Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [74]
And as any business guru, successful sports coach, or motivational speaker will tell you, success breeds ambition. My Day 1 efforts to clean my closet had filled me with mad notions of the possible. Like Rocky after Mickey cuts him (“Cut me, Mick!”), I could see again. I could go the distance. I could be virtuous.
Indeed, I was so inspired that I decided to step up my cleaning efforts—take them to a new virtuous level. Instead of just cleaning willy-nilly, I would implement a real plan. I would be organized in my cleaning. First step, a surface scrub—get rid of the really useless (and in some cases slightly disgusting) stuff. Next, go a little deeper. Examine the items that were left, ditch any ideas of sentimental attachment, and divide them into piles: (1) things I definitely want to keep; (2) things I believe I can give away in a useful manner; (3) things about which I am unsure; and (4) things I have trouble identifying (or which are moving).
Once I had piles of materials in various states of wantedness (is that a word?), I would apply a level of analysis to my postpile organization. For example, the wanted pile would get subdivided into things that I could put away immediately (in a clean manner) and things that might need some further organizing or even culling.
{ Trusting too much to others’ care is the ruin of many.}
Finally, once I’d organized and kept or discarded items, I could implement some ongoing scheme to ensure that I had a continuous cleaning program. That should make future projects more like tidying up, as opposed to postapocalyptic reconstruction.
Unfortunately, my construction of the plan took too long. I never got around to actually doing this “organized” cleaning. Despite this setback, I remained buoyant.
I might go to sleep in one of the closets to celebrate.
A Little Air out of the Balloon
Oh, this was all too good to be true. I was actually seeing real, concrete results. Cleanliness abounds. I almost didn’t know what to do with myself.
Fresh from my closet-cleaning successes and new cleaning plan in hand, I decided to turn my Cleanliness efforts on my office at work, the computer desk in the basement, and my garage.
As with the closet, I discovered gems long thought lost, memories buried under piles of knickknacks, and projects forgotten and stored away. In the past I might have gotten caught up in a sentimental attachment to many of these treasures. In this case, however, I was determined to apply one of Franklin’s other virtues: Resolution. I was resolved that I would not hang on to things simply because they triggered a memory. Not every picture my children had drawn for me was a masterpiece, not every note poetry, not every photograph a keepsake. I would cull the herd in a Darwinian program of organization.
And again, it worked. I discovered that there was more than enough room in my garage for the car, I had plenty of old CD-ROMs that contained nothing of use, and my office had more than one reference book that was ten years out of date. There was simply no way to justify using reference materials that still viewed Y2K as an impending event of unknown consequences.
By the middle of the week, I was leading a much cleaner (or at least less cluttered) life. In fact, I was so enamored of my success that I decided to revisit my system of organization to see if I could impose some convergence of virtues—a little ethical cross-pollination. Mix a little Order with Cleanliness, add a dash of Resolution, and see what the brew tastes like.
Magnificent! Forty minutes of organizing emails paid off with an empty in-box, out-box, and deleted items. Never before in my career in government had I been so free of the tangled morass of unanswered, useless, will-sucking emails.