Stuff

I know of what I speak. I have been fighting against my tendency to clutter all of my life. I think it might be in our DNA. It certainly represents our mind's eye. My mind is still a very cluttered place. I have come to accept my cluttered mind, but I have reached the point where I seek to avoid the chains of the cluttered World. We really have to resist because in the Third Wave there is no reason to hoard.

We now talk in terms of being untethered or wireless. But, the truth of the matter is that stuff is now what binds us to a place, a time, a way of thought. It is what makes us inflexible. It is what makes drives us broke.

It binds because we need offices and storage places for our stuff, and transportation to move and get to our stuff, and people to manage our stuff, and management of the people that manage our stuff, and all of this cost money.

When I started practicing law in in 1986 I had a problem as to where to keep all of my stuff organized on my desk. We did not have computers on every desk and no fax machine. So, I had a huge wrap around desk built that took up nearly the entire room. And, everything stayed on that desk (or on the floor next to that desk, or in the chairs around the desk, or ... you get the point). That desk bound me to that place and time. I had to be at that location and behind that desk to get anything accomplished. My staff had to be close to that desk. I was impressed with my desk. My staff (the people hired to help me keep up with my stuff) referred to it, however, as the "black hole".

I still walk into law offices all of the time to see the equivalent of my 1986 office. Oh, maybe the desk is not as large, but there are still books and papers, and little used gadgets laying around, space leased to keep it all central, and people around just to manage it. I think what a waste.

And, although maybe not in an office environment, clutter and hoarding shows are all the rage on TV these days. Sure, they reflect the worst among us, but it is so pervasive we all recognize it in ourselves. That is the reason that shows such as Clean House, Clean Sweep, Hoarding: Buried Alive, and Hoarders are currently so popular.  Time, Salon, and the New York Times have covered the worst of the situation of late.

There are lawyers that I work with who cannot get me information and documents I need until they are "back at their office" where they are not. Their personal offices look like a frat house. And, I suspect, they feel a need to get away from their offices to avoid the confines of the clutter, the staff, the walls, the bills ... the stuff. The one point that I took away form the book Stuff recently is this: People who clutter are trapped by the concept of potential. They see possibility. They see information they can use. They see ideas they might forget. They do not wish to see opportunity pass.

The point I want to leave with everyone is that where this might have been true in the past (in the age of my "black hole" of a desk), it has the opposite effect today. Where clutter and hoarding, especially files, documents and papers, might have represented potential in the past, it represents paralysis today. It represents the squandering of resources.

It also is the reason that many of us just cannot make the transition to the more virtual world. We just have to hold something, print something off, or store something least we forget it. We have paper files or electronic files trapped on a particular machine. We just need places to put things. We attack the reliability of the cloud. We complain we cannot move our offices home because of lack of room. But, that is the point really. It takes no room in this day and age and we are stuck where we are because we are stuck on our stuff.

We are trained to see beauty and promise in stuff, instead of recognizing the beauty and promise in not having it and being free from it all, having our information available to us via Google. legal research sites, and the cloud, and conducting ourselves accordingly.

Is it not time to get rid of the stuff.

Comments

[Corinne A. Tampas]

Amen to getting rid of stuff!

My family was in the construction business from 1968 to 2006. My mother kept every piece of paper connected with that business; contracts, blueprints, building permits, invoices, releases, bids, etc. The amount of paper was so voluminous that we had to rent an entire storage space just for the these records. As a result, we were the "go to" entity whenever anyone needed a piece of paper. I cannot tell you how many times we were served with a subpoena duces tecum for business records because someone was getting a divorce and the attorneys were fighting over the value of an office building's improvements (not our battle!), or someone needed a copy of an invoice and "just knew" that we had the original and would we "be so kind" as to go through our files. ..... The bottom line was that hanging on to this stuff did not benefit us, but was a convenience for others.

In 2006, I had all but the most recent projects' records shredded. So, when someone telephoned me just five months ago (December 2009) and wanted a copy of some files for a dental office completed in 1983, it was very liberating to say they simply do not exist.