Did you ever see a man’s desk piled high with paper and things, the pigeon-holes crammed full, and running over? Do you know what the trouble is? It is this: He keeps a lot of things he ought to put in the wastebasket. He keeps them because he thinks he will want them some day, and is afraid to throw them away. If he would look squarely at every paper that comes to his desk, and decide then and there as to its actual value, he could throw away a great deal of stuff and never miss it.
Few causes contribute so much to encourage the habit of indecision as keeping old things because you don’t want to make up your mind to dispose of them. A man who saves too many old things gets stopped up mentally, because every paper he puts away has a thought in his mind to correspond with it, which says, “Some day I’m going to do something about that paper.” An accumulation of such intentions is not wholesome; it distracts the mind from present work.
If you are like that, use your wastebasket.
– Waldo Pondray Warren, Dallas Morning News, Dallas, TX, January 19, 1907
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