A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a place to store my daughter's gluten-free stash without doing a major kitchen storage overhaul. My eyes lit on the bins underneath my mail counter, two of which were only partially full (room to grow), so I reached into the middle one, pulled out a pile of magazines and voilà! Problem solved.
Except now I have a pile of homeless (and probably outdated) magazines.
For now, this pile is on the steps leading to the second floor of our house. Last weekend, I was good at picking up a new magazine every time -- okay, many times when -- I passed the piles but as the week got busy, the pile got neglected.
I could just add it to one of the (many) other piles of reading materials I have but I keep holding out hope that its current location will catch my I need to see it eye so that I solve the problem rather than compounding it.
Getting back to my original confession, the concept of piles in disguise is not entirely bad. After all, when you think about it, most organizing systems for papers are organized piles. Binders. File cabinets. In/out boxes.
My magazine bin.
The trick is to keep the pile organized in whatever way works for your styles. I have one bin that is all catalogs so that when I get the mail, every catalog either goes there or gets recycled immediately (Don't put it down, put it away). When I'm looking for a catalog, I look in the bin (the home for catalogs) and when it gets full, it's time to go through the catalogs and get rid of duplicates (two from the same company) and anything outdated. This is a pile in disguise (the bin being its disguise) but, since it's not haphazard, it's also an organized pile. The bin contains everything, matches its neighbors and leaves things looking better than a random pile of magazines would.
As for the pile sitting on my steps? Now a random pile, it was an organized pile before I sacrificed my bin for the greater good. How was it not random in the bin? Only certain magazines got slipped into that bin so that if I were looking for one of those issues, I'd know where to find it.
As I've mentioned before, this blog is therapeutic in that writing about what I need to do often gives me the nudge I need to do the thing I wrote about. With some time off next week, maybe I'll tackle that pile and not only get rid of it, but read its contents. Or maybe tonight I should just take the whole thing back in the family room and get rid of whatever's in there that I know I won't read anyway, assuming those items actually exist. Either of those would be progress.
Stay tuned.
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