Shred-Happy

In a vain attempt to get organized before school starts next week, I performed massive paper-pile dissection and shredding today. I haven't gotten to the bookshelves yet to sort the tomes, but I think it's time for a break. There is now room in my file drawer for all my papers for this semester's classes, the desk is down to a small, manageable pile of stuff to finish off (much wood now shows), and I found a few things I'd long ago forgotten about.

Back when I worked in an office downtown in Gucci Gulch, all my business and personal paperwork was better organized. More file drawers, more time in the day to sort such things. Part of this big purge of paper is to keep the home office (which I share with PH) a bit neater, part of it is being able to find the things I need quickly, but another part of it is stripping down to the essentials. I have a tendency to accumulate random interesting pieces of paper, and then they get lost in the morass of my office. It feels good to toss a bunch of useless stuff.

One thing I've learned from PH, though, is to save the things related to sermon ideas by Scripture passage, so when the passage comes up in the lectionary, I can easily find the ideas or poems or stories efficiently. I also am now saving my sermons organized by Scripture passage as well. If anyone else has any bright ideas about taming the paper beast (yes, RM, I'm looking at the David Allen book), please share!

Of course, two weeks into the new school year, the pile may once again overwhelm me.