Deanna Zandt's Extra Helping

Source: Uploaded by user via Deanna on Pinterest

I’m late to the Pinterest game (as far as people whose job it is to be on top of new, hot social media services goes, that is), but I’m completely in love so far. The basic idea is that it’s a way to collect visuals onto various “boards” that are organized by topic. It sounds ho-hum until you try it… and get sucked down the rabbit hole of Pretty and Awesome Things.

In the tech world, there’s been a lot of slamming of Pinterest for being a girly thing— check out this post that nails it at the Clever Girls’ Collective for more on that. Thanks to the Girls, I learned that Pinterest is 70-80% women… WOW. I mean, it’s well-known that women dominate many social media services, but it’s clearly women driving the meteoric rise of this one—not the dudely early adopter tech crowd. 

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Inspired by Erin a few weeks ago, I decided it was high time I start to get my home office (aka, where I spend 14 hours a day) in better shape. It hit me that I hadn’t been working in there very much, if it all— I’d been working on the couch in the living room. When I work on the couch, I call it “working from home,” haha. And I’d been working from home a lot.

The first problem was that the office was a complete disaster. I’m a packrat by nature (hello, OCD!), and paper and books especially pile up quickly around my house. I do giant cleanouts of everything I own about twice a year, and that helps keep things manageable. But with a lot of things going on last fall, I just didn’t have it in me, and both my office and my storage area have been showing the (very, very) ill effects.

I started by cleaning and organizing everything (useful side of having OCD: things get really clean when they need to be), and got rid of a bunch of crap. Then I realized that one of the biggest problems is that my office is just not a super welcoming, creative space. I’ve wanted to do something with it, but I can never decide, and then I often just don’t have the time. Looking at stuff like my friend Brett Bara’s apartment deco series is both inspirational and slightly deflating— “OMG, I could never be as cool as that.”

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