| One of my
resolutions for the new year is to deal
with the clutter in my office. Having
stepped around the growing piles of junk
for far too long, I decided to get
organized. It didn't take a degree in
chaos theory to realize that old computer
books were taking up much of the space. A
new program comes out. A new version of
an existing program comes out. I buy new
books offering insights and techniques
not contained in the manual or
documentation that came with the program.
After a number of years, all of these
books start to take up a lot of room. If
you've been using a computer for a few
years, chances are you may have the same
problem. So what is one to do? The
first thing I did was to buy a new
bookcase and put it together. I did not,
however, want to depend exclusively on
this approach. For one thing, I have a
finite number of places where I can put a
new bookcase. Also, the more bookcases
one accumulates, the more there are to
dust, move, etc. So I decided to get rid
of some of the books I no longer needed.
Deciding whether or not one still
needs a computer book is not always an
easy task, though, especially for a
packrat like myself. There were a number
of more or less objective questions I
applied:
- Have I used this book (or the
computer program it relates to)
within the past 5-10 years?
- How likely is it that I will ever
have occasion to use this book
again?
- If I got rid of this book and
found I did need the information
it contains, how easy would it be
for me to get that information
from some other source?
Asking and answering questions such as
the foregoing, I found a few books I
could definitely part with, a larger set
I definitely was not ready to part with
(for now), and some that I just couldn't
decide on one way or the other. For books
no longer needed, one may have various
options (depending on the book):
- Donate it (charity bookstore,
friend/relative)
- Sell it (Ebay, Amazon, used
bookstore, etc.)
- Dump/Recycle it (Some books are
just so obsolete that the cost of
locating someone who could use it
exceeds the value of the book -
Like that manual for that
peripheral you no longer own
which hasn't been made in almost
10 year as and was never very
popular even then)
Then there were the books I definitely
wanted to keep for now - No problem there
- Into the bookcase! That left the still
large category items I might still want
to refer to someday, but really am not
using now. For these I decided on an
intermediate approach, grouping said
items into boxes, labeling the box as to
the contents (and the date for good
measure), and sticking the box into an
out-of-the-way corner or closet. I
realize this is not a perfect solution
(one would eventually run out of spaces
in which to stick boxes), but for now I
feel pretty good about it. It gets things
looking neater, preserves bookcase space
for the higher priority items, and if I
do need that old book on C++ techniques
or the basics of Pascal, I know where it
is.
Happily there is some hope that
computer book clutter will accumulate at
a slower rate in the years to come. With
a larger portion of the information I use
coming via the internet or CD's, it
should take up less space, a boon for the
office and the environment!
|
|
