Safe as Milk

Paperwork blues

June 5, 2008 2:54 pm Dave Neary maemo, work

There’s a curious phenomenon I’ve noticed when I attend conferences. During the conference, the energy of everyone around me pumps me up & keeps me going. I love meeting people & talking to them, hearing about the cool stuff they’re up to and making contacts for new projects. This was true of meeting the maemo guys last week – we had a great evening talking about tablets, maemo, and life in general over mugs of good German beer.

But after the conference, it’s like you’ve been on some kind of artificial high of late nights, early mornings, high concentration & caffeine charged conversations – and you get on the plane to come home, and you just deflate.

It always  seems to take me about the same length to recover from a conference as I spent at the conference. Which meant that I was still in a funk on Monday, when I decided that the first thing I had to do was get rid of some Stuff.

Paperwork had built up over the past month or so, I had bits & pieces all over my desk, in stacks on the floor, in drawers… From what I can tell from Getting Things Done (I’m about half way through! yay!), this is a pretty normal situation – something comes into your hand that you can’t forget, but that you can’t handle right away, so you add it to the top of a bunch of other stuff which you couldn’t do straight away, but which you couldn’t forget, and there it lays until you’ve forgotten it.

And so Monday and Tuesday, I spent ages working through email, expenses, receipts, forms for insurance, tax returns and all of the other things that had been building up. At the end of it, my life feels a bit cleaner, but I’ve got the impression I lost half the week.

I can’t wait until the magic happens and my office space suddenly becomes magically organised so that filing becomes fun and I always have a list of things I can do, regardless of what I’m up to at the time. That’ll be fun (I’m not holding my breath).