ABSTRACT
Elliot is a landscaper with ADD. He is a recently divorced dad with two boys in middle school. Elliot has a wide range of interests, including camping with the kids, personal investing, and (“so the kids don’t starve to death”) cooking, as well as building birdhouses, running, and several other hobbies. And then there is his landscape business. “I have to stay up on design, sales ideas, how to go ‘green’, all sorts of stuff.” Each project, hobby, and interest has its own paper trail, both digital and tangible. In Elliot’s case, it’s mainly tangible. Information, papers, and projects are on every surface of his home-the dining room table, every chair, countertop, shelf, and windowsill; wherever something can land, it does, including magazines, clippings, catalogs, maps, manuals, and newsletters. The guest bedroom, long abandoned, now serves as a storage room for boxes of old taxes, the kids’ schoolwork from elementary school, medical records, and loose papers of unknown origin. “I’d like to set a better example for the kids before it is too late and they pick up my bad habits,” Elliot says.
