First it had to go, then I remembered a use for it, now it needs a place.

This means that Purge and Clean Day got off to a bad start.

I’ve written before about the process involved in culling pens, but there’s also an odd situation involved when culling the piles of random scraps of paper, half filled notebooks, full notebooks, empty notebooks, notes from old classes, assignments from old classes, roll sheets from old classes.

The latter three are the easiest to deal with: remove from folders, pull out staples, put everything in book bag, carry to shredder.

If I could do that with everything else, the process would be a lot easier.

Instead, the empty notebook pile gets reorganized and set aside. The full notebooks get set aside for later review as, by colossal coincidence, has been the case for the past several Purge and Clean Days.

The half-filled notebooks get the filled parts pulled out simultaneously creating more random scraps of paper and more empty notebooks.

The random scraps of paper then get reviewed. The trouble is that because so much paper was eliminated because of the old student related folders, it feels as if there’s plenty of room for the random scraps and therefore sorting them is not that much of a priority.

Today I looked at the pile of 10 Ideas from the past few years and threw them away. Then a couple minutes later I reconsidered and started copying a few of the more interesting ideas–see The Economic Reasons from the pen culling post.

This means I temporarily acted on the idea I had planned a year or so ago. I guess that counts as progress. At least it will once I figure out a place to store it. Of course this was a problem the last time I wrote about the ideas so the Purge and Clean Day needs some rethinking.