Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Tricking out the Desk

I spent a good chunk of my summer giving people access to information and protecting privacy for the City of Ottawa. This as it happens is a fine way to spend a summer, especially because you get to work with some fine people who truly believe in what they are doing. And me, I don't mind desk jobs. Especially if I can make my desk into my own mission control. Here are the things I did that made my desk more pleasant for me:

  1. Attached two boxes of binder clips to the wall, so I could always grab one of any size I wanted. (Binder clips: paper clips for grown-ups.)
  2. Attached all three sizes of cover-up tape to a string of elastics hanging from my credenza, so I never had to root around for cover-up tape. (When you're protecting privacy, you use a lot of cover-up tape.)
  3. My favourite: Removed the cover for an unused electric cable hole on the desk and put my wastebasket directly below it. Put tape on the floor with markings so I knew where to put the wastebasket after the cleaners emptied it. Bits of trash, staples, etc. could just be swept into the hole.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you think someone can be too organized?

David Scrimshaw said...

No: You're either organized or you're not organized.

Yes: It's possible to spend more time organizing than the activity warrants, or to create systems and structures that are too overwhelming or too rigid, so that the activity suffers.

I'm afraid I'm more likely to fall in the group of people who aren't organized but have spent too much time doing silly organizing.