The Listening Post: cutting down

Once every couple of years I go on a bender and shovel out the office. Usually, by that time, I can’t see the bottom of my monitors or move the mouse from edge to edge of the screen without repositioning it. So I threw out my weight in paper yesterday.

The half-life of all that urgent and important communication is amazingly short. Very little importance remains to any of it five years down the road. It decays eventually, like uranium, into lead. Outdated insights into abandoned technology, old-school initiatives in new media, a once latest and greatest service now sunk without a trace in Chapter 11. There are the folders related to insurance plans long-replaced, manuals for devices now obstructing the landfill, trade publications, dead memos, pay stubs, scribbled notes–everything must go.

Except for a few flecks of gold panned from the gravel of the past. There is the cautionary poster of Brother Rasputin that once graced the office door, two books of poetry I thought I had lost, the original wireframe design for a new NCPR website I brought to my job interview in 2000, a set of the original wood engravings that illustrate my book. In all, the good stuff would fit in a single folder.

Once you get going, it’s hard to stop. Given a little more free time, I envision an office floored with straw tatami mats, furnished with a zafu cushion and a small, low teak table holding nothing but an iPad2. For decoration, a slim mahogany stand topped by a bud vase containing a single morning glory; for sustenance, a raku teabowl and a pair of chopsticks on the widowledge. It would all be as clean and simple as that original website conception.

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