On Getting Organized

July 25, 2008

On Getting Organized by Kari Breed

I tend to be organized, if not a bit anal-retentive. It’s not that I keep my house exactly clean (the cat puke is still on the floor), but I do like for everything to have a place where it belongs, even if, at the end of the day, it doesn’t always make it there. Perhaps because I am a visually oriented person, when I look around and see things that are out of place, it tends to make my mind feel out of place, as well, and I find myself making mental notes to get things done. To ease this constant haranguing of myself, it is worth the effort it takes to organize.

You might think that organizing, cleaning up or de-cluttering is a simple, straight forward process, but what you might not realize is that there is an entire psychology, and even some biology, keeping people stuck in their mess. It can take a huge act of courage, and maybe even some tears, to get it all done. If you’re stuck, then you know it’s not a straightforward process at all.

Here are a couple key points to remember when beginning the task of organizing:

1. All the junk in Rome wasn’t organized in a day: Depending on the size of the mess, it’s going to take some time to clean it up. Be patient. This may take a while.

2. It gets worse before it gets better: The mess will get bigger as you go through the process of sorting it. Tolerate chaos.

One of the very greatest books on writing I have ever read is a book called On Writer’s Block by Victoria Nelson. In it, she explains that “Procrastination is no limp failure of will; it is an exasperated protest,” and that, “Unless you can find a way to soften that inner critical voice which is your own, it literally isn’t safe to write, for no sane person voluntarily subjects herself to this kind of abuse.” Upon reading this theory, not only did I think about myself and writing, I also thought about a good friend of mine whose house she could never get into order. She beat herself up, accusing herself of chronic laziness, but, in truth, she wasn’t lazy. She was overwhelmed. Overwhelmed and beating herself up. As the author of the above quotes points out, why would you want to tend to a task while you’re constantly flogging yourself with criticism?

3. Don’t beat yourself up: If you constantly reprimand yourself for your disorganization, the last thing you’ll want to do is work on it. Be nice to yourself.

If you’re in the habit of gaggling with the geese (chatting it up with your friends) about the woes of your messy home, you may get kicked out of the club, or you might not feel like you belong. But just remember, if you get kicked out of the Messy House Club, why would you want to spend your time with those losers anyway? Although I’m joking, this does bear some truth.

4. Don’t worry about what others think: The people who look up to you when you’re down might look down at you when you’re up. Stick to your guns.

People who don’t have time to organize can be divided into three categories: Those that really are busy, those who sit around imagining that they’re busy (me!), and those who are tired (me again!).

5. If you really are busy, you may need to plan better, to delegate more, rest more, drop some things on your list or squeeze organizing into small increments. Figure out where the problem is.

6. If you are not too busy but are still stuck, you may be suffering from confusion, overwhelm, depression or emotional baggage. Read on and consider seeing a therapist.

7. If you are chronically tired, you need to find out why. See an endocrinologist.

A wise man once said to me, “If you hear something, and it causes confusion in you, then what you are hearing is a lie.” The truth is always simple. The truth is always simple.

If thinking about organizing causes you to feel overwhelmed and confused, here’s what you’ve probably been saying to yourself. “I need to clean up this clutter. But I need to get that shelf fixed so I can put those books away on the floor. But the hammer’s in the basement somewhere in that mess of tools that I better get put away because…” What’s happening is you’re spinning tornados around in your head. You’re chasing your tail. You’re running around like a chicken with its head cut off. You’re chasing a chicken’s tail with its head cut off in a tornado. Why? Because you’re confused. Why are you confused? Because you are lying to yourself.

So, what is the truth you should be thinking? The truth you should be thinking is: “I don’t know where to start. I don’t know the best course of action. I need a plan.”

8. Sometimes the fastest way to win the battle is to admit defeat: As soon as you admit that the old plan is not working, you can begin to make a new one. Admit that you’re stuck. Admit defeat. Admit it, dang it!

If you were a general, the general rule of thumb would be that you go into battle with a battle plan. People do not haphazardly succeed. So, if you want to get off your butt and clean your home, sit down. You need to make a plan. And if you can’t find some time to make a plan, then you better make a plan to find some time. Taking this time up front will save you a lot in the long run.

Brainstorming is the first step in putting order to chaos. As indicated, it deals with the storm in your brain. Get a notebook and a pen and write down every idea or to-do that comes swirling by, regardless of what it is. This is not a time for self-censorship or organizing. This is an outpouring. Shake it out. Here’s some of mine: Find a place for my new books, go through office closet and get rid of stuff, caulk the trim on the patio, clean up my desk, organize quotes in computer, back up computer, call insurance company…

As you can see, this is all very random. That’s okay. Our thoughts tend to come out in a stream of consciousness, linked together in mysterious ways, probably with Bondo, paperclips and peanut butter. The point is to get them out where they can be organized later.

9. Write down all of your random to-dos in whatever order you can grab them: Pour them all out. Brainstorm.

Once your list is complete (or good enough for now – it will never be completely complete), organize the items by category. Categories might include: yard work, home repair, errands, decorating, paperwork, chores, projects, things to buy, meetings, etc. Figure out, to the best of your ability, which category things fall under, and make separate lists for each item. Remember to include items you think you will probably never do. It gets the item out of your head so you can forget about it.

See my separate article: Managing Your To-Do List (Posting Soon)

Before we can move on, there is yet one more list to be made, this time specifically pertaining to the mess at hand. If you’re organizing your house, list all of the rooms and the activities that occur there (or sketch it out in a floor plan). For example, your guest room might also serve as your workout area, or your home office might also be your library or torture chamber. If you’re organizing your garage, for example, list the various types of activities the items you have might pertain to. For example: Yard work, woodworking, potting, recycling, camping, sports. If it’s paperwork that’s got you by the you-know-whats, list the various kinds of documents you need to sort. For example: credit card statements, receipts, medical records, tax records, insurance, utility bills, coupons. Doing all of this on paper helps you get an idea of what exactly you’re dealing with so you’re able to gain the upper hand. Once you have the upper hand, you can smack this mess in the face.

10. Hone in on the goal: Write down the various areas or items you need to organize. Specify.

Now that your head is empty of your vast and various to-dos, and your goals are suddenly clear, it’s time to leap headlong into your oceans of clutter. Time to get your hands, feet and soul wet. Or dirty. It really depends on what you’re organizing.

The actual act of organizing is little more than moving one thing to one place and other things to other places. In fact, you could say this is true about entire lives. What does anyone do besides move stuff around? To think is not to be; to move stuff around is to be; and to move stuff around to specific places is to be organized.

The first step in the physical process of organizing is to get a bulldozer. If that seems a little extreme, then think about what a bulldozer does. It moves large amounts of stuff around, en masse. That’s what you need to do. You’ve already figured out the general area where everything goes, now move it. But move it generally. You’re not looking for a specific place to set an item, you’re just moving items into a general vicinity. Put the workout stuff in the workout room. Put the linens in (or near) the linen closet. Put the office stuff in the office. You’re making piles, and it’s going to be a mess. Just don’t make a pile of number 2. There’s already a designated area for that.

What all of this moving around does is gets the similar items grouped together, gets them out of the way of other non-similar items, and gets them into the general area where they will be, allowing you to assess all of your various goodies.

If you don’t have a specific room or area to put some stuff, designate a temporary spot. The main point is to get things grouped. If you’re trying to arrange your garage, for example, you might think that the first step is to assign locations for your various tools. Nope. The first step is to simply cluster the similar items so you can assess the damage of all your hoarding.

If you’re organizing papers or other smaller items, make piles or sort into various containers.

11. Organize en masse and en mess: Group all of your stuff, preferably in the general vicinity of where it will be stored. Bulldoze.

Everything has a priority, and even if it doesn’t, it does. You can’t cross home plate without passing 1st, 2nd and 3rd, and if you do, you ain’t playin’ baseball. Even if priority is not apparent, you still have to choose what to focus on first. This is a good time to stop and consider if something needs to be done right away. Don’t forget to pay your bills or file your taxes just because of your monstrous piles of junk (all very nice junk, of course).

12. Some things are more important than others: Prioritize.

Once you have decided what takes precedence, it’s time to buckle up and knuckle down. This is where it gets a little hairy – especially if you’ve buried the cat.

13. Be ready for ideas: You will invariably come up with brilliant thoughts and things to add to your to-do list while you are sorting your stuff: Keep your notebook handy.

While you are sorting, and especially if you are sentimental, you will most likely come across heaping gobs of emotional baggage and resistance mixed in with the bottles of hair gel you should have thrown away last decade.

If you simply find yourself resisting, who can blame you? If you’re not a complete dork, like me, organizing your house, your closet, your garage, or your paperwork might seem a little like yanking out your fingernails with a pair of pliers (if you can find them).

14. If you’re resisting out of the agony of boredom, crank the tunes, take breaks, or suck it up, soldier.

When our hands are busy, our minds are often idle. Idle and ready to floor it. The task of sorting is prime for emotional wounds to open up and seep. Years of ignoring my feelings taught me that feelings do not go away with time. They go away when we deal with them. My advice is to accept how you feel. Be honest about it. Cry it out. I’ve learned to accept my feelings and to allow the unpleasantness of them to live solidly in me until they go away on their own. For past issues, like lost loves and missed opportunities, this, for some reason, usually takes me about three days. It’s really surprising to find out what business gets left unfinished in our psyches.

15. If you’re digging up the emotional dead, attend the funeral and grieve.

Sometimes when we do something good for ourselves, it causes a discrepancy. If we see ourselves as being incapable, worthless or unworthy, and then attempt a change for the better, our minds will leap in and point out just how much this new activity does not fit. It’s like trying to stick the proverbial round peg in a square hole. No, we are informed, this does not work; these two things do not go together. We can be amazingly smart about duping ourselves out of positive change.

There is a book called Self-Love by Robert H. Schuller that astonished the heck out of me by how much it helped. As much as I am not religious (albeit, I am spiritual), I was surprised to find that I did, indeed, hold some pretty nasty convictions about myself that I was projecting onto the powers that be. The author does a superb job of explaining what unconditional love means to us each as individuals.

16. If you’re wallowing in the pigsty of your own self-loathing, stop being pigheaded and ask for some help.

Most of the time, I am quite happy to be off by myself, entertaining my own mind with my own mind. But, at times, when my brainpan isn’t simmering with an interesting concoction, like when I’m doing some mundane task, I might find myself feeling lonely. Most of the time, my cure for this is to engage in a lively “dialogue” between myself and a naked man I dream of doing my dishes, but this can be a sign that I am not getting out enough around real people. Everyone has a different threshold for being alone, but some people do not tolerate it well at all. I have 40-year old friends living with their parents because they are such social creatures they can’t stand to live by themselves. (Living with your parents at 40, by the way, can create the double-edged sword of never finding a good mate you could end up moving in with.)

17. If you find yourself dreading organizing because of the loneliness it brings up, either bear it until it passes, make some more friends or see a good therapist.

I tend to find that aggravation arises for me while I am doing some particularly distasteful chore or something physically demanding or tedious. I especially find myself fantasizing about my husband saying terrible things to me. This happens most frequently when I feel that he is not slaving as hard as I am. Last weekend, while I cleaned the toilets, he called me a fat slob, said I need to dress nicer, smell better, lose weight and cook more often. All in my head. Even though he never said such things, I was tempted to file for divorce anyway. The jerk.

18. Beware of your internal chatter. It can talk you to the brink of disaster.

Probably the number one cause of failure to organize is sentimentality. This can come in two forms: assigning animate emotions to inanimate objects, and guilt.

When you assign animate emotions to inanimate objects, it means that you believe that things have feelings, and if you throw away, for example, your old worn out shoes, you might hurt their feelings. (I still sometimes hear my old Reeboks crying.)

Guilt is a little tougher because it involves real people. You might really hurt your grandmother’s feelings by getting rid of that atrocious cherub-ish shaped knick-knack she saddled you with 30 years ago. Or, as a friend of mine worries, Daddy Earl might be watching from the heavens.

19. If guilt is an issue, you have two options: Option One: Get over it. Option Two: Keep it.

I forgive myself for getting rid of stuff that is still useful by imagining somebody else wanting to use it. Now it feels like I am giving somebody a gift. Actually, I am.

20. One clutter bug’s not-quite-trash is another’s treasure: Fill up the donation box (keep the receipt for taxes).

21. If it’s worth a little somethin’, you can eBay it, garage sale it, consign it, auction it, or Craig’s List it.

The act of sorting through your stuff can be agonizing, liberating, or both. The good news is that once you do it the first time, it gets easier after that, a lot like prostitution.

The very worst part is that every single item in your various piles has to be dealt with, down to the last safety pin, broken tennis racket and pleasure enhancing gel.

22. Throw away anything you will never use that isn’t worth donating. Don’t fool yourself here. You won’t miss it once it’s gone. Get a trash can.

If you’re suffering from “But I might need it someday,” you have some hard choices to make. If it genuinely is useful and would be too expensive to replace later, I say keep it. Or, if it’s small enough to store easily and tidily enough, I say keep it. But if it’s something you probably won’t need and could easily zip over to Home Depot to replace, then forget about it. You don’t need to keep a dozen empty pickle jars for that one day you have to capture the flock of pickles running rampant through your yard.

I just got rid of a mound of clothes I had been waiting to shrink back into, storing them until I finagle myself into a size 6 again. But it finally occurred to me… I didn’t even like those clothes anyway and would rather wear my same old Pink Floyd shirt every day (which I just about do) than wear any of that old stuff.

But… If you can’t bear to part with something, then don’t. There is no law that says you have to get rid of all that old stuff you don’t use anymore. However, you do have to deal with it; if you want a clean house, that is. You can stash it. You can build shelves for it. You can rent storage space for it. It’s your stuff. It’s your choice. Sometimes I tuck away things I know I will part with one day, just to ease my guilty conscience and to give myself time to see that I am, indeed, not going to use it.

23. Once you get the trash and donations sorted out of your keepable stuff, group together all of the similar items into various piles, areas or containers. Sort and group.

Now it’s time to take inventory.

At this point, you may be appalled to find that you own a 15-year supply of nail polish remover that might make the UN believe you’ve been stockpiling an enormous cache of biological warfare agents. If you are this kind of hoarder, there are several possibilities for it. A: You’re so disorganized that you have no idea what you’ve already got, B: You grew up very poor and think that things equal wealth, C: You’ve been stolen from, D: You’re paranoid and are keeping stores for your fallout shelter, E: You’re always buying the next best thing before using up the old.

My mother is a classic example of a recovering hoarder. Her remaining stuck point is with food. Opening her freezer is a dangerous endeavor requiring steel-toed boots, as frozen pounds of ground beef are wont to fall on your feet. She could quit shopping for the next decade and still gain weight. She keeps a spare fridge in the basement packed full of TV dinners.

There was a time long ago when I went to the store with my mother, and as I wandered around and back up to her, I found her standing near a shopping cart filled entirely with bottles of salad dressing. I stopped short and gasped, mortified that she had come across the deal of a lifetime – a lifetime supply of Ranch and Thousand Island. Thankfully, it turned out not to be her cart but belonging to the store. But I wouldn’t have put it quite past her, and that’s why I was so afraid. I still have posttraumatic stress from that terrifying moment.

That my mother has done so well in paring down and cleaning out – TV dinners notwithstanding – is a testament, not only to the difficult task of clearing out clutter, but to the much harder task of clearing out emotional clutter, because that is, truly, where we get stuck.

24. If you are a hoarder, here are some things to remember:
• Unless you’re the FBI, the backup doesn’t need a backup.
• You don’t need sixteen bottles of shampoo in your linen closet unless you’re bathing a herd of cattle in your shower.
• Keeping less inventory will help you to know when you’re in ‘dire danger!’ of running out. (How many times have you thought you had 3 jars of tartar sauce in the pantry when it turned out it was really 5 jars of horseradish? Uh oh.)
• Hell is not going to freeze over, and you still don’t need that spare fridge in the basement.
• Buying in bulk only saves you money if you use the bulk all up.
• Wal-Mart is just 5 minutes away. You can always get more.

Once you’ve whittled away at the gigantic heaps of your belongings, you might actually have room for what’s left. Crack open that notebook and whip out that pen (if you can still find them) and answer the following: What storage items do I need to store my items? Your list might include bins, shelves, hampers, filing cabinets, file folders, trays, binder clips, baskets, drawer dividers, hangars, hooks, pegboard, bags, etc. If money is an object, you can fit most any price range.

25. Your similar belongings need to stay together: Get storage items.

Do your best to fit all of your belongings where they belong. Keep the linens in the linen closet and the dishes in the cabinet. Put the books on the bookshelves and your socks in the sock drawer. Put all of the dead bodies in one mass grave. If you can’t easily see what’s in a container, label it.

Organize rooms into areas of tasking. Hang the yard tools together, away from the sporting equipment.

Label and alphabetize every file folder for each kind of item. I like to label vanilla folders with my Brother Label Maker and then drop those into a hanging folder (I’m not a fan of those plastic tabs). I haven’t gotten around to upgrading to real filing cabinets and still use filing crates. If you have similar types of papers, you can label them so they stay together alphabetically, for example, “Credit Card: Wachovia” and “Credit Card: SouthTrust” or “Writing: Nobody Move” and “Writing: Coming to Terms with Mediocrity”, or “Home: Improvements” and “Home: Landscaping”.

26. Shelve it, box it, bag it, tag it.

By now, you should be exhausted, filthy and disheveled, and your house should be clean, organized and looking good. Take a shower. Take a nap. Take a load off.

Take me out to the ball game.

For future reference, to keep yourself organized, adhere to the following:

27. Keep a perpetual donations box revved up and ready to roll. Toss anything in there as you come across it. When it’s full, take it away.

28. Use up what you already have before buying more. Unless your new laundry detergent smells like BO, like mine recently did (no, it was not BO!), use it up.

29. Spring clean. Go through everything once a year. You’ll be more aware of what you use and what you can get rid of.

30. Don’t mindlessly shop. Make sure you want or need something before you buy it.

A couple notes on mindless shopping:

• Sometimes when I shop, I will carry something I like around the store with me and then put it back after deciding I don’t have to have it. Maybe carrying it around uses up that initial sense of newness and ownership I desire.
• If I feel the urge to buy something I’m a little unsure of, I will wait a day or so to see if I keep thinking about it. This tests the level of how much I really want it. (A naked man to do dishes is still on the list.) If I go back, and it’s gone, I tell myself it was never meant to be.

Everything has a place, and if it doesn’t, it should. If your belongings have a home, it’s easy to put them away when you’re done with them. If you were your own child, you would tell yourself to put your toys away when you’re through playing.

Nothing is absolute. The best plans are flexible. Keep what works for you and adjust what doesn’t.

Just remember: Your home is a big part of you. It is the number one supporting structure in your world. Putting it into working order helps you with the rest of your life – your time, your goals, your relationships, your health, your finances.

Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Ha! Right!

Life Lesson: Your supporting structures will support you if you support them.

Posted in Goals