blue artichoke

I feel like I've just been let out of school for the summer!

I just finished working with my last client, earlier than anticipated, and suddenly have the rest of a beautiful afternoon free. It is sunny and 75 degrees here. I'm wearing flip-flops and a tank top. Fat Larry and I went outside for a while to work/play in the yard. Now I'm inside, blogging for you fools.

When I say that I finished working with my last client, I mean my last client ever. I don't talk about my job here often because of privacy issues, but I am, or I should say was until about an hour ago, a professional organizer. It was a pretty sweet job, really. I never had a client I disliked (or I wouldn't have accepted him/her as a client, I suppose), and I met a lot of really interesting people with great stories to tell. Though I'm really excited about my new job (which, in a way is like one giant organizing client), I'll miss my clients.

I read a lot of organizing books, partly from professional interest, partly because I'm a bit obsessed with reaching my own personal organizing zenith. A lot of the books just reiterate each other, so once you've read a few books, you've pretty much read it all. One organizing "trick" many books mention, which I've passed along to my clients, is to pretend like you're moving. Hah! Easier said than done. I've tried this before myself and thought that it was a pretty good approach, but now that I'm actually moving, I find that the pretend-approach, while perhaps better than nothing, falls short of the real thing. For example, take papers and filing. I thought I was pretty fanatic about removing unnecessary papers from the house, but as I cleaned out my filing cabinets (which I do every year, mind you, after filing my taxes), I found that I hang on to a lot of paper clutter. It doesn't seem like clutter because it is all nicely filed away, out of sight and orderly, but, man, I don't want to move all that crap. I had two filing cabinets (one short-term and one long-term) and a filing box (business files). I'm now down to one banker's box of files:

And here is what happened to the file clutter:

That's a big box of nonsensitive papers to be recycled and seven (7!) grocery bags of shredded papers. And for you earth-huggers, don't worry, I'll dump the shredded paper into a cardboard box to be recycled. A big enough box wouldn't fit into my shredder. Back off! I like looking over my mountain of trash. It makes me feel free, mixed with a little bit of guilt for keeping all those papers just because I had the room. But mostly free. There's nothing like moving to make you question why you hang on to things, and you do hang on to things, I don't care what you say.

Getting to Know All About You: What sort of things do you hang on to?