Late spring cleaning

This is the time of year when, for the last 25 years or so, I have tidied out my office. I've just moved into a new office, my 14th office move in that time, and back into the place where I first started. Some of the offices I've inhabited no longer exist because the building housing them has vanished. Some have now been taken over by admin staff. They've all had advantages and disadvantages but one thing in common: I've never found it easy to do any work in them that required sustained thought. This means that my study at home is full of the material I use most often and would be lost without. In the days when publishers reps used to knock on my door regularly to ask about what textbooks I used and whether I would write one for them, they used to scan my shelves furtively and make quick notes about what they saw there: I always felt obliged to explain that I never used any of those books, they were the inspection copies that never made the grade.

The single filing cabinet in my office houses copies of paperwork that might be needed for future reference; copies of minutes of meetings and papers relating to all the admin responsibilities I've had over the years; and old teaching material which predates electronic versions. It could all be shredded and at some point between now and next April I shall probably have to do that. But the recent move meant that much of the stuff I no longer need has been thrown out and the office looks fairly neat and tidy.

Earlier in the year I had a blitz on my home filing cabinets and disposed of many hard copies of academic papers that are now available electronically. I've also cleared out some of my bookshelves at home and taken the books I no longer need into the office so that they can be disposed of at the next Book Harvest collection (http://www.bookharvest.co.uk/)

So, on the surface, both my office and my study look quite tidy at the moment. The untidy mess lurks within the bright shiny Mac on my study desk. I am incredibly bad at managing electronic stuff. This didn't matter much when there was less of it. When I came across a paper or web page that was directly relevant to something I was working on or teaching about, I would download it and file it (often in a file named "Interesting papers") or bookmark it. Usually I would discover these items via alerts to new journal issues which arrived by email or through following up links and citations in whatever I was reading. The files accumulated and it wasn't always easy to find things because I couldn't remember the filenames but I managed pretty well with the occasional clear out.

Yes, I used EndNote. I had an early version on my PC and thought it was an amazingly helpful tool when I first found it but over time I forgot to enter citations. I had a brief flirtation with the web version, too. Then a student told me about Mendeley which seemed better because it searched for me but I kept forgetting my password. I also discovered Diigo which seemed like a good idea but I kept forgetting about it and using conventional bookmarking instead.

Then the PC began to develop some form of technological dementia, at a point in the progress of the book which made this very worrying, so I took the plunge and bought the Mac. And discovered its neat way of dealing with downloads and its amazing Spotlight search feature. So for the last few months it hasn't seemed to matter where I put things as they were always so easy to find. And getting used to the Mac, an ongoing process, took up more time, so organising the accumulating stuff didn't happen.

And the speed of accumulation seems to have stepped up. On Twitter I follow a bunch of journalists, academics and governance practitioners who tweet links to information which is incredibly useful for work but the volume is high.  Other sources of useful links are the LinkedIn discussion groups I belong to.

So all this stuff has piled up and this morning I decided to sort through the 200+ bookmarks, the 400+ downloads and the random files on my desktop. It's taken me two hours to deal with the bookmarks: all I've managed to do is consider and delete about a third of them and sort the others into folders labelled "Work" and "Misc", both of which will require further sub-folder refinement.

Yes, this is big-time displacement activity. Yes, I should be writing that review paper on board diversity. But I can't start it until I have collected all the relevant literature into one place so that I can re-read it. And I've just remembered that some of the papers have been picked up when I've been using the iPad so they are lurking there in GoodReader. So I need to use Dropbox to get them all into the same place. But I also need to sort out those Dropbox files....