Throwing it all away - but am I happy

My past is in the dustbin and I'm in the naughty corner, writes Lucy Kellaway

Last week I gathered up seven years of my working life and threw it away. I filled three plastic sacks of miscellaneous rubbish for landfill sites. one oil drum of paper for recycling and I built six tottering towers of books to be sent to Oxfam.

The reason for this savage act of clearance was that I had been told to move desks. Since 2000 I have sat in a large open-plan office by a window looking out on a flat roof and a brick wall. As of last Monday I now sit 10 yards along in the same open-plan office with the same view of the same flat roof and the same red brick wall.

As moves go, mine was modest. In the same seven years almost everyone I know has moved to other companies at least once. Or retired. Or moved abroad. Or died. Yet my move, though small, has left me unsettled and slightly unhinged.

In my old corner I had deep, unstructured piles of paper on my desk, under my desk and in a five-foot radius on the floor around it. I had a spillover area on a nearby coffee table. It was ugly and dirty but it was familiar and it was how I worked.

Moving meant a major sorting operation. First, I tackled a job I had been putting off for years: opening my mail. My policy is never to open anything unless it looks interesting. The pile of uninteresting mail was therefore very large, some of the envelopes having been posted several years earlier.

When I started to open them I discovered how right I had been. They contained invitations to dull leadership seminars and press releases about dull surveys. I took an executive decision and slung the rest, unopened, into the oil drum, where it made a reassuring thud. This felt very good.

Then the old newspapers and magazines followed. Thud, thud. Next were books, so many management books of so very little interest. The first I picked up was Value Nets, Breaking the Supply Chain to Unlock Hidden Profits. The question was not whether to keep it now but why I had ever kept it at all. About a hundred other titles followed.

More difficult were the assorted papers and reports - papers on things I have written about; reports on things I might write about one day, things that have amused me, things that never amused me at all but which somehow did not find their way into the bin.

The task of sorting all this out seemed too big, so I swept up a handful and hurled it into the drum. After that it was easy. Once you start, you can't stop and nothing seems worth hanging on to. An hour of throwing things away then exposed something I hadn't seen in years: the pale grey melamine of my desk.

Clearing out can yield other surprises, one being the sheer number of pens. There were 14 Biros, 21 pencils, 16 Pentels and eight highlighters, seven without lids. All had been hiding for years. So I kept the pens, my cup and my teabags. The small file of papers that I had saved after the previous move seven years earlier I kept on the dubious grounds that if I thought them precious seven years ago, I wasn't going to second-guess myself now.

The only books that survived the cull were multiple copies of those I've written myself. Hardback (various editions), paperback, print-on-demand, proof versions. I kept them in spite of the fact that they are the most dispensable of all - I've got cupboards full of the wretched things at home. So that was it: my books, pens, a pad, teabags, a mug. Seven years of work filling less than half a crate.

Last Monday when I came into work I found this modest container sitting neatly by my new bare desk, just along from the old one. I looked at it and felt bereft. There seemed something penitential about the new corner position. I felt marooned, as if I had been sent to sit in the naughty corner. I sat down and felt worse. My chair was different. Same make, same colour, but not mine.

Four days later I have recovered a little from the shock of minor, unwanted change. I will even admit to liking the new location of the hatstand. My clean desk still strikes me as bleak and it doesn't seem to have made me efficient. I still lose my vending card just as often as before.

But I can't quite shake off the glumness. It's not that I regret having thrown any particular thing away; so far I have found nothing that I need or miss. The trouble is that I miss all of it. I miss the security blanket and the mess.

A colleague has sweetly tried to explain why I am downcast. He has quoted an African proverb (which I bet he made up) that goes: "We may not know where we are going, but at least we can know where we have come from." He says I am depressed because I have erased my working past. It's a good try, but he's wrong. I still know where I came from even though I've thrown out the evidence.

What has made me glum is knowing that it was all rubbish: it didn't amount to a row of beans. Or rather, it did amount to a very long row of books, most of which may now be found on the shelves of some godforsaken charity shop in south London. Value Nets, anyone? - (Financial Times service)