Big day at Impelled. After a long day of plotting greedy schemes solely for my own benefit, I began to dig out my desk from the Les Nesman-like stacks of paper walling it off from my colleagues. Our business brings in contact with all sorts of interesting stuff, and my curiousity generally exceeds my attention span, so I end up with World Bank reports on Chinese financial instutions and US Foreign Service reports on Indonesian coal usage stacked in piles around my chair until I have a positive fence around me. I mean to read all this stuff, but who has time? and I really don't have any way to fit it together or turn it into actionable information. After a while the distraction of all this stuff I meant to read and the guilt of not reading creates such confusion that I can't begin to do the actual thinking that might make some sense of it.

So away with it! Well, I'm too compulsive to just throw it away, and the one-touch rule while great in theory demands more discipline and organization than I have. If I had that kind of thoughtfulness I wouldn't have collected 75% of this stuff in the first place. I usually end up throwing away the most obvious offenders and filing some stuff and creating new piles of stuff to be dealt with promptly, once I do get organized -- but of course the organization is itself the problem that never gets confronted, and I expect I'll be back behind the barricades in no time.