Given my retirement from web design and development in December 2022, I’ve found myself looking through lots of physical and digital files: images, logos, email messages, code, apps, and more.
Call it what you will:
- Organizing
- Simplifying
- Decluttering
It all adds up to the same thing – reviewing all kinds of stuff I’ve saved/stored for 25+ years.
That’s a lot of stuff!
Not only in digital format, but in print format.
While I’ve done a fair amount of organizing every January (my month to try to make some order of my work life), things add up.
In January, my focus was on email.
Where I learned I created more than 400 labels to organize messages over the 15+ years I’ve used my Google business email account.
Each day I reviewed messages/labels and by the end of January. And I managed to reduce the number of labels to 200.
That’s a start!
Going through my physical file cabinet, I found all kinds of old client files, logos, print clippings, and literature I collected for their website projects.
And that’s when I rediscovered the physical manila folder of kudos and support messages I created years ago. Where I kept physical copies of notes and email messages.
Actual printouts I saved because of their positive feedback.
One note took me back over 30 years, making me smile when I read it.
It was from the owner of the Ann Arbor software development company where I started my first technology job.
I was employee number six at the company that had existed for maybe two years.
My time there was fun, exciting, and often exasperating, but what I loved most was that it combined my interest in research and technology.
And it was the first time I worked on the Apple Macintosh Plus and Macintosh SE. I learned to use PageMaker, Excel, and HyperCard.
In my three years, the company grew to 25 employees and I rose to take on an administrative role, managing seven people on my team.
At some point I took a needed week and a half vacation and returned to find this note on my desk from the company’s owner:
To: Deborah
From: VR
The entire week and a half passed without any attempt to reach you in desperation.
Everything went smoothly and that is a high tribute to how well you organized things.
I am very pleased. My only worry now is that with things so well organized, people will begin to get bored.
Hope you had a wonderful vacation. Welcome back.
I don’t remember where I took my vacation, but I remember how happy I was when I returned and read that note.
Photo by Wojciech Pędzich is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).
