I belong to an online writer’s group and the writer’s prompt a few days ago was this. Tell us about something in your life that takes too long. The following is what I wrote. Can you relate?

I absolutely hate sorting out and putting material in my filing cabinets.  Did you hear that?  I HATE IT!!  It takes forever and I end up having to clean out file folders to make room for the new.  Sorting, pitching, saving, re-naming file folders—it is all a PAIN! 

While we can read articles and such right on our monitors, I am old-school and need to have a hard copy in my hands.  Reams of paper and many ink canisters flow through my printer month after month.  The other thing that grows is my pile of things to file.  Ugh!  Just looking at that pile fills me with dread.  If I had the money, with joy, I would hire someone to do the filing.  

The other thing about this whole process is that I rarely go back to those files unless I am researching something.  That being the case, today I went in search of material on covenant.  Yes, I found a bunch.  It’s been sitting quietly in my file folders for ten years. 

Was I grateful to have found the material?  O, yes, I was.  It will save me hours or even days searching for information.  But the practice of filing to me is worse than a trip to the dentist. 

Right now, I am looking at an eighteen-inch-high pile of ‘to be filed’ papers.  The six drawers in my file cabinets are all full.  So, I am praying for a filing day and the motivation to use it for that purpose.  If any of you love to file, I am tempted to offer a free plane ticket.  I may at least set aside 15 minutes a day over the next week to sort out the pile.  Some of the things in that pile no longer hold the value that I gave them when I added them. 

~~~

I hope you can see in this brief piece that I am a completely normal human being with the normal frustrations many of you have. When the day is done, 99.9% of the pile could be burned without missing a beat. But it’s the 1% that we need to find and secure that keeps the pile growing. Thank goodness we don’t have skin animals and make ink to create documents. But in all likelihood, if we did, the pile would be forever diminished. 🙂

Well, enough of my ranting.  I need to print out some new material to read over.  😊