Time Management III
on January 22nd, 2009Clean up that clutter!
Let’s face it. Most creative people are disorganized slobs. I am usually horrified by what I see when I go to other people’s studios. I once apprenticed to a world-famous artist. His studio was the most horrific thing I have ever seen, a mass of books and art and files and boxes and piles and piles of art supplies and manuscripts that filled every single room of the six bedroom house. Nothing was ever thrown away. There were six or seven tubes of every kind of paint or a half dozen of each kind of varnish because he kept losing them in the bottomless pit of his workplace and buying more. The waste of money was appalling. The waste of time was worse.
I used to be a clutterbug myself, but compared to most artists, I am an ascetic. However, a few years ago, I resorted to hiring a professional organizer service to come into my home and studio and help me get it together. It was some of the best money I ever spent. I learned some great tricks for controlling papers and keeping them under control. I will probably write a separate column about that later. But the most important and simplest thing I ever learned was to simply learn to throw things I don’t use out. Learn to get rid of what you are not using or have not used in a twelve-month period. Clothes, comics, books, you-name-it, if it isn’t useful or beautiful to you, then you should dump it. That doesn’t mean you have to throw it away. You can give them to charity, sell them, or give them to friends, but get it out.
Clutter is a kind of visual noise. It is distracting and demoralizing. It will impede your ability to work. An inability to find important documents or file effectively will eat into your work time. Think of that seven hours a week that you are probably wasting struggling with your clutter right now. You can either use that seven hours to create more art or you can have more time to play. It’s your choice. Clean it up or live with it and live less well. That’s all there is to it. However, don’t try to clean up the whole pile all at once. Start small, with a small corner and work your way out from there. Stay on top of incoming paperwork while committing a little time every day to eat away at the old. (Your trashcan is your friend. Open the mail over the trashcan. Throw away anything you do not need, immediately!) When I finished my household/studio purge, it took several Salvation Army trucks as well as dozens of hefty bags of trash to get rid of everything I wanted to get rid of. When I was done, I had so much room in my home that I was able to move my studio back into my house and now I don’t have to pay studio rent anymore.
One very poor friend got much of my old furniture and I found so many valuable books and art that I made a small fortunes selling some goodies I didn’t want to collectors, enabling me to get new living room furniture and put some money into investments. De-cluttering can be very good for your spirit, but it can also be very good for your wallet.
Update: Wow, this was a long time ago. Clutter is no longer a major problem for me simply because I am no longer living in a 750 square foot condo. When I was running a studio and living in a space that small, I was always tripping over something no matter how hard I cleaned. No more. It stays tidy in here and takes a fraction of the time to maintain as it used to.
Office management types say any paperwork system that takes more than 15 minutes a day to manage is too complicated. I haven’t quite reached that holy grail of paper control yet, but I am working on it.
Apprenticing to the clutterbug artist gave me a lifetime horror of clutter. I loved him dearly, but could see how I could end up just like him if I didn’t mend my ways. In the mid-1990′s, when I was self publishing, I accumulated a huge amount of stuff, particularly inventory and supplies. It took me a long time to winnow it out, and I am sorry to admit how much money and time I wasted buying things I did not need, and sorting through them. I try very hard not to impulse purchase, or keep anything I haven’t used in a year (with the exception of necessary financial records).
Like most fans, I like to collect things, but now if I don’t have a place for it where I can enjoy it, I either get rid of something I already have, or I just don’t buy it. Because I still have more books than I can reasonably store, my simple rule is ten books must go out for every book I take in. My reference library is sacrosanct. It would be impossible to replace some of these books. Many are quite rare, so even if I don’t use them often, they are staying put.
The only thing I have really regretted selling over the years was some comic art. Now that I have wall space for it, I really wish I had not sold some of my Nick Cardy, Garcia Lopez and Jim Sherman original pages. I have the perfect place to display them! Sob!
Well, crap. I had a long response that got eaten.
Basically agreeing in total with your observations about how debilitating clutter can be. And a declaration that you’ve inspired me to go tackle some clutter-clearing that has been on my agenda for today.
I once read an article that asserted that a clean office was the sign of a procrastinator. Only a person who wasn’t doing their real work would clean their office.
Naturally, I think that’s absurd.
Everyone has different work styles, and some people seem to flourish in messy environments. But the studies I’ve read show that those who thrive in a messy environment have a crap threshold: if the office gets bad enough, their work suffers.
If it’s bothering you, then it is probably time to deal with it. If not, then whatever.
Back in my self publishing days, my disorganization was legend. Now that I have a nifty computer, I doubt I would experience that kind of horror again. But I used to routinely lose orders and commissions and addresses. It was just a mess.
It is so easy to just put a commission on a sticky and leave it on my desktop now.
If my computer ever dies, I am screwed.
When I first read this article months ago, I was living in a very small, 104-year-old house. My studio was what once had been the dining room, as well as the main room of the downstairs, and I had roughly 8 feet by 4 feet square to work in. Not surprisingly, no matter how often I cleaned it up, it always felt like I was losing a battle with clutter. My ‘office’ was my couch.
Now that I’m in my new place, and have an entire 15′x10′ bedroom to paint in, AND another bedroom for just the office, not to mention closet space in each room… it’s been lifechanging. It’s so much easier to focus when I don’t have to play a game of Tetris just to put away and take out the gouache.
“It’s so much easier to focus when I don’t have to play a game of Tetris just to put away and take out the gouache.”
Best quote of the day! LOL!
Because I have ADHD, it’s especially important for me to control clutter. An ADHD brain is like a radio that can’t isolate just one station. I just can’t work in a cluttered environment because my brain often can’t tune out the visual “noise.”
There’s a book on productivity called Getting Things Done that indirectly offers solutions for controlling clutter. The premise of “GTD” is that everything that commands your attention should be recorded in some format to help keep your mind clear, whether that means an action list, project support materials, reference, whatever. The rest gets thrown out.
GTD recommends a single alphabetical filing system rather than multiple systems (unless you’re working on a massive project that requires a cabinet-full of material). The idea is that if you file everything by person, company, theme, or project and keep it in one alphabetized system, you’ll save time searching for stuff because you’ll only have three or four places to look. As I said, I think it’s also a solution for clutter, at least indirectly.
(I’ve only begun experimenting with the principles in the book and can’t really vouch for them one way or the other yet. There’s a near-religious following for GTD, and I don’t want anyone to mistake me for a GTD evangelist! I gravitated towards it because my ADHD makes it imperative that I have some sort of external system to make up for the structure my brain inherently lacks. For me, the jury is still out on whether “GTD” works or not.)
As an aside, my at-home clutter problem will soon be alleviated just a bit. I just accepted a job offer today that will not only end two months of unemployment, it will also provide me with a cubicle where I can display my impressive collection of Spider-Man action figures. Sadly, there just wasn’t room for all of that stuff at home.
I hope my new employer’s corporate culture can accommodate a salesman who is also a huge Spider-Man fan. If liking Spider-Man is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
I think I’ll leave my Buffy the Vampire Slayer stake at home, though. That might be harder to explain to the uninitiated.
Great post, Bill. I might have to check that book out.
I used to have several filing systems, primarily because my home was too small to accommodate all of my records. So some were in my house, the rest were in storage, or stuffed in closets.
I could never find a thing.
I’ve made big improvements in the last few years by reducing my filing system to one set of cabinets for business files, and another set for reference and manuscripts. Now I can find things.
Having multiple places to look was a nightmare. I had the self publishing files, my publisher files, my financial files,t he mail order files, the freelancer files, the reference, and than all the crap I did not know what to do with.
A nightmare.
Simplify, simplify.
I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear you have a new job! Good going!!!!!
OK, I have to confess: there’s still the unknown pile o’ crap box. But it’s a much smaller pile o’ crap.