A Randomized Life or The Second Law of Thermodynamics

I’m a naturally disorganized person that loves to be organized. I’ve spent much of my life thus far fighting entropy as it and the Second Law of Thermodynamics manifest themselves most personally. As the Law says, energy is a constant, inevitable and irreversible process of becoming increasingly randomized. All one has to do is lie on the couch and watch as everything around us, including our bodies, become increasingly randomized. The yard grows wild. Books fall off the shelves and mix together. Cords in boxes quietly tangle together. And our neurons die off. If we don’t get up and straighten things out, take a shower and delete old files from our computer we will become so randomized that we cease to exist as a recognizable lump with a name.

But I love a good fight, even if I know I will lose in the end. So organizing my offices and my virtual office are actually fun – especially if it involves gadgets and software. A trip to the Container Store is always a pleasure. Who doesn’t need boxes to put their boxes in? I also love organizing software. I’ve used Mindmanager mind mapping software for many years to organize my thoughts. I use “The Brain” to organize my virtual files. I use Scrivener to organize my writing. I recommend all of these great tools. But there’s one tool I need and that is some software that will clean out my computer files and my virtual office – magically getting rid of old files I no longer need. It takes hours to go through those old files on four different computers and drag those old files into the virtual trash bin.

Inadvertently I did discover just such a tool last week when my hard drive crashed at work and destroyed eight months of files. I thought they were backed up automatically but they weren’t. So suddenly I’m unburdened by all that accumulated information I spent hours accumulating and organizing into tidy folders. It was a crash course in digital entropy. Yet somehow I feel unburdened. Pleasantly randomized.