I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve given up on creative work.

First of all, actually sitting down to do the creative work was rare enough. The list of prerequisites was long: tidy office and home, emails answered, bills paid, routine tasks accomplished. I may as well have been Cinderella trying to go to the ball, simultaneously playing the role of my own evil stepmother.

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I am grateful to my longtime mentor, Neil Bainton, for his perpetual nudges toward clarity.

We’d meet for a meal where I’d talk about my plans for my business or whatever, sharing the various options and possibilities I was considering.

Neil would never get mired in the details. He always brought the conversation back to one simple question: “What do you want?”

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I can lump my middle school students into two brutally overgeneralized categories: those who crave drama and those who enjoy life without it.

Amusingly and frustratingly, a student of the first type almost always pretends to be the second. “I just don’t want all this drama, you know? But I just can’t seem to escape it.”

When it is pointed out to him that he could choose to associate with classmates who are drama-free, he will retort that everyone is full of drama and there is no alternative.

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I learned how to file papers from David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

It might have been better if I had simply become more effective at throwing things away. Then, I wouldn’t have found myself combing through a box filled with ten-year-old notes and supporting information, all meticulously organized.

On the one hand, it was interesting to see a time capsule of where I was in my work a decade ago — how I saw things and what I was hoping for. But whatever had once seemed precious and memorable and worth saving was gone.

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At the Little Middle School, we have too many books for the shelves.

This is not a problem I used to see clearly. I just figured that we needed more shelves.

That is, until I encountered the work of Dana K. White, a self-professed “deslobification” expert out of Texas who proposes a simple idea she calls The Container Concept: shelves, boxes, bins, closets, and even homes are containers, meant to contain, or limit, the number of items that can be there.

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