Max Riffner

The Parlor

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Quiet on the Front, Organize the Back

I’m sorry things haven’t been too interesting around here lately. I have been really busy with things that aren’t very interesting, but I realized that while slightly off-topic, this particular project is actually more relevant than I thought.

One of the things that caused me quite a bit of stress while creating Quick Step was how terrible my office has become. It’s a mess, because I’m a piler. I think I have bank statements in my office from 1999 just hanging out waiting to get filed. So whenever I would walk in to work on a page, I had this stress-mess waiting for me. If you don’t enjoy where you work, you don’t want to work. As such, I’m trying to make it a good working environment. That includes filing my piles.

Most of my important paperwork is done (bank statements, mortgage statements, credit card statements, etc.), and the other night I realized that I have 4 giant piles of comics just sitting there. I have too many comics to really want to organize them all now, so I bought a new long box yesterday to just dump them all in for now. I’ll worry about organizing them all later. I’m not that concerned with it; my buying habits are usually with graphic novels that go on my bookshelves anymore. When I do buy regular comics, I usually only buy one or two issues of a series then wait for it to be collected in a paperback.

Next on the plate has been to audit my magazines. I’ve been grabbing all of my old issues of Macworld and sending them out to be recycled; since the information is out of date after a year there really isn’t a good reason to keep them. Also, I have a huge stack of old Print and How magazines that will probably end up going to Christian. I always thought I would use them, but since I rarely do print work anymore, what’s the point? Although I do like Print’s critical writing, I’m much more concerned with the issues of today, rather than of ten years ago. The issues of How I won’t give up though are the Business Annuals. I love those and frequently refer back to them.

After I have the office in a good working condition, I’m going to set up reminders in both Backpack and iCal to email me once a month to clean. I do this with other tasks like changing the air filter and clearing the drains, and it has worked well for me. Finally, once all that is done, I’ll start remodeling! It is a small room, so I want to get the most I can out of it. In no particular order, I would like:

• a corner desk to optimize the spatial arrangements.
• to take off the wallpaper and paint the walls blue/grey (grey being a good color to keep focused on work).
• get a little lounge chair from Target or IKEA so people can come see me while I work, or I can escape the Chief’s TV watching to enjoy a good read.

That’s how I’ve been spending my January so far… how about you?

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