i prefer old fashioned pencils. i like the feel of the wood and the weight of the pencil, which is lost with the mechanical versions. for general office use i prefer the 2b grade, which is a plain old, standard pencil. there’s a nice image on wikipedia that demonstrates the grading and classification of pencils: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil.
so. i like a regular old pencil, but it has to have a SHARP point. i get grumpy when they’re dull; what’s more depressing than pulling a pencil out of the pencil holder to discover the sharp is worn down to a nub? well, lots of things are more depressing, actually, but i’ve got this sharp point problem licked. here’s how:
sharpen a bunch of pencils
insert into cup on desk with the pointy tips facing up
after using one, return to cup with now dull tip facing down
when there are no more pencils with pointy tips facing up, it’s time to sharpen all of them
this way i am guaranteed to always choose a pencil with a sharp point. woohoo!
if you’re on twitter you may know that there is a feature called “lists.” putting people you follow into a list makes sense if you follow different kinds of people and want to be able to separate their tweets. maybe you don’t want your favorite sports team tweets mixed in with tweets about your type of work, for example. when twitter introduced this list feature i was not surprised to find myself on many lists titled “librarians.” i was surprised, initially, to find myself on lists titled “professional organizer.” when i think of a professional organizer i immediately think of the calm, gentle guides that lead people to get rid of the trash in their homes on the tv show, hoarders. when i thought further about it though, i realize that what i do all day is organize data. i have a professional degree in organizing data, in fact! so yes, i am a professional organizer.
further conversation may be had about whether libraries are hoarding spots and if some libraries would benefit from a hoarding intervention, but that’s for another time.
read how to travel without paper printouts of hotel confirmations, maps, or driving directions by reading my “paperless traveler” profile on the evernote blog. they even included a picture of me with the profile! the write-up includes instructions on how i used evernote, my iphone and dell mini on a recent driving trip from l.a. to napa.
if you’re like me, by the time you roll into work on monday morning you’ve completely forgotten what you did on friday and what your goals were for the upcoming week. the last thing you want to do first thing on a monday is figure that out. help yourself! on friday afternoon, 15 minutes before you leave work, set your monday morning schedule. i use the calendar in my email program to lay out tasks for myself for the entire day but only commit to completing the ones i’ve set for the morning. on mondays when i get in to the office i don’t even have to think about what i’m supposed to be doing; i just pop open my calendar and follow my own lead. try it!
writing an article always begins neatly: i have an idea, i write down a few guiding thoughts, i begin my literature search. i create four folders on my computer: the main folder has the working title of the paper, three folders inside that are titled “drafts,” “data” and “literature.” from this point on, during the creative, expansive part of writing an article, things are not neat.
i’ve looked around my desk while working on an article and have thought it looked like it exploded. the desk is covered with stacks of articles for the literature review, printouts of tables and graphs, scraps of paper with notes i took while on the way to my office, and books. if i’m working with co-authors, it’s just that much more disheveled because i’ve got copies of the articles they’ve read on my desk too, with notes in their unfamiliar handwriting. it’s a visual mess.
at the end of the writing process, after i’ve submitted a manuscript, i like to bring it all to a close with some celebratory organization. i create a hanging folder with a tab with the title of the article. inside the folder i put the copy of the submitted manuscript up front, along with any copyright forms or checklists. behind that i put clean copies of all the articles i used in the bibliography, organized in file folders by author’s last name. i save pdfs of the articles too, in the “literature” folder on my computer; i also title the pdfs with the author’s last name. i create a folder on the computer titled “submitted” and put in there the final version of the submitted manuscript, any tables or figures, and a scanned version of anything i had to sign when i submitted the manuscript.
bringing a neat closure to the messy process of writing feels like celebration to me. once those things are neat, i move on to my next project or article and start the process all over again.
Marie Kennedy is the Serials & Electronic Resources Librarian at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. This blog is about organization, librarianship, and sometimes monkeys and/or bananas.
