NOT so long ago, military conflicts were characterised by periods of tidying up and regrouping in between periods of total mayhem. The decks of fighting ships would become so clogged with fallen masts, spars and rigging, bodies and other debris, that all fighting capacity would be effectively disabled. At this point clearing the decks was the only option. Almost everything loose would be quickly thrown overboard, and only essential repairs attempted.

Sometimes my office feels just like the deck of a warship - debris everywhere. And occasionally all work has to stop for a tidy-up and deck-clearing session. No matter how I try, I just seem to hit this end stop from time to time. Only it is bits on the screen and not atoms on the desk, and the scale is now immense, with megabytes strewn everywhere.

At these junctures caution sees me burning a CD to record everything on the desktop (deck), and then I just junk everything in sight - except for the functional, it all just goes over the side. And then my battle for progress starts again.

The intervals between such clear-up sessions expanded for a few years when I first made the transition to a digital office. But in the past couple of years they have been getting substantially shorter as more of the business world goes digital. This has all gone hand in hand with a corporate and academic life that sees fewer people employed doing far more work than ever before, with more customers and suppliers, and far more communication. I have invoked all the mechanisms and technology solutions I can dream up, and still it happens: my office just gets log-jammed.

As a direct result of these now frequent sessions I have a growing collection of CDs recording the state of my machine-based life at each juncture. In addition, I have a substantial and growing collection of CD-based databases, encyclopedias, education and reference works. CD storage space has long overtaken book and paper-based storage in my office, as I have very little of either. But at home I have all my old college and university books, my lecture and research notes, and, rightly or wrongly, I cannot bear to part with them - the emotional attachment is too strong. But CD storage space in my home has started to rival book and paper space. It is not just my books, paper and CDs, but those of my family too. There is no space left and I have a crisis.

I could buy more furniture, but extra bookshelves would be just putting off the day of decision. So I have had to bite the bullet. Lecture notes to the loft along with books I never read, and everything I can bear to part with to the church sale or tip. The problem is, people keep giving me more books, and I keep buying CDs.

But I have a solution that will soon be economic: the networked domestic server and hard drive. A 100 gigabyte hard drive for my home will soon be within my grasp, and then I can just load every CD I own, along with all my notes and papers, on to this centralised unit and despatch the originals to the bin, along with some bookshelves.

Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is:
http://cochrane.org.uk