My computer is full

I'm not really one to procrastinate long term, but having a long term project, like putting together a course in bioethics for a year, has really tried my focus. I'm not really sure why it is so different from the rest of my work- I do sometimes have to sit at my computer and think about things. But that is the fairly exclusive mode of work for teaching. So I'll sit down, open up a spread of documents, start scribbling some notes and brainstorming, which leads to day dreaming...

I've learned to disconnect from the internet when I really need to get something done, but that can only go so far. I am at least fairly self-limited to actually productive activities. I organized my files for work into a smarter folder system. I sorted all the downloaded journal articles off my desktop. All of this is good, but it still isn't working on my syllabus.

The big kicker came yesterday, as I was really about to get serious on this syllabus. My computer popped up a message "Start up disk is nearly full." "Matt, what does this mean?" "... Your computer is full? What do you have on there?" Well! Let's find out! I hand cleared nearly 2 GB of random files (so now I have 2 GB of free space). Thank goodness for Matt's GIANT external hard drive, which serves as a reservoir for the kind of data I don't need to carry back and forth with me all the time. But will 2GB get me through the rest of this program? I don't know. Makes a person think about getting a new laptop- something I would rather do while I have the patience to re-learn all the new software (no, I am not running Office 2007. I like to keep my computer retro). But maybe this baby will pull through, and I'd hate to drop a chunk of change like that for no good reason.