Office/Prison Diss Prep

If one were to ask me how much I accomplished on the dissertation this weekend, I would have to say that it's a thing that makes me go hmm... It's hard to measure. You could scroll back through this blog and see fairly easily that I do not like to clean my home office/prison. And yet, when it's messy, it's tough for me to concentrate.

Well, my office/prison was a mess before we moved from SCT last June. Don't get me wrong: "mess" is a relative term. A reasonable person would enter my office and see several piles of paper neatly organized on the desk, on the floor, on any flat surface really. I typically know where most things are, but living this way tends to drive me NUTS. My office on campus is a total 180-degree shift from that. It's usually pretty darn organized, I must say. But when I'm at home, that's my space, and mine alone, so neat & clean always it is not.

As I was saying, the office/prison was pretty messy before we moved from SCT last June. The night before the move, when I still hadn't organized all those piles, I finally just said, "fuck it." A couple of trusted friends helped me put all of the un-filed piles into a few boxes. I worked pretty hard not to feel guilt for moving piles of stuff to be chucked or filed, but oh well. Later in the fall, I unpacked the un-filed piles into new piles in my new office/prison. Had to get rid of those damn moving boxes! I have a rather large closet in the new space, so the piles have been shoved in there on a bookshelf or near the file cabinet, both of which fit very nicely in the closet.

True to form, I'm creating new piles that are now in nice organized piles all over the floor, AGAIN, and the un-filed ones were still in the closet. Yesterday I decided to take the bull by the horns and start organizing the entire space. Call it a "clean sweep," like the TLC TV show, I dunno. But I'm getting through a TON of old stuff, and it feels pretty good. I'm also finding several neat, printed, stapled, organized piles of articles that My Committee wants me to incorporate into the literature review of the proposal (oh YEAH, my proposal!), so this is a good thing! For the last several months, the prospect of tackling all of these things like literal skeletons in my closet has been pretty daunting. Now that I'm about halfway done with it, it's not so bad. Pretty soon, every piece of paper in my office will either have a place in a file drawer or in the recycle bin.

Yeah, I know...kinda like the data analysis. The thought of it freaks me out more than doing the task itself. I know, I know...

Anyhow, I do chalk this up to having a greater ability to be productive in my office/prison. While it's not work directly related to the dissertation, it's helping the entire process along.