I’m a pack rat, and this tendency isn’t helped by being an omnivorous author and researcher with a broad range of interests – nor is it helped by my tendency to let piles just pile up while I rabbithole on whatever major project I am working on at my primary work. But I’m between contracts right now, I survived the trio of ICRA-ConCarolinas-CVPR, and my wife’s mother is moved into her new home, so I don’t really have an excuse not to go through the piles and try to return them to some semblance of order.
Also, I’m tripping over stuff.
Now, I don’t throw away things because other people want me to: I throw away things when I’ve decided to. Because my interests are, um, broad, and the projects I use to tackle these interests are even broader, I have a vast number of project folders and project stacks. But a stack isn’t a pile: a stack is an organized collection of items of interest that enables you to make intellectual progress on a project, like the “storytelling and the sciences of mind” and “creative endurance” stacks I have to my left, the “mental models and explanation patterns” stack in front of me, and the “taido and jeet kune do” stack I have to my right.
A pile is something different – it’s the detritus of “company’s coming over and I gotta clear off this table” or “I need space to work on this important thing so these other projects gotta go on hold”. Like the “robotics consulting” pile in front of me. It’s not about robotics consulting. That’s just the top action item on the pile. Below it are my theological studies folder, some bills, some items to file, Thinking Ink Press stuff, and more theology, which it looks like I put in the pile for this week’s Saint Stephens in-the-Field Friday Journal entry that I have already written and submitted two days ago. It’s a mess.
More specifically, a pile is a stack-like mess that hides its information and actionable content. You can’t tell what you need to do to a pile just by looking at it the way you can a stack or a folder. (Folders are also dangerous for a similar reason if you’re not strict about what you put into them, but that’s a problem for another day). And so, the reason that I don’t throw piles away without processing them is that it’s all too easy to not realize what’s in a pile, and to lose an opportunity – or even money – by chucking it prematurely. In the piles in the banner image, I found roughly $50 bucks in foreign currency and a stack of gift cards.
The rest was easy. 80% of that just needed to be filed (a less pack-ratty person would throw some of this stuff away, of course, but I genuinely enjoy reminiscing over keepsakes from old trips, especially abroad). 10% could be thrown away or recycled immediately. And only 10% or so were actually actionable items.
I learned a lot about my own past going through these piles. I recalled things I did, places I’d been, stores that had closed, people I talked to but had fallen out of contact with, people who had retired or died. The pile processing worked both against me and for me; there were a handful of “action” items that dated back to the last millennium, which was great to harvest for keepsakes, but meant that there literally were several inches of that particular pile that had repeatedly gone through a “company’s coming, better move this aside” cycle over literal decades, yielding a stack that mostly just needed to be recycled or trashed.
There’s a value to throwing stuff away. It keeps your environment clean so you can feel good about your space and focus on what’s important. But if you’re a pack-rat person, it’s really important to make sure that the stuff you have around you are actual stacks and folders of actionable stuff, and not piles that have been piling on top of each other since the last millennium.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Remains of a pile spread across the kitchen table, exploded into stuff that will be filed into topical binders or trashed; and the sorted remains of the same pile spread over the nearby builtins, ready to be filed into my filing system (or trashed). Now I kinda wish I had also taken a picture of the pile itself …
