3 Keys Thursday: 3 Organizational Problems in Search of a Solution

Photo: Dodgerton Skillhause via Morguefile

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you've heard me say of organizing that it's a process. I've come a long way, baby (to quote an old commercial) but that doesn't mean my home is perfectly organized.

When I look around, I see many solutions of which I am proud. The open-top files for my course materials (my husband hates them, but I love them -- and have many fewer papers lying around as a result). My mail counter, which was once so bad it daily threatened to morph into a paper avalanche (and sometimes made good on that threat) now clear (or at least close) most of the time. The desk in my home office, which boasts an actual work space for the first time in a very long time.

But, as I said, things aren't perfect around here. Here are three organizational problems at my house currently in search of a solution.

A drop spot for my school papers. Technically, I have several of these, but none of them quite fit my I need to see it personal style, so I remain in search of something better. Why do I want such a thing? So I don't forget to do things. Right now, I've gotten into the habit of dropping my daily work to-dos on my dining room table, a habit that says as much about the functionality of my drop spots as it does about my drop and run organizational style. If those spots were such a good fit, wouldn't I use them instead of my dining room table?

Or, maybe it's more a matter of establishing a new habit than actually creating a new drop spot. The good news there is that I can try out those existing spots while I'm in the process of trying to find something a little more perfect, and a lot less visually unappealing than my dining room table.

A clipping file. I'm one of those people who can't seem to read a magazine without tearing out an article to save, something that's been happening a lot more lately as I continue to chip away at my resolution to clear out accumulated stacks of reading material -- a task kicked off by the addition of new storage in my living room that was more living room-worthy. While some of the things I've unearthed can go straight to the recycle bin, the ones that earn a read often yield things I want to save. I could go old school and create categorized files but past experience has taught me that's a lot of work for articles that, very often, I never go back to. What I need is a self-emptying system of sorts. I'm considering employing a stack of file folders labeled by month and simply stashing whatever I find and want to save each month into that month's folder. It doesn't make as much sense from a retrieval perspective as sorting by topic does but, if I want to, I can always put little topic flags on the articles.

Why engage in a system that sounds kind of random? Because a year will pass between the time I need the folder the first time and the next time I need it, which means one of two things will happen to every article in the collection. I'll either pull them and put them to use, or I'll uncover them, unused, twelve months later at which point I can toss them all without a moment's guilt. If I didn't read them again in a year, I don't need to save them. It's the sort of deferred decision that makes professional organizers cringe but I like the fact that it allows me to contemplate the article's value for a little longer and it gives me a built-in expiration date.

And I have just the perfect bin for storing all those folders (of course).

kaz via Pixabay

The miscellany taking up residence on the counter in my office. Full disclosure. One reason my desk is clear is because some of the things that need to be sorted got moved to the counter so I could clean off the desk (literally). Then, I got the flu and never got back to the requisite sorting. I'm hoping it will be a somewhat easy task -- lots of miscellany to toss -- but the longer it takes me to get back to it, the more I fear the objects that lurk there, homeless, will claim the counter as their home indefinitely. The solution is simple -- start sorting. ASAP.

Unlike my I know I put it somewhere husband who opts for clear surfaces at any cost (including just stashing things wherever), I enjoy contemplating my organizational challenges and watching solutions emerge -- at least as long as things don't get too cluttered in the first place.

And, who knows? Maybe by next week at this time, I'll have cooked up a solution, or at least have dug out those month-by-month files to use for my clippings.

It's a process.