- Is a clean desk the sign of a cluttered mind?
- Is a cluttered desk the sign of someone who can't find that bookstore form again?
- Is it possible to get to your desk without stepping over piles of books and papers?
- Is it likely that your office has a window behind all those boxes?
Q: Where is your office* on the continuum from Martha Stewart to Hoarders?
*At home (especially for adjuncts), at work, or both.
At home: pristine but obviously functioning; at work, heaped and teetering.
ReplyDeleteAt work: pristine but obviously functioning; at home, heaped and teetering. I want to look professional when my students come in to see me (which does happen occasionally). And at home I do my real work, so there's lots more stuff there.
DeleteAt home, an unholy mess. At work I keep it spare and clean. This way if I have to ever leave town suddenly, someone else can plug into my spot with no problem.
ReplyDelete-At work (as an adjunct): whatever I've schlepped in with me when I squat in a computer lab or the library. Rather spartan and totally unpersonalized.
ReplyDelete-At work (outside the academy) where I share my desk with 4 others in a rather large 24/7 operations center of a Major Government Agency: I have a shoebox-sized plastic container with a stash of my favorite gel pens, migraine medication, band-aids and a spare pair of reading glasses. Otherwise, it's the task essential clutter that I and four others agree must be present at all time (centered on hand sanitizer!). Once I'm back at my own desk in normal business hours routine: I'm keeping the small footprint of personlization. It's very liberating in a bureaucracy!
-At home: A blissful retreat behind a farm table with a nice library table to my right. In runs about a two-month cycle from clutter-free to stacked with stuff (including academic materials and various consumer technology items in various states of unpacking for an avocational stream of product reviews).
With speakers. 5.1 speakers with big honking subwoofer that I play really loud when I get the house to myself.
I think of myself as a chambered nautilus. I can get to and from the door, and there is a clear seat and some desk space when I have conferences with students. Otherwise, like Mrs. C. above, "heaped and teetering" is the way it usually ends up, despite sporadic efforts to organize.
ReplyDeleteOn a side note--found old parent-teacher conference cards from grade school. One thing all grades had in common: "Chrome needs to work on being more organized and keeping her workspace neat."
My office makes "Hoarders" look like a colony of minimalist ascetics.
ReplyDeleteThe only reason I can function is that my desk has pull-out platforms on which I grade papers. Otherwise, I take electronic submissions.
As an adjunct:
ReplyDelete1. A file box in the car trunk.
2. At one location I have a locker (YAY!) so I can store my computer, a coffee cup, textbooks, etc.
3. The other location has nice shared office space, but no secure storage for personal items.
4. My desk at home? A mess upon a mess. Much to my husbands dismay I am a super pile-r. I fine nice flat, clean areas and start stacking papers!!! At home I work on the couch with a lap desk and/or a TV tray-table thing-y.
I long for an office so I can properly display my Beaker doll and plush microbes.
The answer to this question largely depends on what part of the semester we are in. At the beginning it is neat a tidy- not OCD neat and tidy, but I can see the top of my desk and shit is put away (where it belongs, not just crammed in some file drawer so I don't have to think about it). At the current point in the semester it is a controlled chaos of piles for my five classes of committe crap, exams, papers, the "done" pile and the various "to do" piles. At the end, the desk looks good, but don't look in the file drawer!
ReplyDeleteHave you seen photos of the Illinois twister?
ReplyDeleteMy office can beat that.
1) Too soon, but . . .
Delete2) LOL
I have no desk in my office. This is because I do relatively little work in my office. All of my REAL work gets done at home. During office hours, I do piddly things like respond to emails or put together daily quizzes, nothing that requires more than 10 minutes of my attention at a time, because I'm usually interrupted by colleagues about that often when I'm in my office. At home, my desk has free space only where my laptop goes. The rest of the desk is covered with books, Post-Its, receipts, books, mail, bills, and... oh, look, I found the book I thought I'd left in class last week. :)
ReplyDeletePS. I have a small computer shelf where my laptop sits when I am in my office...
DeleteThe messiness of Henri Becquerel's office led directly to his discovery of radioactivity. On the other hand, Jan Oort's office was described as "the tidiest place in the Universe." Your mileage may vary.
ReplyDeleteMy office is my very own natural history museum, with fossils, meteorites, rocks, globes, photographic gear, and all manner of other curiosities all over. I started collecting when a fundamentalist was being annoying about the age of Earth, so I could sit among the evidence. I stopped collecting when I ran out of space. My office does have a window, but I always keep the shades drawn, and in front of them is a copy of the 1969 National Geographic poster of The Earth's Moon, and another poster of dinosaurs, mounted on pieces of foam board. My lab is similarly "intimidating," as more than one student has observed: the lab is full of electrical equipment that goes "ZZt! ZZt!" just like my grandfather Viktor's lab (back when the family still spelled it "Frankenstein"), and gives the impression that one false move will get 4000 volts through you. Good.
I am not a maintenance cleaner, but a cathartic cleaner. When I get good and sick and tired of losing stuff, piles of stuff tipping over, etc., I then do a great job cleaning it all up at the end of a semester. And then it all begins again.
ReplyDeleteIt should be getting a good "cathartic" cleaning in about 2 weeks.
I'm a procrastinator cleaner (when I don't want to grade, I find it NECESSARY to clean).
DeleteMe too! Today it was the stack of dirty dishes calling to me instead of the piles of quizzes and homework. If I were Kimmie, I'd ask why nothing ever is less appealing than grading.
DeleteI rearranged a shelf of books into alphabetical order by title, then by author. It took way less time than I'd hoped. :)
DeleteWhen I was in grad school one of the faculty members had his office condemned by the health department. The department hired an undergrad to swamp it out, and she found...the snake that the biology department had lost a couple of semesters earlier.
ReplyDeleteAny time I have a messy desk I just think back to this example, and I feel much neater.
I have a colleague whose office was condemned by the fire department. The Fire Marshall demanded that it be cleaned out because it was a hazard to our entire building. :)
DeleteNo snakes were unearthed.... :)
DeleteReally, that's the more satisfactory outcome!
Delete:)
DeleteThe snake probably kept the vermin under control!
DeleteThat reminds me of my Master's adviser. He got a new desk. The old desk was pushed aside, new desk plopped down, and he continued building his fort of papers and empty styrofoam coffee cups.
DeleteI'm in a shiny new office in a shiny new building, so I feel obligated to keep it neat and clean. Also, one of my walls is a whiteboard wall, so I need to keep things somewhat clean so i can use it.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, my home office suffers for all the neatness at work. I've got 20 square feet of desk space at home, but only 5 square feet of it is usable.