The Great ADHD De-Clutter

I'm totally fed up.

There's so much garbage in my computer, on my bulletin board, and on my new clean-erase whiteboard — I'm not even beginning to account for the garbage in my head (see Fresh Kills Landfill for an idea of what that's like) — that I have no choice but to dedicate this weekend (assuming it's not going to be good beach weather, of course) to cleaning up the debris.

This morning I wanted to make note of an address. Good plan, right? Only problem being that I have no idea where to put the damned information. Plaxo? Gmail? Yahoo address book? LinkedIn? Sticky note? Google Docs?

This garbage has got to go. Time to wade in, swinging the machete, and clear the ground.

ONE place for addresses. ONE.

ONE place for my writing (currently strewn about in Google Docs, Google Notebook, Writeboard, Word docs in a byzantine nest of folders, and heaven knows where else). The most likely candidate is Google Docs, because it keeps track of your revisions.

This means that I'll spend a half-hour reading the support info for Docs. Currently, because I'm a total knucklehead, I write in Docs, then export to Notebook in order to keep stuff organized (please stop laughing) by sub-topics, then convert it to Word and download it to My Documents, then move it to another folder, so that I can email it to my Dear Editrix, then re-enter it in a Docs spreadsheet to keep track of it for bookkeeping purposes. I've got stuff in every possible configuration, all over the joint. Sheer madness.

So. This weekend I'm going to start from scratch. Figure out how to do all this sorting and labelling and inserting and exporting in one easy process. If I can't figure out how to do this, I may dig around in the back of the hall closet and see if I can find an old typewriter and clear some space in my old filing cabinet and buy some stamps. Anything's better than the mess I've gotten myself into with these labor-saving devices.