- Cookie Jars within 2m of your working area.
- Constantly complaining boyfriends.
- Girlfriends who only love you when you have showered.
- Books you’ll never read.
- Coffee beans you hate.
- Stale packets of pasta.
- Pinging e-mail.
- Worries about stuff you can't control such as weird viruses and who'll be in the next redundancy round.
- That Anorak tendency to buy anything ever produced by The Beatles.
- Those shares which ain’t ever going to bounce back.
- Those shorts. No you won’t.
- Leaky pens.
- Non-sharp pencils
- Loose change from, Singapore, Reykjavik and where was it?
- Prospect who are never going to buy.
- Recipes cuttings you are never going to cook.
- Software programmes which collate loads of stuff so that you don’t have to read it now and will never read it in the future.
- Chapter 1 of your very first novel. No: you don’t want to ever see it again. Novel 2 is going much better.
- Contacts on your phone who when you scroll by them you wonder who they are. And they never ring.
- Socks with holes in them.
- Any of your business cards which are out of date.
- Most of the stuff in your desk drawers.
- At least 30% in any physical filing system.
- 90% of the stuff in the down-town storage unit.
- 5% the stuff in your briefcase.
- A lot of the free iApps on your iPhone.
- That odd tattoo in that odd place. Sure it’ll be long and painful but worth it.
- All photos (thank god that was a pre-digital era) of you and the girl from Florence that night after the conference.
- Thinking you can't do stuff.
- Thinking you can't change the world.
- Thinking you are the only one who has ever felt any fear.