commandments of clutter - triage. transcribe. ?

[psocoptera]

Trying to sort through pile of old papers. Argh. A few things are fairly clear - play programs, ball booklets, they're over and done, to be saved (or not) as a record and memento. The rest is a great heap of incompleteness... reviews for restaurants never visited, opening paragraphs of stories never written, song lists for mixes never made. Those NYC maps I might want next time I'm in NYC. What do I *do* with that stuff? I hate to give up on the potential each paper represents - that fic (I still could write!), that restaurant (might be really good!). I also don't want to end up mummified in an accretion of little scraps of paper I might someday act on. If I file them, they're nearly as lost... files are like a dead space, an archive. If I let my desk stay buried under them that chokes off a possible active space where things could get done.

I don't know if it would really help or not, but I want a catchy slogan for reducing clutter. Like how reducing waste has "reduce reuse recycle". So far, I have come up with "triage" and "transcribe" for a parallel slogan. ("Transcribe" since I think I'd rather have eight zillion little text documents than the corresponding pieces of paper... they're lighter, for one thing.)

Can anyone think of a good third? Do you think the "3 Rs" are actually useful in motivating individual behavior as opposed to, like, corporate awareness? Does a good anti-clutter meme have the potential to, say, help my mom clean the house? Or me? (I'm kind of picturing a logo, too... some kind of triangle with arrows converging on one of the points to imply shrinking, maybe.)

Comments

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

And I often find that the transcriptions can be combined, so that there are only, say, half a zillion little text files. Or in some cases just fewer pieces of paper -- I did that with all the phone numbers in my wallet at one point, putting them all on a single little card, and it made it much better, while still preserving the convenience of having all of them in my wallet.

My method for maps is that if they were free, they'll be free again next time, and it's easier to get a new one than to find the old one, so I tend to recycle them. If they weren't free, I try to keep them with other travel stuff in the hope that I _will_ be able to find them the next time.

And I also agree about files being a dead space -- the only time I actually look in them is if I'm reminded of something that's in there and I need to go find it. Maybe when I move next time I'll manage to clear them out a bit...