Wrapping up my month of the #UfYH #FlatSurfaceChallenge…

The week 4 prompt was to revisit our previous surfaces and reset them back to clear if they'd accumulated new clutter. Fortunately I didn't have much to do there, so to reward myself for good behavior, I decided to tackle the last section of my office floor. 🙄

This one was possibly the most functionally annoying, since it kept me from sitting at my project desk (which I cleaned off in week 2 😁). I decided I didn't have to empty and organize the two most intimidating boxes - that's part of the next phase, triage - so it wasn't even terribly difficult... Honestly a bit anticlimactic after everything else I've done this month. Not complaining!

Yesterday was a lovely day of hanging out with friends, first at the #TriangleTootParty gathering and then a wonderful dinner at Chez @honusharp with good friends. So I feel just fine about not making any #UfYH #FlatSurfaceChallenge progress yesterday... 😇

And I finished the week strong today - got everything up off that stretch of floor except that bin & basket of holding. Yay! 🎉 My plan for them is to use them to jumpstart the next phase of Unfucking My Office: take one bin, box, bag, or basket at a time and continue the keep / donate / recycle / discard triage that I started with that bin earlier this week.

I've realized that my office is messy because it isn't organized - it's hard to put things in their place when they don't have a place *to* be put! And with two decades of accumulated stuff in here, it'll be impossible to organize if I don't pare it down first. So... more baby steps. (Don't worry, I don't plan to livetoot that part - but these toots have been a really good accountability mechanism for getting me to the point where I'm *ready* to face that demon.)

So I finally bit the bullet and started emptying the Bin of Holding in my #UfYH #FlatSurfaceChallenge space tonight! I did a quick triage of keep / donate / recycle / discard, and then managed to find temporary homes for the stuff I'm keeping, designated a bag for donations, and put the recycle and discard in their designated receptacles. Why is this so hard? 🙄

Feels like not much visible change, but I just have to keep telling myself that it's relentless forward progress, as Mike's running crowd says...

I didn't work on the #UfYH #FlatSurfaceChallenge yesterday - spent the evening happily catching up with a friend, and it was a *much* better use of that time. 😁

Today looks like less progress than it actually is, because I actually took the time to excavate a shelf, discard obsolete things, and make room to actually *put away* some of the floor stuff...

(Whyyyyy do I still have the original box and international plug adapters for a PalmOne docking station? 🤦🏻‍♀️)

I've decided to tackle this week's #UfYH #FlatSurfaceChallenge by giving myself permission to shoehorn anything isn't immediately definable as discard or donate into my existing storage space, rather than trying to do a deeper triage it as I go. (Mostly because I made an abortive attempt at triaging it, ended up staring at the pile in despair, and pulled the eject handle.) Which meant I made considerable progress tonight!

(Future-me is going to have *so many* of bins of stuff to deal with - now with a slightly more efficient compression algorithm! I need to figure out a plan for it that doesn't involve a bottle of whiskey… or a flamethrower.)

This week's #UfYH #FlatSurfaceChallenge led off with:

"We're on week 3 now, and that often means one thing: you've been avoiding one particular surface because it just seems like way too much to deal with. Guess what we're doing this week?"

And I feel SEEN. The floor on the open side of my office is currently a disaster zone… This is the space that I bought an entire shelving unit to clear a year ago, and now it's full of crap *again*, but I have neither any more room on the shelves, nor any room for more shelves. 😖

The real problem here is that I hang onto too much stuff, and I'm not organized enough to have homes for all this stuff, so to really deal with this I need to do some serious triage. But at least I got a start on the nuisance bits around the forward edge tonight...

I took a break from the #UfYH #FlatSurfaceChallenge yesterday, but managed to finish the week strong today! This project table is another clutter-attractor - but it's also the LZ for things I use frequently enough to want them easily at hand.

Fortunately, those don't take up much space after everything else is cleared away! So now I have no excuse not to actually start one of the projects I have queued to do there… 😅

Does a shelf count as a flat surface? For the #UfYH #FlatSurfaceChallenge, I think it does! 😁

This one is a bit of a gimme, but I shoved a bunch of clutter in the guest room wardrobe last week when I was tidying up for Mike's dad to come visit... and if I didn't unfuck it soon, I probably wouldn't find it again for a year or two. 🙄 (And I'd most likely be wondering where the hell it all was, in the meantime...)

I didn't have a lot of spare cope today, so I picked an easy spot for today's #UfYH #FlatSurfaceChallenge.

And then it took me twenty minutes anyway because I got sucked into a pile of personal history… most of which ended up in the recycle bin. 😐 Do I really *need* those network diagrams from my first network admin job? No. But it's hard to let them go anyway.

(And this is why my office looks the way it does...)

So @Diami03 lovingly dropped an insight bomb on me earlier today, and I've been mulling it over:

"If you never get rid of anything and there's no room to put it away...you've got to internalize that some projects just aren't gonna get done, don't need to be done....and THAT'S OK."

Arrrrgh. I feel seen! But also I'm just not prepared to concede that ground. (Yet.)

My real problem in my office is that I can't "tidy" - put things in their place - because I have so much stuff that doesn't have a place, and I can't "organize" - figure out places for things - because I have so much unplaced stuff taking up the space I need to organize *into*. I bought an entire shelving unit last year, spent an entire weekend getting everything up off the floor into unsorted boxes on the shelves... and now the floor is full again, but my shelves are full too. 😐

So today's #UfYH #FlatSurfaceChallenge goal was to start at the edge of my disaster floor and see if I could actually put things in reasonable places, rather than just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic...