My office is not the largest thing in the world. In fact, it’s the size of a closet. So design and storage are at a premium. As far as design aesthetics, I have painted the walls. As far as storage though…it’s lacking. I have been working on my office slowly since we moved in over a year ago. Slowly but surely I have been getting more comfortable with it and what I need out of my space; which is more space. As a designer, artsy type creative person, I have been collecting magazines for years that had something in them I liked. Rat-eared pages and pieces of paper, stashed between the pages so that one day I might look at them again and remember why I liked it. When all of a sudden the idea hit me that this would be a good job for Evernote! I had already been using Evernote for web clippings of things that I had found online that I liked from a design point of view, so why not my physical media as well. Exact-o knife in hand, I went through several years worth of magazines and cut out pages and articles that struck my fancy and made a pile on the desk of pages to be scanned. Once scanned, I would import them in to Evernote and tag them with whatever metadata I saw fit for the image. Office, kitchen, desk, rug, lighting. Anything that stuck out as being my taste. So the next time I think of wanting to decorate or design a room, all I have to do is fire up Evernote, type in a tag and see what there is to see.
That little process has cleared off half a shelf of my less than optimal storage. I have an idea for my books, however it would be a design thing rather than a functionality thing. I saw it in one of my magazines, however it isn’t very functional if I am using them on a daily basis. We’ll see if anything comes of that. I subscribe to Dwell magazine and I really enjoy it, however part of me wants to cut them up as well for more storage space. I have been collecting them for 3 years now, so that makes for quite a lot of wasted space. Not to make puns, but I feel torn about it. I want this minimalist look, but can’t seem to do away with things. I guess I get that from my mother. She can be quite a pack rat when it comes to posessions. I keep trying to reduce the number of gadgets hooked up to the computer, but alas it hasn’t changed all that much. Besides getting multifunction components, does anyone else have any ideas or suggestions for my dilemma? Not just components, but design or organization. What works for you?
From the desk of The Sabbatical Daily Journal, this is Matt…
-Take care
