Junk drawers, aren't they great?

How many of you maintain at least one of these drawers at home? Do you have a corresponding one at work? I have often thought there should be one drawer on every work desk labeled JUNK, it would do away with piles on the desk, and those obnoxious pending trays we inherently have in our office.

I do not know what I would do at home if I did not have numerous junk drawers to store thousands of items I know I will require one day.

I have one in the kitchen, bathroom (beware this one accumulates weird objects), bedroom, garage and, of course, my shop. They are wrongly maligned as junk drawers, when they actually store articles of great value and rareness we positively will require someday.

The negative side of the drawer is we throw items in there we do not know where else to put them, but we really do not want to throw them away just yet, or we plan on dealing with them later. Later never seems to come.

Think how great it would be at work to open a drawer, toss in those problems, issues and projects we are not going to deal with this instant because we have more pressing matters to manage.

Be the item mundane, serious, boring or something we know we will never address, it sure would be nice to put them out of sight and out of mind for a while.

The drawer would confine the petty bickering between employees, the complaint from the never satisfied customer, the report you are never going to read, or the phone calls from the starving salesman who phones two zillion times a month to inquire if you have thought about the offer he made you.

I can hear my professors, mentors and management instructors winching in management pain at these blasphemous words in regards to this advice on handling issues which might steal their way onto our management plate.

To tell the truth it would not be a problem if they only reared their disruptive heads sporadically, but they gather at the door and attack all at once. So why not put them in the junk drawer for awhile or until spring cleaning? Sounds good to me.

There are, however, some minor drawbacks to this system and they are really minor. When you know you have put an item in a junk drawer and now need it you have to sift through each drawer, because you are not sure which one it is in.

During this process you should cull out the genuine junk and throw it away, but you don't take the time right now as one might forget what they were originally looking for. Another problem is some irritating or disruptive items seem to float to the surface and try to nag your good manager conscience into taking care of the item currently.

Remain strong, sorry conscience no time right now, forgetfulness can strike in an instance.

The best feature of the junk drawer is when it starts to overflow or becomes too full of items you no longer want to wade through, you just pull the entire drawer out, walk out to the dumpster and empty it. Now you can start over with a clean drawer. Have a great day.