Office refurbishment and time to clear my desk. I started on Friday afternoon and finished this afternoon - and what a difficult task. Three full bin-bags of rubbish plus several bits and pieces taken home (and some still to take), but final outcome - clear the desk and there's a whole heap less clutter to bog you down in your working day.
Decluttering is a trendy thing, with Japanese and Scandinavian guides to getting rid of your possessions topping the UK bestseller lists. We live lives increasingly cluttered lives, 'stuffocation' I've written about. Physical goods are becoming cheaper and cheaper, even as property prices (especially in London) become unfeasibly expensive. We get an endorphin rush from the act of buying things, and so often end up with stuff we neither need nor want, but it ends up stuffocating us.
It's not just about acquiring new things - it's about getting rid of old things. Even if we live by William Morris's golden precept not to bring anything into one's house that's neither beautiful nor useful, we will still end up, after many decades, to have more stuff than we have room for.
The same in the office. You go to a conference. You get a nice bag, with a report printed on thick glossy paper. And a note pad, and ballpoint pen, and lanyard with your delegate's badge. And a gift, like a leather-bound folder with space for credit cards and paper. And this goes on, year in, year out, and your desk is groaning with the stuff and you cannot bring yourself to chuck it out.
After all, someone's spent money manufacturing these things, so they must have value...
Spending time with the bin-bags and deciding what goes in and what's spared made me realise a few important things.
Don't chuck out:
1) Things that can be useful in future (pens, paper-clips, rubber bands, note-pads, name-badge holders etc) - but don't keep them to yourself. Put them in the stationery cupboard for everyone to share.
2) Things of historical value. Old copies of CBI News that I used to edit from the late 1980s into the late 1990s, one with Lech Wałęsa on the cover, or another with a debate about Europe (below) or a supplement about Poland from 1992. These don't exist any more outside of an archived copy of each issue in the British Museum library, all dumped by someone doing what I was doing today. I have three examples, which I'll keep to the end of my days.
3) Things of sentimental value. This is the tricky one. It's easy to say that everything has sentimental value. It doesn't. It's equally easy to say that nothing has any sentimental value. Equally untrue. Consider what you really, really, really want to hang on to. Otherwise, chuck it out.
It's a generational thing. My parents' generation, who went through the deprivations of war, who lost the things that their own parents had worked so hard for, and then, in the austere post-war years, had to work hard to establish themselves in a new country, could easily drift into hoarding. The extreme example was Edmund Trebus, the Polish soldier who ended up in a house in North London surrounded by hoarded junk, and his own BBC documentary.
My father hangs on to things on the basis that a) someone once took the trouble to make them, b) they may come in handy someday, not necessarily for the reason they were made, and c) it costs money to replace them. Hence the large collection of nuts, screws and washers in the garage, stored in old jars.
But the young generation that grew up in an age of plentiful stuff, just disposes of things without thinking. My younger colleagues find it painful watching me deliberating over whether to throw or keep something. I'm somewhere between the two generations, though tending towards my father.
In 1978, my father bought me for my 21st birthday a ghetto-blaster radio/cassette player with big speakers; it cost £118, which in today's terms is £675, enough for a well-specced laptop which will do you a whole lot more than just play music. That old ghetto-blaster is still there, in his room, taking up space... but it still works, and it was my 21st birthday present, and so... it's still there.
Books go into bookcases, and if the bookcase is up against an external wall, it makes for good thermal insulation. Plates and cutlery go in the kitchen - but when is the last time you had a four-course meal for 12 people at your place? Time to let go of much of the stuff in the kitchen, really. Clothes - for me not particularly difficult to get rid (to charity) stuff that's slightly frayed but still useful. And I buy much of my clothing in charity shops in Pitshanger Lane, Ealing, thus doing my bit for the circular economy.
The local authority in Ursynów advertised a garage sale yesterday - turn up and for free! sell your unwanted stuff to people browsing for knick-knacks. The weather yesterday was quite appalling, but no doubt there will be another bring-and-buy (quite a novelty in Poland), but a great initiative.
Being forced to declutter radically every now and end then is, according to Japanese decluttering guru Marie Kondo, an experience that brings a purgative joy.
My IT meltdown last month, in which I lost two years' worth of data, presentations, articles etc, passed without any major repercussion. If data is valuable, it will have been duplicated (uploaded, emailed to someone else, saved on pendrive etc). If not - no one's missing it, not least me.
Let us strive to live a life without clutter (but not get obsessed about it). Laurence J. Peter's quote, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” (often misattributed to Albert Einstein) is a signal to get the balance right.
This time last year:
Hammer of Darkness falls on us again
This time two years ago:
The working week with the clocks gone back
This time four years:
Slowly on the mend after calf injury
This time fiveyears ago:
Thorunium the Gothick
This time six years ago:
Łódź Widzew or Widź Łódzew
This time eight years ago:
A touch of frost in the garden
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