I knew this day would come eventually – that day when I had to invest time in organizing my workspace so that I could actually find something that I needed. After returning home from a really great potential client meeting (yay!), I remember that I needed to take care of a small task. Of course, that task had been weighing on my mind for the last week or two but rather than add it to my daily to do list, it was floating around on my desk in the form of an invoice that needed to be paid.  Shame on me for the lack of to-do list hygiene, my mom would be raising her eyebrows at me if she were still around….

I plopped down my back pack, unpacked my laptop and kept it closed. Rather than checking emails, I knew I had to get this particular thing out the door and in the mailbox before the end of the day.  As I was sifting through the piles, muttering about my document retention policy (that I never got around to in early start up mode), I thought back to my working days before a computer. That’s right, boys and girls under the age of 30, there was a day when we carried notebooks and paper calendars. No electronics.  We wrote letters, not emails.  We left phone messages via pink call slips, not voice mails. We actually wrote memos to each other on memo paper. Did you know that CC stands for Carbon copy – which meant you inserted a sheet of carbon between the two sheets of paper at the IBM Selectric….  Booking a meeting took a carefully orchestrated series of phone conversations. On the other hand – we always answered our desk phones because we had no idea who was calling! We relied on each other to log it in our calendars via a pen or pencil – if the meeting was important enough, we’d type up a memo, copy it and put it in an interoffice envelope with a mail code to get it to the other person. Clearly, the reason why denizens of cubeville spend all their days in meeting rooms is the fault of the engineers at Microsoft Outlook.  If meetings weren’t so easy to arrange I’m sure we’d have less of them. I digress….

My point is that “back in the old-timey days” of the 1980’s – when my career started, everything was paper based. A desk full of papers was expected. How you filed them made the difference between neat and messy, between effective and incapable.  In the corporate banking culture – even before the days of privacy regulations, we were encouraged formally and informally to keep neat desks. A place for everything.

Swing through time and on the pendulum of technology change – my recent job at the Big Blue Box – I was so paper-free I rarely sat at my assigned desk. I worked out of my trusty backpack and survived through my phone and my laptop. I was known as a gypsy who was more likely to spend my days at a booth in the cafeteria than at the desk that was assigned to me. Through the use of tools like Sharepoint and network drives, I was able to store and access  99% of the information I needed without a scrap of paper.

And now I’m back in the middle – I do as much as I can electronically (Since there’s an app for nearly everything!), but a lot of small business is still done through papers, flyers, letters, brochures, and cards. It’s not like I’m going to spin up a sharepoint site just to store my documents and scan in everything, right?

The good news – I found the invoice near the top of the pile of papers on my little desk (It’s really little – like 30″X 45″ – an old family antique)…. and it’s now safely in the mail. The bad news – it was at the top of the pile and I am now no longer required to organize my desk….

Sounds like a great project for the weekend! Happy Friday everyone!