'Material'

I recently organized two baskets that sit on top of my desk. They landed there about a year ago when I set up my home office, and I used them to house portfolio werk from past projects, binders from seminars and conferences I'd attended, and a variety of other miscellaneous resources that seemed important at the time.

A year later, a lot of those resources/binders/etc. are quite useless to me. I haven't referenced them, I haven't even thought about them. All of the copious notes I'd taken at conferences were simply gathering dust, along with the project management intro class materials I'd taken 4 years ago. It's hard to part with that type of material when it's still new, because there is usually quite an investment of time and money to obtain it. You think you'll reference things when you get back to werk, but usually, my mental filing system is where most of that stuff takes up residence.

So, out of the binders (we saved those!) and into the trash can they went. Perhaps it's my nesting instinct kicking in, but I'm just not in the mood to be surrounded by stuff I know I'll never look at again. The less 'stuff' I have to file/store/pile around me, the more free I am to move forward and pursue things in front of me.

Next office purge victim on my list? My filing folders...