A Hallowe’en Scare: This is what happens to naughty cartoonists when they don’t keep their rooms clean.
on October 24th, 2012If I die and go to hell, I am sure this is what it will look like.
I do not know the original source of this photo, but I was on one of those websites with scary pictures of Home Offices. I think I take a peek at shows like Hoarders just to scare me into getting my act together once in awhile.
But this pic really freaked me out when I realized whoever the unfortunate soul is who lives in this squalor, it’s a cartoonist.
Egads.
I am going to print this out and make myself look at it until I get through that pile of papers on my desk.
Very sad situation, and far beyond the point of mere “messy desk”. Hope whoever it was got their life sorted out.
In the meantime, here are a few of my previous posts on organizing your studio and home office. I cannot stress enough the importance of time management for the self employed creator. It is very easy to fall into bad habits when you work alone.
Worse yet, for the freelancer every bit of that time is MONEY, because we only get paid for what we actually produce! If we are losing an hour every day to clutter, we lose a real hour every single day of productivity! Over the course of one week, that’s an entire page of art or 52 pages of art EVERY SINGLE YEAR! Half a graphic novel! Three issues of a comics series!
Time Management Tips: Links to my series on getting it together.
If there is one thing that creators know how to do, it’s waste time. We’re masters of procrastination. Freelancers working at home can imagine a thousand ways to sink minutes and hours and not accomplish much of anything and still make it to the end of the day feeling like they’ve done their bit of work. It’s easy to delude ourselves since we usually live and work at home alone and there is no boss standing over us cracking the whip.
A Messy Desk is a Sign of…This is one of my most popular posts. I suspect people who don’t want to clean up their messy desks want reinforcement for their bad habit, and justify it by convincing themselves a messy desk is a sign of genius. It can also be a sign of a messy desk.
Years ago McClellan offered a motivational theory that suggested people with clean desks and grip and grin photos were motivated by power; people with messy desks/offices were motivated by achievement; people with toys and family photos were motivated by affiliation. The theory went on to suggest that each of us is motived by all 3 factors in varying degrees.
Need serious help?
Contact the National Association of Professional Organizers. I took classes with a pro organizer once, and it made a world of difference for me. Check them out!
It’s so stressful to see that as someone’s workspace.
Seeing some of the other offices of similar cleanliness (here: http://imgur.com/a/wBsn8#1EnhN) is breathtakingly disturbing. I never knew someone can smoke that many cigarettes.
YAGH! Yes, thank you, that is the source of this photo! I am going to have nightmares. I think a few of those offices are not really that messy, it’s just the people are living in very poor conditions. But that smoker, holy cow!
I just realized something horrible: that’s not the only cartoonist office in that series. *FAINTS!*
Whoa…Just…whoa.. I was in the Air Force for a loong time, so..This needs a GI Party. Looks like enough for 3 …You just cannot be productive trying to work in a …well, a garbage pile, because that’s what this is.
Everything you would do risks getting lost or misplaced, ..or vanishing…
Ugh! Back up the 50 cu yd dumpster, it’ll only take 8 hours for me to clear it,
but you wont like what I throw away! LOL
Eep. I strongly recommend browsing the “Before/After” section of UFYH as an antidote for these pix. ( http://unfuckyourhabitat.tumblr.com/tagged/before-and-after )
Thank you for cleaning out our brains with a link to a site with before/after photos! There’s hope for everyone!
Someone tried to hotlink this photo, but failing that, simply linked it here instead. Where you may go have a look at the interesting, tidy spaces of creative people. http://sequentialworkshop.com/forum/discussion/210/show-us-your-digs/p1
Yes, this site is protected against hotlinking. It eats my bandwidth.
My desk had built up some clutter recently, and I tackled sorting through the accumulation just the other day. It’s not totally back into order, but I am getting myself back into the mindset of “These things DO have homes!”
I need to finish getting my apartment in better order because I’m about to close out my Storage Unit. I can’t afford it anymore right now, and will have to bring everything back to my apartment – where I will have to do a more ruthless sort of: keep, store, sell/give away, toss. A friend is loaning me space in a storage pod for the keepables that I don’t need immediate access to. But a Major Sort is going to be needed. And then living with the crowd of boxes until I can make a more permanet change.
But the kind of disorder in that picture — Yikes!
Good luck! It is so frustrating getting it together, but so worth it when you are done!
And I had to move all my stuff from storage into my condo years back, and the resulting clutter was depressing. It took a long time to sort it out. When I moved a lot of my office stuff into the new house, it took months and months of ruthless sorting to get in line. So worth it when done.
Environments like the one in that picture speak to serious depression. It’s hard to convince people that cleaning up the mess will help alleviate the depression.
I’m making some headway with my apartment, certainly feels good to not have to tiptoe around boxes and stacks of books in my computer area. Still have a ways to go but it’s progress. At work, my desk used to be completely full of my work folders. People would make note of how they would start to shift a bit since they were stacked so high. One Friday I cleared everything (put them in other areas of my office) and come Monday some jokingly asked if I got robbed. It’s a never ending battle to keep organized.
Yeah, I haven’t been feeling well for over a month, and did not clean up the place. And the last few days, clean, clean, clean. My home area is fine, but the work area gets cluttered so fast. And the minute it gets cluttered, I stop being able to draw. It’s a vicious cycle! I need a clean work area to function.
That isn’t just a picture of a messy office/living area, it strongly resembles a health hazard as well…
I actually work best in a slightly cluttered environment. Clean is no good for me. BUt hopefully I’ll never be anywhere hear that top photo!
I think there is a big difference between cluttered and dirty. I have some very pleasant clutter in my office. I’ll have to post a photo or two. But my office is clean.
When I lived in my cramped condo, and we finally moved all those boxes and storage things out from my self publishing days, the one thing everyone commented on was how clean it all was despite the clutter. It’s hard to be an artist and not generate clutter, especially if you’re running a business out of your home! But I made sure to vacuum around all those boxes of stuff, by golly.
I have a great, two room office and outside storage now, so I think I have one of the nicest studios I could hope to have. Barring winning the lottery, that is.
Moving is my enemy. It takes me years to get organized, then poof, one move and it’s back to square one. Recently I moved out of rented office space back to my home office. Guess what? Didn’t have anywhere to put that stuff. And so it sits. In piles. I’m working on it…you’d think the stress would be motivation enough!
Meredith, I feel your pain. Moving is hard enough, but this will amuse: my last move included the efforts of an Almost Helpful Person. I’d left him the key to feed my cat and let in the carpet cleaner. He took it upon himself to also do a very bad job packing my things and cramming them into his van. He destroyed my organizing in one fell swoop. He showed up on my doorstep at the new house with my belongings in a cluttered mess. He expected a gold star for this, as I pulled out a set of shattered gold dinner plate chargers.
I’m serious; he had my glassware crammed into boxes with books, papers, and bric a brac, and even a stack of geodes, because we all know how you should TOTALLY PACK GLASSWARE WITH ROCKS.
I have yet to find missing items, including a set of Russian lacquerware. It still chaps me when I think of what a rude thing he did. And what a mess he left.
Ouch, that is the WORST! I’ve had those “moving (totally not helpful) helpers” before, but nothing that bad!
Almost Helpful people can be a real pain, but this guy had serious boundary issues. Had to cut him off years ago for my own peace of mind.
Anyway, for those of you in the tri-state mid_atlantic, you might want to contact Clutterbusters for hard core cleaning and organizing aid. They’ve featured on the show “Hoarding” and can handle any mess.
Don’t be embarrassed to ask for help if you need it.
http://www.clutterbusters.com/index.cfm/container_id/351/container_top_level_id/416.htm?gclid=CLmCktO4nbMCFQ6CQgodwyAAOQ
oh wow…that was stressful just to look at. Think I’ll print it out as well and take a break to straighten out my desk!
Just to stay ahead of it!
I got help from a cleaning service like Clutterbusters a few years ago to tackle the excess. They were a bit help and they specialize in not being judgemental (or at least never showing it to you. That was when I first got the storage unit.
Now, it’s back in the living space again. But over the week I was bringing boxes back (a Mustang is not great for cartage jobs!), I suddenly found that I can’t just leave things sitting around any more. Somehow, having less space to actually move about it makes me more conscious of the need to put things back in their homes, put loose pieces of paper in the trash, put books and DVDs back on their shelves.
And now I’m sorting through stuff I put in storage – a lot of it should simply have been thrown out. I’m also going to have to part with a lot of books: many will go to libraries.
But I totally agree — too much clutter is smothering. Can’t work with it.
I think the clutterbug gene runs in fandom. Almost everyone I know is a collector of some kind, and it is terribly hard to let go of books.
I might be a different person today if I had not apprenticed with Frank Kelly Freas. Loved him to death, but he was a hoarder. Scared the crap out of me to see what a state he was in. I swore I would never let it happen to me.
I clean as best I can but then I wind up buying more books (even though I still have plenty unread). Though I am getting better and designating what is a “need” and what is a “want” and scaling back. Never ending battle.
Some of these photos look like they have been taen in places where people did not have a lot of money though. That one place looked like a trailer, and there is that other arrangement that looks like it is being used by a person with severe back pain.
But also, yes, holy Hell, how does the keyboard even work with all this stuff stuck between the keys. And all those cigarettes O.o The chemical squad really needs to look at these ones 8/
I clutter a lot, and every half a year I go on a cleaning spree, and boy, do I suddenly find a lot of good pens, printer cartridges, lost drawings and the like, also money. But I would not be able to declutter regularily, like every Saturday or something.
(oh yes, Sabine needs to read -all- comments before posting >.< Sorry for saying the same thing that has already been said.)
Aw, no worries. No one wants to pick on people for being poor or disabled. I’m thinking some of these people are just extremely messy.
One person pointed out to me that some of these pics are of hikikikomori or
“shut-in” people in Japan. Folks, usually young men, who completely withdraw from the world and live in isolation and squalor.
It must be awful to get to a point where living like this seems better than facing the real world.