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

[stowaway-geek.livejournal.com]

For filing, I really like those hanging file folders. Possibly in the plastic box from Staples, if you don't have a file cabinet.

I pretty much just have an envelope called "nostalgia" for each year, and toss small stuff into them. Ditto "letters" and "taxes". Seems to basically work, although I'm probably saving too much.