I am amazed at how inefficient I have become.  I thought I was a pretty good multi tasker.  Pre-computer, I kept a legal pad on a clipboard nearby and had a system whereby I put a small date on the bottom of each page and wrote notes of things on the days I needed to accomplish.   I would draw a line through the item when it was completed, and add more items as they occurred to me.   Usually after a phone call, or an idea, or after I noticed something, I would make the note and then I would resume my process of piling through the list of things.   This note had a name and phone number and a one or two word instruction.   My desk had paperwork sorted…..sort of vertically fanned downward from top to bottom.   These were pending and working items.   A living breathing system of piles and notes, and I could easily see what I had accomplished and what was waiting for me.   It was a good system.  

Then computers came to save us from paper.   HA!   Email, text messaging, Twitter, cellphone, homephone, extra email addresses, Facebook, MySpace, My GOD!   Suddenly the excrement has hit the oscillator!   I don’t know what happened, but my desk regularly looks like a bomb hit it.   There are sticky notes with phone numbers I don’t recognize and encrypted notes that the CIA would not be able to disentangle.   Flyers, folders, business cards, receipts, notes.   I am looking at a scrap of paper at this writing that has a phone number, the words 3 kids, and the number 246.   Can someone help?  

I didn’t used to be like this.   But the problem is too much incoming.   Too many sources to review, catalog, disseminate, order and it changes constantly.   Email alone is a source of endless distraction.   I get up in the morning and I sit down to “check email”……next thing I know I am heading off in three different directions at once, responding, making notes, thinking and I find that an hour has passed and I am still sitting in my………well…….you get the idea (don’t bother with the picture).    And my desk gets worse.   Fortunately, its all ‘contained’…….I don’t delete email unless its spam and I know that everything that I need is “somewhere”………either on my desk, or in my email.   That is some small comfort.   It is the only thing that keeps me from complete madness.   I know that I can lasso the thing if I spend about 26 uninterrupted hours putting everything in order, deleting the unneeded emails so that I can find more easily what I need, and making another promise to myself that nothing gets written down on a scrap of paper without leaving clues to decode it later.   I know I can do this, because every 2-3 weeks, I do it and return my world back to some kind of order.    Then sigh.  And begin again.

But I miss my legal pad.