File cleaning

I started cleaning out my files as part of my effort to pack my office. I have kept very neat and organized files since high school (maybe even middle school?), but I'm always amazed on the occasions I have to sort through them just how much can be chucked. It makes me feel kind of like a hoarder.

From my extensive viewing of television programs about hoarders, I have identified several factors that often converge in hoarders:

• Compulsive acquisition, from shopping, dumpster diving, or theft.
• Chronic disorganization -- an inability to sort, categorize, or even identify clear and obvious trash.
• Inability to get rid of stuff, either stemming from the disorganization above, tendency to assign tremendous meaning to objects, and/or paralyzing fear that the object might be useful or necessary sometime in the future.

Fortunately, I am not much of a compulsive acquirer of paper, in the sense that I don't print too many things unless the printed version will be vastly easier to use for a given task. I printed all the readings for my class because when I'm putting together a lecture from materials across articles, it's easier to have them all on the desk open to various pages. I guess it was no surprise then that these articles gave me the greatest pause -- in one sense, I didn't need them because I have them in pdf, and I'm not going to be giving lectures anytime soon. However, I had done a fair bit of underlining in them. And I might teach a class someday. But by then I will probably want new articles in a lot of cases. So I left them in folders for the next person, with a note to alert me if he or she intends to toss them, to at least give me one last opportunity to keep them (although I'll probably just say toss).

I am a bit of a compulsive filer, however, in that once a paper does exist, I'm pretty likely to file it if there's a chance I'll need it at all in the future.

I am extremely organized, as indicated by my awesome filers. I love sorting and labeling!

On the inability to get rid of stuff front, as noted above, potential usefulness can sometimes give me pause. What makes hoarding so insidious is that many of the decision processes are not wholly wrong -- they're based in something rational that just goes off the rails a bit. Usefulness is a wonderful criteria for deciding what to keep. But the line can't be drawn at "could be useful to someone at some time in the future under some kind of conditions that have more than a zero probability of existing." It has to be based on a realistic likelihood. So you have to purge the 4 sizes too small pants when it's pretty likely that even if you lose weight, it won't be until those pants are out of style. I had to purge things that I know I have on my computer, and while these copies might have notes on them (homeworks fall into this category), I'm unlikely to dig out the hard copy over firing up the electronic version.

Unfortunately, I didn't have a laptop my first year of graduate school, so I have a lot of printed articles and lectures from that year. This was useful when I was teaching, however, because I used a lot of my first year grad courses as material for my lectures.

The process of chucking stuff involves a lot of rapid decision making, which is tiring no matter what (and why Hoarders in particular evokes a lot of drama, because it's impossible to clear an entire house in two days without bypassing the main decision maker, who is at their limit. Hoarding: Buried Alive is a lot more responsible and realistic -- and boring -- because they clean over the span of months). I finished my main filing cabinet, and I have a whole nother filing cabinet to do next week. One whole drawer will be tossed because it's my dissertation data, and it's past the expiration date for that stuff to be kept. I have some limited files from grad school and even college that will be more purgeable now that a few more years have passed since my last sort.

But then all that stuff comes home, and I'm kind of wondering if I should go through my files here!