Jaq Bayles on How to avoid the unavoidable

While it may not seem like it, there might be a bright side to the whole having to stay indoors thing. Most people are already saying their homes have never been cleaner; their wardrobes never neater; if they’ve got an outside area it’s probably been jetwashed to within an inch of existence. And it’s only day two.

But once all the essential boxes have been ticked, it’s guaranteed that everyone will be left facing their nemesis – the one thing they will go to any lengths to avoid, no matter much free time they have. In a startling number of cases this nemesis is known as “sorting the paperwork”.

You don’t need to be a hoarder to have somehow ended up with a mountain of old bills, bank statements, invoices, work memos, magazines that have a recipe you might want to follow one day… Unfortunately, that unnecessary stuff somehow always manages to winkle its way in among the really important papers that you actually need, so in order to tackle “the paperwork” you have to go through absolutely every piece of documentation that’s ever come your way.

But don’t despair – you’ve avoided it up until now and just because there are weeks of not being able to go out looming doesn’t mean you can’t continue to avoid it.

Here are a few suggestions for essential time-wasting activities:

That book you’ve been using as a step to help you reach the top shelf, which is the only remaining place you can stuff more paperwork, is probably a classic. Any book that’s the size of a breezeblock will likely be very worthy, very profound, very mind-expanding. You probably didn’t buy it as a height aid, so get reacquainted with your inner intellectual – or pop a copy of your favourite comic inside so it at least looks like you’re reading it.

Got an album collection? There’s never been a better time to alphabetise it. Hell, there’s never been a better time to alphabetise anything – CDs, mixed tapes (if you don’t know what they are you probably haven’t accumulated that much paperwork yet), DVDs, clothes, ornaments, Trivial Pursuit question cards, kitchen cupboard contents…

Which leads neatly on to another great essential time-eater – arranging the contents of the kitchen cupboard. There are many ways this can be done and in all honesty alphabetising probably isn’t the most fruitful – your flour and fois gras, pickled onions and pasta, soup and spaghetti, aren’t going to look particularly neat together, neither will their groupings make sense.

Probably best to do this one by category. Remember, you’re looking to while away the time, so don’t rush it – you can eke this one out for days while you try to find the most efficient system of categorisation. Then you’ll be in a position to alphabetise the categories. And be sure to get fully distracted by the random foodstuffs you didn’t even know you had, along with the use-by dates on any tins – these will invariably go back as far as 1993 and can be the source of long-term topics of debate, reflection and conversation.

So there you go. A few essential tasks you may not have thought of to keep you occupied outside the TV box sets and that have the added benefits of both not being a board game and of keeping you away from the horror of “sorting the paperwork”.