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

[elysdir.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking the other day about how useful the slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle" is -- I recycle all the time, but the slogan reminds me to reuse things, and once in a while I even remember the reduce part, at times and in contexts when I might not remember without the slogan.

To come up with an equivalent slogan for reducing clutter, I'd say you should start by defining the steps. I like people's suggestions for things like "Trash" or "Toss," but it seems to me those may be equivalent to "Triage". It seems to me the process goes something like this:

1. Decide which things are important. (Triage.) (Implicit step: if they're not important, throw 'em out.)

2. If they are important but don't need to exist in the form in which they exist, convert them into a more compact/portable/searchable form where they can coexist with other items. (Transcribe.) (Implicit step: after transcribing, throw 'em out.)

3. If they are important *and* need to exist in their current form, then file them somewhere where you'll be able to find them again. (sTore? inTact? accumulaTe? caTegorize? :) ) I suppose you could levy some sort of penalty against yourself for every item in this category (Tariff).... :) It helps a lot if you can follow the "place for everything and everything in its place" dictum here -- filing cabinets are good things, and I have a shelf of a bookcase devoted mostly to maps, so whenever I'm going on a trip, I go to that shelf and grab the right maps. Of course, sometimes I neglect to put 'em back afterward, which means I end up having to go to AAA to pick up a new map after all. But often it's helpful.

Side note: at such time as you have OS X, I recommend DevonTHINK as the place to transcribe stuff. Great note-taking and organizing software, very useful for storing snippets of info, fits my head *way* better than other computerized approaches I've tried (such as storing notes in Eudora, storing notes as individual files/clippings on the desktop, or storing notes in Stickies or Scrapbook). And if you have a scanner, you can scan things that aren't plain text (such as doodles that you don't care about preserving in original form) and store the resulting images or PDF files in DevonTHINK, along with text notes about them for searchability. Good stuff.

(There are a bunch of other note-taking apps out there that may be more to your liking, and/or may run under OS 9; at least one review I read said that DevonTHINK just didn't fit the reviewer's head, while a couple of the other apps did. But for me it's the other way around -- this is the first app I've seen that's handled this stuff the way I want it to.)