Realistic Organization

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I used to be embarrassed by the state of my house often. It wasn't terrible -- just cluttered and very, very lived-in. My I need to see it/drop and run styles were in evidence in many places and on many flat surfaces. Having visitors required either hours dedicated to finding homes for things and putting them in those places or a frantic dash through the house to grab and stash.

These days, I'm embarrassed a lot less often.
If you were expecting me to say I'm never embarrassed, I hope you're not shocked or disappointed. The fact is that knowing about organizing -- and even writing about organizing -- is different from doing it.

When it comes to organizing (and keeping things uncluttered) the "doing" is often hampered by real life obstacles. Things like time, space and conflicting priorities lead us to take shortcuts that feel comfortable in the moment (like dropping and running, cramming and jamming or putting things somewhere), but that lead to piles and clutter we end up having to tackle later on.

Organizing is not a one-and-done process. (Wouldn't it be wonderful if it were?) Balancing what comes in with what goes out in a timely fashion requires consistent time and attention. As long as  both time and attention are plentiful, things go relatively smoothly. But, when we get busy or overwhelmed or other priorities emerge, it's easy for things to pile up. Quickly.

Tomorrow is my last day of classes for the semester. This week, I've emerged from the grading cave long enough to tackle a pile or two and create some clear space. Because I have workable systems in place, it's a fairly easy process, but it still requires time and attention. Fortunately, each clear space motivates me and reminds me that I know how to do this. I just need to have all of the tools -- including the intangible ones -- at my disposal.

When it comes to organization, no matter how much I learn and how much I write about it, I remain a work in progress. Some days, it's hard not to see this through the lens of failure -- as though simply understanding what I need to do will get the job done.

But it won't. Although knowledge alone is insufficient to keep my surfaces clear, there is one piece of information that helps me keep things in perspective -- one that I remind myself almost daily.

It's a process.

3 Keys Thursday: 3 Keys to Mentally Managing Too Much to Do

Dodgerton Skillhause via Morguefile

College semesters, like so many other things, have an ebb and flow to them. In the past two weeks, the flow of papers, exams and concerned students has been steady enough for the work waters to rise to flood level.

This is not a surprise. It happens every semester.

So often, when we find ourselves in rising waters, figuratively speaking, we concentrate only on keeping our heads above water. While this is essential, how we manage our mental state amid the deluge is essential as well.

Clearly, my stacks of papers and stuffed inbox are not life-threatening, but my attitude about managing them can make a big difference in the quality of my life and the lives of those around me. Here are three keys I try to keep in mind.

Some time lines are flexible. There are many deadlines at this point in the semester, so the last thing I need to do is impose more deadlines on myself, especially if those deadlines are unrealistic. Makes sense, right? But every semester, I need to remind myself of this and fight the urge to think I can read 30 papers in one sitting and still remain a semi-functioning human. Giving myself the time I need to not just do required tasks but do them well benefits both me and my students.

Baby steps. Some days, I think this will be engraved on my tombstone (right beside "it's a process"). Breaking a task down into smaller chunks not only makes it more manageable, but it enables me to build in breaks -- a wonderful, restorative feature necessary when the finish line seems far off. Powering through seems as though it will get us to our destination faster, but it can be overrated, and it might even backfire, causing us to hit a wall, unable to go any further.

Some things are not expendable. Sleep. Sustenance. Time with family. Okay, so I rescheduled a hair cut, and a massage (both of which I should have had the foresight not to schedule this week in the first place) and I begged off choir practice so I could recapture that time to check tasks off my list. These were trade-offs so I could make time to do things like talk with my daughter on the phone, have dinner with my husband and sneak in a nap when my eyes couldn't focus on one more paper. Knowing our limits isn't weakness. It's wisdom.

Two weeks from now, all of the papers I've collected will be graded and I will have listened to my last presentation of the semester. Meanwhile, I will never have this particular combination of students again and I owe it to them -- and to me -- to give them my best self. Without the right mindset, she's nowhere to be found.

Lister or Flitter?

Today is one of those power-through-the-list days, so I'm sharing a vintage post that asserts there's more than one way to get things done. 

Happy Wednesday!

Some days, I start with a list. Other days, I flit.

Sometimes, I'm a linear thinker. I create a to-do list and work my way through it, step by step, item by item. Methodically. Efficiently. When I'm drowning in projects, as I am right now, this happens a lot.

Other days, I'm more scattered, or the piles are too massive, or...something. On those days, I flit. I do this mostly in the morning, with more speed and energy if I'm also drinking my favorite Starbucks beverage (iced chai, preferably a venti, with an extra pump of chai syrup). Caffeine seems to increase my efficiency.

I start at the top of a pile (did I mention that there are typically multiple piles?) and simply move from one thing to another, tackling whatever's in front of me, in no particular order, except the order in which I uncover/come across it. I develop a rhythm, and though I may leap from item to item and project to project, I get a lot accomplished. One paper leads to another, which leads to a file, which leads to a magazine I must thumb through before tossing. The piles diminish, my stress level drops and the desktop - or at least a small portion of it - becomes visible once more.

Other times I start at the bottom of the pile -- an organizing trick I learned years ago, probably on HGTV's Mission: Organization. The items at the bottom of the pile, by virtue of having been there longer, are often outdated and/or easier to part with.

I'm a professional organizer's nightmare, moved by mood, not method. I'm a visual organizer, an I need to see it person, someone who has to see things in order to remember to do them. And, as a writer, I'm a creative person, dropping bits of ideas like so many bread crumbs, but lacking the time to sweep them all into a neat pile. When it comes time to make sense of the mayhem, I like being able to choose my plan of attack. 

My Type A friends shake their heads and smile that smile that says they think I'm hopeless.

I prefer to think of myself as flexible.

3 Keys Thursday: 3 Keys to Temporarily Switching Things Up

Dodgerton Skillhause via Morguefile

When it comes to getting organized, consistency is key.

Except when it's not.

Yesterday, I wrote about ditching my tried-and-true system for a simpler plan -- temporarily. For the past couple of days, it's been exactly what I needed but, when I found myself longing for a daily plan, I knew it was time to switch back.

While we should always be open to new solutions when the strategies we're using aren't working, I think there are also times when we should abandon the thing that works for something else. Here are three that I can think of.

• When it's what we need in the moment. Coming back from nearly a week away, my brain was spinning with things I needed to do. My usual system involves a combination of lists and time slots, but my immediate need was to just dump everything onto a list where I could take stock. The time slots would come later -- but not until after I'd checked a few things off the master list which, for sanity's sake, had only two categories.

• When you're in transition. This definitely piggybacks on what I wrote above, but it can also happen on its own. There are times that require schedules and there are times that require a free flow, moving from one thing to another as time and mood permit. When we're making the transition from one into the other, we may need to adjust our systems as well.

• When the amount of stuff temporarily overwhelms the system. If I had attempted to take the rather substantial number of items on my two-column list and slide them into time slots, I'd have run out of space on the page I use for my day-by-day schedule. Then, instead of becoming a tool, this day-by-day list would have become a source of stress. Tools should always work in our service, not the other way around. When we discover that the tools are running the show, it's time to step back and ask ourselves if we need something different.

This morning, I sat down with one of my week-at-a-glance sheets and pulled everything together, assigning times to what I could and listing what I couldn't yet assign a time to. By Sunday evening, I'll be ready to return to my usual system but, for the past few days, my temporary system has been just what I needed to help me return slowly and (somewhat) smoothly to the real world. 

New List, New Look

Holgi via Pixabay

Last week, my husband and I went to visit my daughter, who is finishing up a semester in Ireland. I applied all of my organizational strategies to packing in a logical fashion, only to have to unload and reload as we went through security, who had no respect for my styles whatsoever. And, not knowing what to expect when it came to the weather, I seriously overpacked.

But none of that stood in the way of my fun.

Now I'm back, the fun is behind me and everything I left at home -- papers to grade, book tasks to manage, writing assignments to complete -- is tugging at me. Typically, I spend some time on Sunday night or Monday morning making lists and assigning tasks to times, using my "This Week" pad to create a lovely little I need to see it reference list. But this week, we were in Ireland on Sunday and spent most of Monday on a plane or en route to one. At one point during the journey home, my husband looked me at and asked me what I was thinking. I told him I was thinking I needed to make a list of everything I needed to do.

And I did. I could even see it in my head. Two neat columns, bearing no resemblance to the day-by-day format I cherished on a weekly basis.

When I got home, I grabbed a steno pad and set to work. Column 1: Work. Column 2: Not Work (a.k.a. everything else).

It's now Wednesday and I've supplemented that list with a Wednesday schedule. Have I dropped the ball? Abandoned my strategies? Gone over to the organizational dark side?

Pexels via Pixabay

Nope. I've merely responded to what I need at this moment. The end of the semester is less than a month away, the number of classes that remain to be planned and taught now in the single digits. As I try to shift gears out of vacation mode and into nose-to-the-grindstone mode, I need to see the big picture, which means I need to use a list strategy that gives me plenty of room to see all the stuff. Right now, that's my two-column format.

Next week, I'll return to my usual strategy. By then, I'll have crossed nuisance items off my list and the remaining items will earn their slots on the day-to-day schedule. But for now, as I transition back to the real world, I need something a little less structured.

How do you know when it's time to change up your strategy, whether temporarily or permanently? I'll take a look at some of those ways tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

3 Keys Thursday: 3 Containers to Get Rid of Today

Dodgerton Skillhause via Morguefile

I'm taking some time off to be with family this week, so I'm re-running a favorite post from May 2017.

We've all done it. We've succumbed. Maybe it was a planner that promised to do everything but organize our time for us. Maybe it was a purse that claimed you'd never again have to dump it just to find the one thing you were looking for. Maybe it was those bins that you just knew would remove clutter from your life.

Except that they didn't.

When is an organizing tool actually an obstacle?

When it doesn't match your styles. For me, one of the best things about identifying my styles was that it helped me to stop buying every miracle organizer that came down the pike. If it doesn't match my styles, it doesn't make it into my shopping cart.

When it's too small for the task at hand. The best containers are, like Baby Bear's bed and porridge, "just right." They fit the space we've allocated and they have a little bit of room left over so that other, similar items can be added as necessary. Too-big containers are unwieldy, but too-small containers are perhaps even more frustrating. By the time we get in the habit of using them, we've outgrown them. While it's reasonable to expect to sort and review the contents of our containers from time to time, too-small organizers require this process much too often.

When it's too complicated. Let's face it. Most of us want to make it as easy to put things away as it is to drop them on the nearest counter. The more complicated the container is, the less likely it is that we'll use it on a regular basis.

Take inventory at your house. Do you have any of these containers in your possession? If so, it's time to consider a container upgrade. Ditch the miracle organizers and their empty promises for storage that actually makes your life easier.

Just One

TheDigitalArtist via Pixabay

Last week, I was feeling overwhelmed. My dining room table was covered with papers to grade and things to attend to once the papers were graded. Everywhere I looked there was something to do and every time I walked through the dining room, I wanted to just close my eyes and wish everything on the table away.

When life gets busy, it's often hard to stay on top of things. Luckily, sometimes the answer to making progress is "just one."

Just one minute. While a minute won't be enough time to clean out the garage (or get through all those piles on my table), it's long enough to put away a pile of clothes, sort mail or make a list of steps to take to complete the project when you can give it more time.

Just one pile. A pile of clean laundry is usually pretty easy to manage in just a minute (or so) because everything in the pile (most likely) has a home. Accumulated piles of papers and homeless items can be a bit challenging. If you don't have time to take care of the whole pile, set a timer, flip the pile over to start sorting from the bottom and get as far as you can in the time you have.

Just one drawer or shelf. Sure, it'd be great to clean out the whole dresser, closet or pantry, but often, that's just not possible. Tackling one finite section of the space in question can give you a feeling of satisfaction, which can motivate you to tackle the next drawer or shelf when you have time.

Just one hot spot. Every home has them -- the spots that seem to invite people to drop things and run. Creating clear space -- even if only in one small area -- provides both satisfaction and visual evidence of organizational progress. And if you can delegate the putting away of the items to the owners, that's even better.

Next time you're feeling overwhelmed, consider the concept of "just one." It may not get things completely organized, but it's a start and, sometimes, getting started is half the battle.