7.30.2006

i am overwhelmed.

i have issues.

organization issues.

issues that i hope that library science will help me with.

i have incredible packrat tendencies. i find interesting things and write them down on bits of paper. these bits of paper can be anything from a normal page in my actual "journal" to post-it notes, torn off pages from scrap paper at work or even the backs of receipts.

i am awash in bits of paper. drowning. lists of websites that might be interesting one day. books i want to read. adorable craft suggestions. organizational ideas i cannot live without.

this packrat tendency has now overflown into my email inbox. i read a ton of blogs from many places. to keep track of them, i read them through bloglines.com. this website is amazing in that i can tell when a blog has a new item i haven't read yet. and i can easily read and manage them. until i find an interesting or noteworthy bit of information.

i quickly email myself the blog post and voila! more digital bits of paper crowding out the real emails i want to read. i label them "neat" or "craft."

i plan on writing about them in my blog. but the truth is, i just get overwhelmed even more. too many cute things on the internet. too many emails. then i don't reply to people i want to reply to and i get frantic.

and then there's all my photos. the bane of digital photography is that you can take ba-zillions of photographs and only 10% will be of any use. which is rather normal, i think, with photography.

except.......... i can't get rid of them. and i don't know how to organize them. and i'm feeling frantic at the thought of never finding a certain photo when i need it, or never being able to organize them.

in any case, i just downloaded picasa in the hopes that it'll help w/ the photos. with the email thing... i'm just going to have to cut back.

with the scraps of paper... i'm going to have to face it and just throw them all away.

i just had a heart palpitation at the thought.

why am i so frantic right now??

and why do i feel the need to organize when i need to work on the gfss website....



goals:
- quick organization of digital photos
- archive all that CRAP in my inbox
- finish working on website all next week.

4 comments:

Tits McGee said...

I heart Picasa, but I hate organization.

madge said...

i have issues.
organization issues.
issues that i hope that library science will help me with.


library science will give you...more issues.

Anonymous said...

I have some suggestions b/c I too, suffer from a tendancy to packrat pieces of information (and physical items, too, but I digress)...

-I make lists of books to read and movies I want to watch using Amazon's wish list feature.
-I have a large, 8 1/2" x 11" reading journal. Mostly used for writing down cool stuff in books - I use little tabs while I'm reading and write them down later, occasionally printing out pictures so it doesn't get overly text-y. The occasional quote or magazine article will make it in, too.
-I email myself things, usually NY Times articles... I'll send myself a link to the article and then go back later and reply to that email cutting and pasting the text of the article b/c NY Times will restrict your access after 14 days or so... so I'll always have the article if I want it... gmail is such an enabler, but I put a "NY Times" label on it and that's working so far.
-I also keep a draft email list of songs I want to listen hear or websites to check out (anything internet related). Afterwards I delete the info or (rarely) add the site to my bookmarks.
-My inbox is overflowing, too. Except most of it consists of personal emails I need to reply to... and my reply time has grown to about 2 months, at least in cases when I need to write a substantial email. [gmail = enabler, again]
-Glad I don't have a digital camera. Yet.

Umm, I think there was something else but I forget at this point.

Hope my suggestions help?

Sleep Goblin said...

Don't throw away your scraps of paper. Get a little scrapbook, the old kind with the craft paper in it, and just glue them in there. Or put them in a binder, with those transparent sleeves you can get for things like baseball cards and the like. That way, if you ever need to move one, it's easy, and you can still have tons of pieces of paper, but they're flippable and contained.

I like little bits of paper.