When the world was new and humans were living in caves, a clever prehistoric fellow discovered one day that he’d be able to have a greater number of stone tools if he stored them one atop the other in the corner of his dwelling instead of scattering them on the dirt floor.
This marked the dawn of the era of stacks.
About a year later, then, his wife grabbed him by his wild beard and said, “Don’t you `What, honey?’ me. If you don’t do something about that pile of tools in the corner, I’m throwing all of them into the tar pits!”
This marked the dawn of the era of stress, domestic friction and self-loathing caused by stacks.
Both eras have been in full bloom in my life since shortly after I discovered the pick-and-place use of opposable thumbs some 45 years ago.
In view from my desk are no fewer than 10 stacks of material–nine paper, one computer storage discs–that I aspire to sort, file and ultimately eliminate. News clippings, letters, folders, publications, directories, manuals, old notebooks, current notebooks, forms, applications, invitations, demands, suggestions and so on.
Even if these stacks were sorted by category, which they’re not, really, they would still be a major drag on my life.
“Stacks hide things,” said Fran Piekarski, Chicago-area chapter president of the National Association of Professional Organizers and the owner of Remedease in Batavia. “In that way, they often cause a lot more havoc and chaos than plain old clutter.”
They’re insidious.
“As soon as you put one piece of paper on top of another, you’ve just given other pieces of paper permission to sit on them,” said consultant Terry Prince, Sacramento-based president of the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization. Then the growing stacks “steal time from you” when you can’t find what you thought was in them as you paw through stuff you didn’t really need to keep in the first place.
And they often lie.
“Stacks looks like a form of organization, but they’re usually not,” said consultant Randi Lyman, owner of A Helping Hand in suburban Winfield. “They’re usually evidence of delayed decision making.”
Rather than deal with pieces of paper or other office or household items as they come to us, we pile them up, sometimes neatly, until such time as we have the inclination to take whatever action they require and then either throw them away or put them into long-term, easy-access storage.
In my case, this time has often been never.
A stack is the physical embodiment of procrastination. It’s where good intentions and human nature accumulate, compound and suppurate.
“Deal with your stacks now, or they will own you later,” Prince said.
Prince and the other organization coaches I spoke with deal daily with anxious clients overwhelmed by business and personal paperwork and the secret fear that they will end up like that man in the Bronx who last week was rescued after spending two days trapped by collapsed piles of old newspapers, magazines and books.
Start now, she advised. Attack those stacks with 15 concentrated minutes of effort each day, and they’ll gradually shrink to the point that five minutes a day will prevent new stacks from forming and important documents from falling through the cracks.
Piekarski recommended half an hour a day for those dealing with serious stack issues, while Lyman suggested an hour a day to get started making a real difference.
I wish Prince were right but fear Lyman is right. I’ve decided to take the middle path and go with Piekarski’s moderate 30-minute-a-day un-stacking plan for at least the next several months.
I’ll spend half an hour a day attacking one of the many literal and figurative stacks in my home or work life, putting each element in turn into a permanent spot or the refuse bin.
If all goes well in my effort to conquer the syndrome that has afflicted mankind for tens of thousands of years, I’ll be sure to tell you about it. If it doesn’t, I’ll forget I ever made the pledge or else simply not bring it up again, figuring that your note reminding you to hold me to my word is unlikely to surface again for decades, if at all.
