Clutter
Every so often a book changes your life.
Way Down Cellar made reading fun, turning rainy days into great adventures. The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet inspired me to write stories, and I've been writing ever since. Time Wars made me consider time differently, and I stopped wearing a watch.
But Clutter's Last Stand (tagline: It's Time to De-Junk Your Life! ) really hit a home run. It's what you might think: a book that tells how to eliminate clutter and get organized. Once clutter is gone, it teaches, we never miss it.
I remembered this the other day as I looked around the laboratory. What is it with clutter? It's everywhere: on the walls, tacked inside catalogues, stuffing shelves, packing drawers, on the floor, and sucking up every available inch of bench space. Whatever space we have is always cluttered, sooner or later.
Perhaps, your laboratory is overwhelmed by clutter. If it's an older lab, you can blame new technology. If it's new, you can blame settling in. Perhaps, clutter has ebbed for now. Don't worry, it'll be back.
But the point is that Clutter's Last Stand changed my life. I got rid of all worldly possessions but six small trunks; at work I was called "H.R. Chuckin' Stuff." Since then the clutter has returned a few times and been purged. I've come to see this as a necessary cycle of organization.
Maybe, in your laboratory the best idea is to take all the paper down and just return what people want when they have justified it in writing. For kicks, one of the refrigerators must go, and just see what happens to its contents. Surely, the five hundred lab coats hanging in the back room can be whittled down to a dozen. And do you really need all those bulky binders, bags of instrument tapes, log sheets, maintenance charts, and meeting notes from the 1980s?
You'll be surprised at what your laboratory can do without when you start chuckin' stuff.