Author's Notes on: Your Workspace

And cleaning it, mainly.

I’ll be the first to admit that my workspace (ie my room) is a certified mess.

No matter what I do or how much time I spend cleaning, it’ll be less than an hour before my room looks like a tornado ran through it.

My brain has a tendency to delete information about anything that isn’t directly in my hands. It’s very easy for the Mess to form because the second I set something down, my brain might just consider it a sort of visual white-noise if I’m not paying active attention to where I set it down.

Think of it like this: if you listen to a fan for a while, your ears will eventually decide that you’ve heard this sound enough and it doesn’t need to keep reminding you that the fan is making noise. Your ears tune it out and listen for other sounds.

That’s what my brain has a tendency to do with the Mess. It says “oh, I’ve seen that jacket lying on the bed already. We don’t need to notice it anymore”. So the jacket stays on the bed for several days instead of getting put away. It says “yes of course we had our keys when we sat down, but then we put them down so we figured we didn’t need that information anymore”. So two seconds after getting home, the keys are lost.

It’s the strangest thing. It really is.

Some amount of the mess is functional. If I need a chapstick, I know there’s one on top of the bookshelf next to my bed.

I also re-discovered today that there’s a cup of loosely stored chapsticks on the bottom rung of my bedside table — which is where the chapstick on my bookshelf is supposed to be, but never is, because clearly if I put the bookshelf-chapstick with the others, I’ll forget that it exists too.

I remembered where my hairbrush was this morning because before breakfast I clocked that it had gotten trapped between my bed and the wall, despite me having no memory of bringing the brush into my room in the first place.

Cleaning is such a chore because it never lasts long and on top of everything it removes all those little bookshelf-chapstick type items that are out of place in exactly the right place for me to remember where they are. Once things are put away neatly, it becomes much harder to remember where they are. Sounds fake, I know, but that’s just how things are for me.

There is, however, a level past functional Mess where things become too visually cluttered for me to think properly, even if I’m not working at my desk. It’s like my head fills with static as it tries to process and discard everything in the room. THIS is when it becomes absolutely necessary to clean my room to at the VERY least a state of functional mess.

My room hasn’t hit that point yet.

But my virtual workspace has.

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I do a fair amount of art and edits for Author’s Notes. If you’re reading this from your email, you may have noticed that this article came with a fancy new graphic for the banner!

There’s character art, sketches, banners, icons, supplemental files art, and so much more… and until today it was spread sporadically between three different locations: Downloads, Pictures, and my general Art folder(s), which contains a lot of art I do for OTHER projects.

Finding any specific art for a post was a scavenger hunt through each folder, especially if I didn’t know what the file was titled. And when you name things like I do (SleeplessIcon, SleeplessIcon1, SleeplessIconIcon, .SleeplessIcon.png-autosave) it’s pretty easy to see how things get lost.

The clutter finally got to me. I couldn’t write anything knowing how messy my files were! I needed to consolidate it before my brain short-circuited.

You see that? That’s a folder on my desktop that has all the art I use for this blog. It’s even separated into subfolders!

Cardinal and Sleepless have all the respective art for their projects EXCEPT their icons — the little pictures that appear next to them on the site. The Author’s Notes Banner also goes in the Icon folder.

And just like that, I should never need to go sifting through all my different files to find what I’m looking for.

Well.

At least if I do, I’ll have a better place to look.

Now I just need to actually remember to put any new files in it, and not save any unrelated files to it. …Realistically, it’s going to happen. But that’s why I put it on the desktop where it’s very visible and won’t become the jar of chapsticks I forgot existed.

But that’s not all.

The same clutter happening in my files was happening where I store my copies of chapters and mission logs for safekeeping. Files were scattered between separate emails and drives and programs. They are now officially all in one place that’s separated into about a million subfolders so I can sort through and find what I need.

Also my dad once asked me if I really go through so much trouble every time I want to get to where I keep my stories (Open Chrome > Choose Chrome Profile > Switch to the Right Email > Google Drive/One Drive > Any additional file navigation within drive), so I’ve finally added shortcuts on my desktop to skip all the hullabaloo and go straight to the folders I want to be in!

It’s small, but hopefully it’ll all save me a headache or two in the future.

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All in all, the definition of a perfect workspace is different for each person. Organization may be unnecessary for you, or it may be everything for you.

Whatever works best for you, take the time out of your day to make a few quality of life upgrades to it. Do some cleaning or sorting, put anything you use frequently somewhere you can easily get to it, work out some shortcuts — that kind of thing!

Treat yourself! Make things easier for future you, in whatever form that takes.

As for me… I should probably be cleaning my room.