administrative moments

We're approaching an office move, into new and larger space across the street. That's very much a good thing, the existing space is showing it's age, and the new building layout will be much more conducive to teamwork and functioning in groups.

The move won't  actually happen for about another three weeks, but I'm going to be out on project sites monitoring dragonflies for much of that time, so I need to be essentially ready to go by the end of today. There's a wall of boxes stacked up near my desk, mostly books, but including some paper files and lots of binders full of old endangered species recovery plans and regulatory guidance.

If I ignore the boxes and look only at my nice clean desk and nearly empty bookshelves, the lack of clutter is enticing. That's making me think about how to pare down, simplify, at the other end... a sentiment which will be encouraged by the fact that I've intentionally specified a little less shelf space in the new office.

A lot of what's in those binders is readily available online these days. Last night I began to set up a file structure and tested it by downloading a few documents. I will probably spend part of this upcoming holiday weekend doing more of that, and setting up resource folders on an external hard drive. Longer term, I'm anticipating one drive on my desk, another as a backup and kept offsite, not unlike the way I already back up my photos, which tend to be dramatically larger files than the documents I'm presently working with. Then a set can also go onto the network, and as my ecology group expands the information will be available across offices.

The idea is to exchange entire bookshelves for a couple of hard drives taking up not much more space than a paperback book each. And then, once the easy stuff is done, I can have admin start scanning paper files on slower days, and eventually get rid of most of that paper as well.

I have no illusions about keeping some sort of clean minimalist office, the nature of consulting is that day to day existence is chaotic and unpredictable, and piles of paper will happen when there's no time to sort and arrange things. But perhaps a simplified form of anarchy is a reasonable expectation?.