Throwback Thursday: Piles. Again.

This post first appeared on The Porch Swing Chronicles in September 2012.

tmq.us

In June, I brought a rather substantial portion of my school office home with me. And, since I wasn't  going back to school in the fall, neither was the stuff.

Consequently, a chunk of my summer was spent finding new homes for old things...some of which still lingered in various places in my house, homeless, as fall approached. The problem with that (besides the obvious) is that I seem to have harbored a secret hope that everything would magically find its place, and by the time the new school year started, my home would be the epitome of organization. Since this has never happened in any summer in my lifetime, I'm not exactly sure why I thought it would happen under these more cluttered circumstances.

I have made progress - quite a bit of it. But, as I told a friend today, there is no grey area. Everything in my house is either exactly where it belongs or it's in a pile somewhere, awaiting travel instructions. This particular state of affairs leaves me more than a little frustrated because I have so many things I want to do, and the clutter is a distraction. The homeless items keep calling out to me.

And so I've developed a plan because I'm always happier when I have a plan. Those who know me might rat me out, sharing their acquired knowledge that any plan I develop can be classified as, at best, Plan A.

This plan, however, is designed to last.

I can't do it all - that's a given (and not the plan). But I can (continue to) do it a little bit at a time. And so, each day, I'm going to ask myself a simple question: which space am I going to improve today?

The best part of this plan is that there's no guilt inherent in the question - no perfectionism, no "but I just cleared the dining room table off yesterday, how can there be piles on it again today?" involved. Take stock. Take action. Make progress.

Some days, I find the projects. Other days, they find me. After three tries at getting dressed for church yesterday, I left the rejected clothing on the bed. (Yes. I created more clutter.) When I came home, the rejected items were dispensed with. Consignment pile. Donation pile. Definitely not going back in the closet so I can play this fruitless game all over again.

This, of course, led to the domino task of going through other items in the room to see if they could be added to a "one way ticket out of my house" pile. In the end, the bedroom looked better, and I had eliminated items from my inventory.

A pile in the living room was today's casualty, and the day isn't over yet, so I'm planning on taking a few prisoners in the dining room as well.

And the piles in the office? Their days are numbered.