Tuesday, February 05, 2013

Getting Organized (again)

I haven't made it quite back to 100 percent, but just having the mental fog lifted has been wonderful. I was able to read non-fiction books yesterday and get information out of them, which I wasn't able to do last week.

As a result, I may be ready to make yet another stab at an organization project. I had a few lightbulb moments while reading, and I think I've uncovered some of my organizational issues. One is that I'm more of a perfectionist than I realize. If I can't do something perfectly, I put off doing it at all. Another problem, which ties back to the first one, is that I don't really have a good "home" for everything -- which is because I haven't found the "perfect" system. And I can't start organizing without a system.

The book I was reading, Organizing From the Inside Out, by Julie Morgenstern, suggests figuring out your system as you organize instead of starting with a system and trying to make everything fit. Tackle one area and sort absolutely everything in it into categories. The categories you end up with will help you create a system that makes sense for putting things away -- and you put things away based on why you'd need to find it again. Her other big idea is to think about a kindergarten classroom, where things tend to be put into activity centers, with all the stuff you need for that activity in the center, and then bins, boxes and other clearly labeled storage for everything, so that it's not only easy to put everything away, it's also kind of fun. Thinking in those terms indicated that my office is set up all wrong. There are too many tasks that require getting up and going around the desk or where the storage for an item on the desk isn't in easy reach of the desk. I'll have to get out the tape measure and graph paper and see if I can come up with another set-up that makes more sense.

I should probably take some "before" pictures and chart my progress.

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