four times (maybe five). I’m not some CEO with papers and printed emails; I was a university student with notebooks and textbooks and yarns strewn about/under my desk. In order for The Partner to be able to walk to his desk, I have to do this chunk-by-chunk. I’m starting with my desk/work area and then I’ll move on to The Table That Just Collects Shit and/then the bookcases, finishing with the closets. The fucking closets. They scare me.

So far I’ve collected everything from my work area into an overflowing pile on the floor that is giving me hives every time I look at it/step over it. I cleaned the desk surface and my desktop PC, which I hadn’t done in over six months. While The Partner was installing my new DVD-R drive (I only have 18G free out of 80) and sucking out all the hair from the fans and vents (we have two cats), I meticulously cleaned every crevice of my keyboard and went crazy with the magic erasers. The shit shines.

I did do a tiny bit of processing, though: I pulled out some things that are specifically staying on the desk and the rest I’ll get to later, after I’ve gone to bed for several hours and woken up when the sun is warm[2].

I must never again let the office explode and computer cleaning must be upped to every three months.

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[1] Someone actually created gingerkids.org: International Ginger Kids Foundation. I’m totally buying this shirt for her.

[2] Bill Murray I love you.