Stoppit and Tidyup


Over the last few days, I’ve been very organised (for me) and tidied up my computer desktop and email inbox.

The latter was the most in need of attention and that’s an understatement; for a number of years now, I’ve had literally thousands of unread emails (just a little under four thousand, to be a little more detailed) and while they were all of no importance - and most could be deleted - I’m sure it will make a real difference, psychologically speaking, to not be confronted by such a big number when I log in.

That’s not to say that I didn’t have a system for spotting if I had something to attend to; as ridiculous as this may sound, I always knew at which point my unread stack tended to total at - normally around the 3,420 mark - so anything above that would have just come in. This is similar to the bit in Spinal Tap when the documentary host asks Nigel Tufnell why he doesn’t just make ten louder instead of going up to eleven; there was logic to my approach even if it was a touch idiotic, but it still worked for me.

My desktop was another secret shame that, if anything, wasn’t that secret at all, what with the amount of shows I do with projection that inevitably result in people at the venue seeing clutter that had built up, as I test my gear. Now, it almost doesn’t look like my computer which is a little disorientating, but if that’s the worst part of being more on top of things, I can live with it.

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