@online: still going at it

After three hours of trying to tackle what seems like a never-ending iPhoto mountain of images  - shifting, organizing, deleting - I'm still at 17.2K photos!

Why is this taking so looooonnggg....

It's a long and tiring process really - going through so many memories. I've amazed myself with how much I remember with regards to the significance of different photos and the memories tied to each one of them (ranging from where and when I got them, or where and when I took them, to who I showed them to, to what the reactions were...). I suppose with all the activity going on in my head, having been able to get rid of 300 more photos was probably somewhat of an accomplishment.

There is such a thing as emotional fatigue when it comes to cleaning (which is really quite different from laziness or procrastination), and at some point I did hit that wall. I tried fighting it by moving with my laptop to another environment in hopes to get some encouragement to fight the fatigue, but when I realized I was starting to linger too long at certain photos, I knew it would have been a more productive use of my time to move on to another task altogether. As so:

I'll admit I didn't exactly do a stellar job with the drawers, but considering I only gave myself an hour on this area and that pretty much everything in the drawers weren't mine (and I had to sort them as I went along), I was pretty proud for how much I did throw out. There were four other drawers but the photos didn't turn out too good. :( Still, it was a good productive breakaway.

My main springcleaning thought for this week has been "How do I make a sustainable system in my home and office so that I don't have constantly be cleaning up a specific place?" Things can move very quickly (see: deteriorate) in a house with seven other people - especially when the group includes two guys, one hoarder, two other women who have a ton of stuff of their own... then there's Y who's my perfect partner in getting the house in order (a little task at a time). As I reflected on my efforts to keep my house in order, I realized that I've been in a constant clean-deteriorate-clean-deteriorate cycle (which can be really quite emotionally tiring after a while). 

Work has been tremendously busy, but I've still been trying to keep decluttering as one of my priorities. In fact, this past week I challenged my Operations team to 5S the whole factory - one area at a time. If you're not familiar with the 5S system, it's basically a lean management system which was developed in Japan to support efficient "Just In Time" manufacturing. What I love most about it is that the first step starts with the elimination of everything unnecessary...then there are the parts about making sure everything meets my mildly-OCD standards.

This week, Whilst the Ops-team will be busy with the red-tagging, and we happily make big donations to our nearest Salvation Army, I'll be continuing with the decluttering and organizing the paperwork in my office. Last week, I believe I must have shredded at least a thousand sheets of unnecessary (outdated, duplicated, trash) paperwork in the office and it felt amazing! And tomorrow, I'll be back to the ploughing! It's truly amazing how much rubbish can build up over 25 years.

Springcleaning priorities for the week:

1. Watch over the Operations-team's 5Sing of the factory
2. Continue clearing out paperwork on my side unit and in the accounts cabinet. Lots of paperwork to put together...especially with the closure of the year.)
3. Clear out at least another 500 photos from iPhoto (to 16.8K). Yes, I'm going to take it one step at a time.
4. Clear out 1500 emails across the board (yes, I'm going to be ruthless with them this week...especially that I've taken over two other email boxes this past week and decided to start looking into my SPCG mail too!)

That should be challenging enough for the week.

Current email standing (ARGH, these mails are creeping up on me!)

• Personal Gmail Standing (Was: 238, Now: 283)
• Work Gmail (Was: 398, Now: 407)
• Work Intramail (Was: 1393, Now: 1408) 
• Work Sales Intramail: (383)
• Work Marketing Intramail: (263)
• Work YahooMail (Was: 199, Now: 205)
• SPCG Mail (51)
• Previous Total: (Was: 2228, NOW: Exactly 3000!)

@online...I'm going to be staying here on this task for a while.

Still over 17,500 photos. :(

It's amazing how much time and emotions clearing through photographs can take up. I still have to delete another 7500 photos to reach my target... almost as bad as my email-flood (which is still work in progress). But I suppose I should still celebrate. After all, I have deleted almost 500 random, blurry, and unnecessary photos. From this day forward, I've decided to no longer take pictures of food unless it is a purely function shot (for research/idea generation purposes). It is astounding how many "oh, I ate that!" photos I have... and so many of mundane normal foods. =_=

Other than clearing through the iPhotos today, I also cleared through another box of random documents in the office and hopefully have started a little cleaning movement for the office to get tidier. My administration director especially needs a new revamp to her space.

Tomorrow, clearing out MINDSPACE is the plan.

I plan to prioritize clearing out my work intra-email (the one with the 1400 mails in the inbox) and getting some action on some of the projects I've been procrastinating on, and finishing some of the irritating projects that I've been irrationally fearing to start - worrying that I might not be able to do them well due to the tremendous size of them. Mindspace is a precious thing that needs to be protected. Having it filled with worries and anxieties and "to do"s that have been on the list for a long time can be really disconcerting.

Today, I've discovered that I also seem to have a period of "distractedness" sometime in the afternoon around 2-4pm which my brain pretty much surrenders and tells me it needs a break...perhaps it's my "work saturation point". I need to somehow fill with some sort of repetitive or active work that doesn't require too much brainwork. For those two hours tomorrow, I plan to either clear the office stationery cabinet or do something creative to occupy my mind.

Okay, time to sleep! Tomorrow is another day and with all the work I'm planning to do, I need all the rest I can get.

SPCG @home & @online

Okay, after a day of trying to go through as many mails as possible, and to clear as much of the room as possible, this is what I could get to... I'l start with the room (which yes, deteriorated over time because...it's just how life is with the sisters. Though they are improving!)

My table got all cluttered with all sorts of things again after the flurry of the wedding weekend.
The best part of today was that the younger sister finally cleared out the grey basket in the corner!
Yay! Achievement of the month for her!
Yes, I celebrate the smallest of victories!

We use the vanity table everyday and somehow things just get here like a vicious cycle.
I'm glad we got to go through it together this time though so that we could throw out old makeup and stuff.
When things are thrown out, there are less things around, and they won't have the opportunity to move or come back. :D
The stuff on the floor has been promised to be moved when my sister gets to her new office in a few weeks. :)

I took the "before" pic after just starting to LifeHack the bottom drawer
by stacking them upwards (instead of on top of each other).
I was amazed that it was actually my younger sister who requested that I should try organizing the drawer that way.
I was very happy with the results!

This is my lower drawer of dresses.
As you can see, they are sorted by colour and I put the most "fragile" ones in Ziplocks.
Finding my dresses is going to be so much easier now! :D

There's more to the room to be done, but I somehow found myself at "room-cleaning saturation point" after going through my table, these two drawers, my undergarments drawer, as well as the bookshelf, and I knew pushing myself to try to tackle the rest of the room would have been at a lower productivity rate, so I decided to do it on Friday when I have the night free. :)

Instead, I decided to get back to decluttering the emails...and look at how much I got accomplished!

And here's the rundown of how we're doing in terms of Email-decluttering

• Personal Gmail (Had: 390, Now: 238)
• Work Gmail (Had: 415, Now: 398)
• Work IntraMail (Had: 1396, Now: 1393)
• Work YahooMail (Had: 4678, NOW: 199!!!!)
• Previous Total: 6897 Mails to get through, NOW: 2228)

I pretty much cleared 70% of my mails! I was so proud of myself!

As you can probably guess, I spent most of my time on the Work YahooMail. I still can't believe that I could bring it down by that many (I suppose because a lot of it was junk mail, obsolete information, or needed simple archiving). It took a lot of time-investment, but I'm glad I got through them. I can't wait to hit my target of having only 7 mails in each inbox. 

And for the iPhotos
Before: 18,078 Photos
Currently: 17,814 Photos

For the photos, I was mainly deleting duplicate pictures, random, insignificant, and blurry pics. It's amazing how many unnecessary photos I've taken of food and random bits of life. Not to mention I still have yet to compile all the photos of the ex together. I already know it's going to be an exceptionally emotionally draining experience, but I suppose somethings need to be done sooner or later. (And today, being the exact one-year mark of our breakup last year, it's probably high time to get them together, store them away in a CD, and out of my daily workspace - far away to prevent memory triggers. Perhaps I'll stay up tonight to try to sort through them and bring a little more closure.)

My goal for my iPhotos is to go through all my photos, delete all the crummy ones, organize all the nice ones into proper Events/Categories, and choose a few pretty & memorable ones to be printed out. :) I'll probably burn a the photos into CDs by the year or something too. Either that or store it in an online space. Not to mention that I have a lot of work product-shots in my laptop that really could be somewhere else. Hopefully by the end of the exercise, I will have less than 10,000 personal pictures on my laptop.

There's so much more to go, but we're getting somewhere.

For this e-decluttering, once we're through with the emails and iPhotos, I'm planning to go through my iPhone and DropBox, and eventually look into my online profiling and clear any junk floating around..and I suppose we'd be done for the year for the online side of things!

It's back to office tomorrow and I'll be back to clearing out boxes of random information chucked together. Especially that it's tax-filing in a month, we've just got to get all our information and paperwork sorted out quickly! Looking forward to closing this year well to start afresh in 2014!

SPCG @home: midday update!

Tah-dah! :D

I've closed all the unnecessary tabs and compiled all the links of "floating projects" into Word docs and categorized them for easy retrieval when I start working on them again. I probably have to give those folders a deeper clean, but at least they're all cleaned out now!

In order to not "cheat" in the case that I might have been just moving stuff around my computer instead of actually decluttering - and to have a better monitoring of my springclean - I also decided to look into the actual numbers that I can compare at the end of this exercise. Specifically, I have looked into my system memory and disk usage (of which I surprising only have slightly over 900MB of free disk space!).

The rest of the day is going to be spent refreshing and updating the system. Clearing through the over 18,000 iPhotos I have (yes, more than 18,000). And the emails.

I have found this LifeHack of "How to Speed Up, Clean Up, and Revive Your Mac" to be really helpful! I don't really have a problem with the cleanliness and cables, but the parts about updates, uninstalling unnecessary apps, and reclaiming hard drive space would be great! I can't wait to get to the optimizing the system step - and to see how much space and efficiency I would have created at the end of this process! :D

Oh, and then there's the room.

Back to "work". ^^
Happy cleaning!

Organizing plans for the public holiday!

Done! And with an empty in-tray too! :D

And here's if you're more of an before-an-after sort of person:

I'll be clearing away that red box this Thursday,
and moving a few other items here as we reorganize the outer office. :)

It was only at the end of the work day that I realized that tomorrow is a public holiday! And I was completely ecstatic at the extra time I have to organize @home! I was very tempted to head back to office and get some cleaning done, but I decided that it'd be a great time to straighten out some of my finances and declutter the room (of which I only did a rough sweep of when I got back two weeks ago).

I have big plans for tomorrow.

Including trying to clear this up...

People tell me this e-clutter is a normal for a girl's desktop, but it's not acceptable for me!
I actually chose the background graphic partially for its content,
but also for the white border to act as a "No files past this line" marker.

As so:

I think there are a lot of duplicate and obsolete files and stuff like that around.
Gotta go through the Eliminate, Categorize, Organize Plan.

I realized that I also have have a really bad habit of working at too many things at one time. From the graphic above, you can see how many files I have open at the bottom of the screen. Worse still, I usually have quite a few projects open at the same time...

This is my typical web window:

And this is probably not the only Chrome/Safari window I have open...

So I'm not perfect...but I'm in the midst of getting things in order! It doesn't help that my mind sometimes just runs with SO many ideas and I just chase after them as they come (omg, isn't that a sign of bipolar too?! ARGH! Then again, it might be OCD... hmm...) Anyhoos, racing thoughts or not, I have the ability to get them under control and organize them into chunks. I choose to! And tomorrow I will have the time to clean all these things out!

Plans for tomorrow (Yay for public holidays!)

• Declutter and organize the girls' room (and bathroom)
• Organize personal finance, insurance, and travel files.
• Declutter my poor art cabinet (which has turned into a sty whilst I was away in the States)
• Send the clutter out of the house! (Salvation Army, here we come!)
• Declutter the laptop desktop.
• Declutter and Organize my iphotos. Burn photos that I really should store away into a CD and not be in unhealthy viewing access (see: photos with J :(). 
• Try to get more cleared out of the emails! (Current accountability count as below)
• Personal Gmail (85 in Inbox, 305 in "Personal" label. Total: 390)
• Work Gmail (415 in Inbox)
• Work IntraMail (1396 in Inbox)
• Work Yahoo (Apparently 4678 mails now that I have to sift through.)
• TOTAL: 6897 mails to get through! X_X Unsubscribe! Delete!

It's late and I'm still up, but I'm just so excited and can't wait to get started!!! 

Maybe I'll start a little now since I've still got so much energy in me. :)

back on track

What a whirlwind last weekend was! With the best friend's wedding finally over, life seems to have space again to get back on track with some of my spring cleaning activities. My inner office looks somewhat better though it's not completely done yet.

It's amazing how much paperwork
can pile up in a few months!

Today, I tried to tackle this stack (almost 4 months worth of receipts and some other random stuff!) and it was such a struggle to get through it. I don't know about you, but I seem to have a tendency to not be able to complete tasks. Somehow, when I get to something like 80% completion, I'll just...give up on the task. Or shove the last 20% somewhere for an indefinite "later".

I was so frustrated that I decided to google "Inability to finish tasks" and I was surprised that one of the links led to "symptoms of bipolar disorder". Believe it or not, I was so shocked that I took a couple of minutes out to try to verify the possibility that I might just have bipolar disorder. Soon enough though, I realized how ridiculous my concerns were (not to mention that I rarely, if ever at all, display spurts of grandiosity), and that it was more likely that I was trying to procrastinate the last 20% away. What it really came down to was telling myself "FINISH IT. No excuses.". And so I did. It took quite a bit of self-disciplining, and I was really proud of myself after. Perhaps it's a fear of failure - something like how people get a runner's wall in a marathon. But I suppose it's these small victories that will make the springcleaning easier and easier (and life will get better and better! :D).

The last 20% that I struggled with!
FINISH IT!

I've decided to try to tackle some other parts of the office today too..and it's amazing how we're keeping a lot of rubbish! I mean, look at this!

Why in the world are we keeping this?!!

 Today's task: Clear out this area!

I don't know about you, but seeing so much unorganized paper stresses me out.

My father actually wanted to put a daily "empty in-tray" policy for our office - which I thought was a good idea. I'm going to try to follow that and encourage the other staff to do the same. I'm also going to try to declutter the stationery cabinet and the space around it. It's high time to get some "Zen" into the office.

Last week, I paid the library a visit and picked up some books on financial organizing too and I've started on one called "One Year to An Organized Financial Life" by Regina Leeds. I intend to finish the book (and accomplish the tasks) in a month or two. In an hour, I pretty much got through 3 weeks of material and it's looking pretty good (As in inspiring-good.). Whilst I have my "Act, Forward, Delete, or Archive" Method for paperwork, the book has a broader "Eliminate, Categorize, Organize" method which is more generic - and similar to what I use when I springclean rooms. Here's a review of the book from The Simple Dollar, another organizing blog specific to finances. Perhaps I'll do a little review on it when I'm through with it.

I'm also still in the midst of clearing out the emails. I'll have to do an update report on that soon. It's a daily battle.

Glad the springcleaning is back on track.

@online 06.10.13

Okay, I know "@online" isn't as grammatically correct, but I just wanted to keep the theme.

Lesson learned: Never not check your emails for three months.
Just like a garden, without constant weeding and pruning, it'd be a jungle when you finally get to it.
And gosh does the state of my online mailbox feel like one now.

Even though I'm a woman, I've somehow never been one to be too good at multi-tasking. Having been away from home for a few months for some studies, and simply not being very good at mixing studies away and work and personal mails from home, meant that taking care of work and more home-based email whilst I was studying was pretty much impossible for me as I focused on my studies in the States. Unfortunately, what that did was accumulate literally thousands of emails spread over four (two personal and two work) email accounts. As so:

The personal email, though this was only one mailbox.
The other one has about 1000 mails.

The Yahoo Work Account

My direct personal work email was by far the worst. 1398!!!

Almost 3700 mails to sort through... though it's nothing that my trusty FAAD method can't work out and keep procrastination at bay, but it's still a feat. I'm guessing getting through this mess is going to take me about two solid non-procrastinating days...unless some replies take longer to process. I can't wait to get through to the end of the tunnel though! (I'm also already thinking how I shall reward myself when I get through all of them.)

I used to think that keeping my Inbox for each account to below 50 was acceptable, but I think that I'm going to challenge myself this time. I'm going to work with the target of having a maximum of 7 mails per inbox (which would mean a maximum of 28 pending mails in my life at any moment of time).

Why 7? I just like the number. (It's also a lot less daunting than 10 which could add up to a lot more when you have more mailboxes.)

Wish me luck!

@office 04.10.13

What a difference a few hours can make...

I've got to get through that load of paperwork,
but at least it's all in one place for me to tackle now. :)

My walls in my office are pretty bare and I realized that I would like to make it a more creative and conducive place to enjoy what I do. Perhaps it's time that I venture a little into more than decluttering and consider doing some decorating too. :)

I'm in the process of decluttering and organizing the main office too! There's much to do!

The main office looks like a jungle now,
but you cannot imagine how excited I am to conquer this!

@home 28.09.13

Just got back from a few months in the States and the first thing I did was clean (considering how my sisters (aka "The Messies") kinda trashed the place up. Here are some pics.

Not quite done yet, but I'll be sorting the nitty grits out over the weekend. At least the general bits are settled. The room feels so much lighter now. Gotta get the sisters to promise to work with me to straighten to room out (or at least their own stuff out). But it looks like another two rounds of decluttering, and we should be in much better (happier) shape.

It's amazing how people can really trash up your space so quickly. Returning back to work this Tuesday was a big shock for me. I left my office open for use whilst I was away, but what I came back to was not what I expected. I mean...look at the place!

And it's worse outside in the main area! Cleaning out my office will be my priority for the week. It's going to be a feat because of all the paperwork I will have to go through in the main office - I literally have boxes stuffed with random mixed paperwork that I found from when we sped-packed up for renovations - but I'm just going to utilize my trusty FAAD (Forward (to appropriate person to Act on it), Act, Archive, or Delete) method and hopefully I'll get through the paperwork jungle to a cleaner, brighter, decluttered happier workplace.

Can't wait for the before and after photos!