I’m impatiently waiting for my Knit Picks order, which includes no less than 20 balls of yarn for the blanket I’ll be knitting as soon as the order arrives, and their Options Knitting Needle Set and some extras to go with it, which I’ve been drooling over for a while now.

In the meantime I am attempting to start a pair of socks from the toe-up, but I’m having one hell of time with the cast on. I’m trying to teach myself the figure eight cast on, of which Hello Yarn has the absolute best tutorial on it that I’ve found, but I’m having difficulty tightening up the bottom row and then dividing the stitches among four needles; I think I’m knitting too tight. I am determined, though, because this should be silly easy and I’m probably just getting too frustrated.

It is beautiful.

Right now, however, there is a large stack of papers on my desk that needs to be shredded but other than that it has stayed clean. On Monday I started Phase Two of Office Cleaning 2007, which includes very generally, the entire floor: the shit under the second table that has been piling up for months, the shit in front of the bookcases, and the shit that I’ve been stacking in the back corner. Don’t stack stuff in corners, folks; the stacks only seem to grow with time.

As per The David’s suggestions and GTD, I collected everything into one area and then started the task of processing. I had to process all this shit four times because I had so much paper stuff that needed to be filed in multiple places, thrown away, or shredded.

It was not fun.

But I got it done.

Ever wanted to know what four years’ worth of class notes looks like?

Left to be cleaned are the bookcases, the shit on top of the second table, and those very scary closets. Then the rest of the house. Eek!

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.

I have been content using only three sets to categorize/organize my photos. In fact, I’m going to keep the original three sets (Beings, Places, and Things) among my primary collections. But I have the Flickr Uploadr installed and I have been put-off by the limitation of 100mb per month of photo uploading (and how the only size viewable are the small images) and thus I haven’t really utilized the application nor the site as much as I otherwise would have without the limitations.

My hesitations dealt with ownership — that Flickr (Yahoo!) would have my photos on their servers. Which is silly, seeing as how I have my sites (and so many files and other photos) hosted on some other company’s servers.

The deciding factors were the ability to upload as much as I want whenever I want, the ability to create as many sets and collections as I want, and the pure awesomeness of the Flickr community.

I’ll be uploading a bunch of photos from the past several years (I have close to 9GB of photos on my hard drive), and we’ll see how it works.