Uncluttering the mind...

One of the issues with the health problem I had is a generic mind numbness and tiredness due to the illness as well as the medication taken to control it. As a result my desk as the rest of my life and work have been quietly getting piled up with important and unimportant stuff.

For me at least, the task of uncluttering everything is daunting. Every piece of paper was either something important that still needs doing or that I missed doing or didn't do as well(or fast as I could) or ... And lets be honest, on my list of things to do are several papers and projects that should have been done nine months ago, and are more important than figuring out how to unclutter.

A successful strategy for me is to leverage random outside events to get me to focus in a burst on one of those tasks, without expectations.

The random event: a garage sale/giveaway.
The random find: a desk that could work as a TV stand and matches our living room colour scheme.
The random mishap that helped: what was formerly our TV stand was a coupe of wood like shoe racks on top of each other, which I always worried would break and hence were filled with inaccessible books to turn it into a more solid rectangle of wood and paper. I t turns out that as we moved the tV onto the new desk/console, I got excited to use the shoe rack for my shoes -- and it didn't fit into our shoe and coat closet by less than an inch. Loathe to not use up the shoe shelves, and loathe to put my shoes in the bedroom closet where lets be honest I rarely would look for shoes, I had the idea to stack them on one of my desks and organize the papers on them.

The result: a very clean desk. I sorted my papers by shelves for project: code, set up notes, troubleshooting notes, papers on the science code, papers on the technique from a different field, etc.

All of a sudden what was left was a pile of papers that are not needed, which got trashed, and a very small pile of personal stuff to sort through. I made a space for pile of personal stuff to be sorted through, and voila my desk is clean.

But the mind is a funny thing -- it translated the order on my desk, as getting control of my life (finally). I wonder how long this feeling will last.

Anyways, it seems someone at the New York Times has spent some more time musing on the brain on metaphors, backed up by some curious scientific studies.