The tedium of filing
What should my Sunday afternoon include? Could it be be food foraging, cooking, newspaper reading, stretching exercises, continuing turning the pages of the current novel underway, football watching, filing, or writing a short blog. Filing is the real necessity here but writing a short blog could at least be marginally viewed as constructive procrastination. What it really is, only pure procrastination.
Filing is a never ending chore here. Mail comes in 6 days a week, at least for now, and it is sorted from the start with more than half, advertising and unneeded documentation going straight into the trash at the outset. Some worthwhile financial information is read quickly if carefully and then can enter the pail immediately as well. Then there is the real stuff that needs to be filed.
It is the put in piles on the left or right side of my desk, in front of the file drawers that they are destined to be in. That seems easy and organized, but the work begins with the real filing. That involves seriously looking at what absolutely needs to kept and assessing what is in each file to determine what can be thrown out, shelf life already overdue. It's time consuming and tedious.
One could say that the wonderful internet should be the solution to this problem. For the most part everything should be there except for local service people, whether for home repairs, car repairs and maintanence, and yard and tree maintenance among other things. That is why the vetting of files can be regularly done, but here, perhaps with a bit of irrationality, the tangibility of paper is valued. Even the remote possibility of a serious hacking attack on a financial account or the arrival of a mega-storm once again makes this filing necessary here, old fashioned maybe but so be it.
Waste of paper and environmentally unsound certainly seems to be worthwhile trade-off to paper but one that is not convincing enough yet to sway habits here.
Procrastination done, now to the dreaded task.
Filing is a never ending chore here. Mail comes in 6 days a week, at least for now, and it is sorted from the start with more than half, advertising and unneeded documentation going straight into the trash at the outset. Some worthwhile financial information is read quickly if carefully and then can enter the pail immediately as well. Then there is the real stuff that needs to be filed.
It is the put in piles on the left or right side of my desk, in front of the file drawers that they are destined to be in. That seems easy and organized, but the work begins with the real filing. That involves seriously looking at what absolutely needs to kept and assessing what is in each file to determine what can be thrown out, shelf life already overdue. It's time consuming and tedious.
One could say that the wonderful internet should be the solution to this problem. For the most part everything should be there except for local service people, whether for home repairs, car repairs and maintanence, and yard and tree maintenance among other things. That is why the vetting of files can be regularly done, but here, perhaps with a bit of irrationality, the tangibility of paper is valued. Even the remote possibility of a serious hacking attack on a financial account or the arrival of a mega-storm once again makes this filing necessary here, old fashioned maybe but so be it.
Waste of paper and environmentally unsound certainly seems to be worthwhile trade-off to paper but one that is not convincing enough yet to sway habits here.
Procrastination done, now to the dreaded task.
posted by John Borden at 2:43 PM
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