The vile stuff is like kudzu. It keeps creeping in unless a machete is used on a regular basis and when the stacks accumulate, they become a source of:
- confusion
- irritation,
- depression, and
- disease-bearing rats.
So far, I've only noticed the first three.
Unless there is a regular effort to fight paper proliferation, in time the average office will resemble the hovel of some Greenwich Village loon who rambles on about Bolivian politics and Swiss bankers and has soup stains on his tie.
Fortunately, I've developed a simple strategy: Throw it out.
I don't mean, look it over and file the good stuff and toss the rest. I mean throw it all out. All of that pondering the value of an old Tom Peters article is a time waster. Chuck it. If you don't know what you threw out, you probably won't miss it and your culpability will be uncertain. [Perhaps I didn't throw it out. Maybe I loaned it to someone. Yeah, that's what happened.]
I've changed my tune on this one. In various time management workshops over the years, I've sung the song about prioritizing the stacks and creating nifty files. That was before I found the true nature of the adversary by calculating the amount of time even a paper management system can consume. Those stacks of paper are soul-sapping minions of Hell. They deserve a quick death.
Shred them, recycle them, or toss those suckers into the dumpster. The method of disposal does not matter. The goal is space.
Think Japanese.
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