Best Results Organizing

“I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.”

We lost an hour this past weekend. Actually, if you’re like most people, you lost more than an hour. First, there was the change to Daylight Savings Time, which thanks to a relatively recent Congressional mandate via the Energy Policy Act of 2005, came a month earlier than we’ve experienced in the past.

Then, you walked around your house, noticing you needed to re-set clocks that don’t automatically update, checking clocks that do automatically update (such as on your cell phone and caller ID) and then bemoaning that because of Congress’s change, all the devices that used to update automatically (computers, VCRs) no longer do so if they were produced before the new regulations.

Then, if you had not yet followed Paper Doll‘s advice here, you may have spent more time searching for the instruction manuals to re-set the clocks in the house, only to realize when you got in your car on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning that you needed to dig the auto manual out of the glove compartment to change that clock, too.

Indeed, just thinking about this may have made you stop in the middle of reprogramming the time on your computer to Google (as I did) about DST, pop over to Amazon to check out Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Savings Time by Michael Dowling, or read the fascinating blog post inspired by Downling’s book at The Dilettante’s Dilemma about how this inconvenience could be a huge conspiracy by the Golfing, Grilling and Candy-making Industrial Complex.

Then, amused enough to proceed with your weekend, if you followed the advice of wise people everywhere, you took this opportunity to remind yourself of the other things you should be doing on a twice-yearly schedule. Did you test the batteries in your smoke detector? Test your carbon monoxide detector? Run a household fire drill with your family?

Perhaps the next thing you knew, it was dinner time, and you’d failed to read and recycle your Sunday newspaper (which sits on your kitchen table, still), sort your papers (see, you knew Paper Doll would bring this around to her bailiwick), open your tickler file, pay your bills or do anything remotely productive.

At least I’m guessing that was the case at your house, too.  Paper Doll bought a new shredder this weekend, and spent all that lost time reviewing and then shredding old bank statements, credit card statements and other no-longer necessary financial and personal papers. (Paper Doll is not yet self-actualized enough to shred old love letters.)  Hopefully, you know the importance of shredding documents, but you may wonder why I chose a weekend already foreshortened to do it.

Well, Paper Doll has a birthday this week (not a big one, at least in terms of significance, though grocery baggers insist on calling me ma’am), and the end of a year always seems like a good time to shred, I mean shed, the insignificant items of the past and move forward.

Which brings us to today’s lesson, if there is one. We have to declutter the past from the present in order to make room for the future.

I’m not sure what Marcel Proust would think of today’s self-indulgent post (assuming he could even read idiomatic 21st century English), but as he’s the reigning (non-X-Files) expert on lost time, I hope he and the less retrospective (but far crankier) Robertson Davies don’t mind my taking their names in vain as I eat my cake and close out another year.

Here’s to another cycle around the sun (whether we “save” our daylight or not) and to reducing paper (and other) clutter!