Clear desk top

I had about an hour at the end of the day yesterday and I was sure what to do with myself. Don't get me wrong, I had stuff to do, I just wasn't sure where I felt like starting. I decided I didn't want to start anything big and I knew I couldn't complete some of the small stuff without a lot of effort because my desk looked like this:

and this:


Lots of stuff everywhere. Little wonder I couldn't decide where to start. I took everything that was on the right sided of the desk and dumped it on the left side so that the mess was contained to one spot. I got rid of washed the dishes and put them away in the cupboard above the desk. I got rid of my sad orchids that only lasted a few weeks because my office got too cold for them over the weekend.

Then I made areas on the desk for the paper to go:


I also made a place for the shredding in front of my keyboard (you can see some of it below - the rest of it had already been shredded).


Then I shredded the shredding (three bags later...) and put the paper away. The File pile is in the top black drawer. The Enter pile is in the bottom left drawer. I don't need to deal with either pile right away - they are all important papers that need to be kept either for archives or financial purposes, but it's not urgent. I can pretty much find what I'm looking for in the piles anyway. And the file pile isn't as scary as it looks. Most of the paper is already in file folders, I just have to put them in the filing cabinet.

The To Do pile is split up in the order I need to do it on Monday. The small pile on the left is my work note book and the office supply catalogue. I've been putting together an order all week and I think it's about ready to place on Monday. Very exciting stuff, we're getting new visitor chairs and some new desk chairs and some new cabinets. You should see the disaster on the other side of my work area...


And this is what it looked like when I went out the door this afternoon. And it will still look this way on Monday. The clear out wasn't too bad - I moved to a brand new department last March and we immediately decided to try to file as much electronically as we possibly could. I also moved into a new office in August and organized the space fairly well, so it's easy to put things back where they belong!