Friday!!!!

I had hoped I would never be one of those people who lived for the weekends, but I'm afraid it gets worse every week. Not because I have anything fun planned for my weekends. Actually, I hardly do anything and try to go nowhere. I love them simply because I don't have to go to work.

It's been an up and down week...and so shall it continue to be until, well, the unforeseeable future. Now that I think about it, maybe that's why I've been organizing this office like a fiend the last two days: it's my way of dealing with stress.

Most people would say my office is organized enough. And in that I know where to find everything with my eyes closed, that is correct. But I'm in the business of the dying. That means I tear down medical charts almost as quickly as I put them together. Which means lots of dead charts. And, before I know it, my shelves are full again. So yesterday I spent an hour or more pulling every dead chart from 2009 from the shelves and packing them away in boxes. I have a feeling a psychologist would say I have a problem: I like packing boxes.

Today I cleaned out a file drawer because my billing files are eating away my space. It was time to move 2009 and 2010 to the attic. Packing those away led to cleaning up the attic. I don't get up there but once every few months, but if I have to find something I want to know where to look without shoving things everywhere. So after climbing up and down the ladder, swinging from the rafters and crawling around; all the boxes are in neat stacks so they can be easily obtained. And I was sweating like a pig...

Apparently not knowing when to stop, I decided the insurance billing files in that same drawer need to be sorted too. I mean, they are sorted. But insurance patients are few and far between in hospice, so when I need to find how I dealt with an insurance company last time or what my passwords were I have to rely on my memory to pull the right file. Usually, that's not a problem but there have been a few times. So we will make that system more efficient, too.

Of course, I nearly always end my Fridays by charting all the weekly paperwork, building the new charts and tearing down the old ones. Not my favorite organizing task, but I can't stand leaving paperwork undone over the weekend. As long as I don't get any more calls from nurses with questions I'm suppose to be able to answer (e.g.: do I know a good oncologist in Plano; will this medication still be covered by Medicare), it should all be put away before 5.

All of this leaves me with only one dilemma: if I organize everything in the office this week, what will I have to do next week to relieve my stress? Maybe I can sort my pens by height...