Your clean clothes are migrating from chair to bed to chair and your life is in shambles. You lose your phone, your wallet, and your jewelry. You frantically clean before every unsuccessful date. You’ve always thought of an organized room as the minimalist, sanitized, color-coordinated ones you see on Pinterest. I have bad news: you and I, along with most, are not minimalist, sanitized people. Our lives are messy, dirty, and full of junk. That won’t change, but what can change is how we interact with our things.
I invite you to look at your space as a neighborhood. There’s research that shows people won’t litter in a space that they see as clean. The point of the organizational ritual is to create a neighborhood you don’t want to litter in, and systems to make it easy to avoid doing. It’s all about minimizing the effort needed to stay organized in the future. That might sound unrealistic, but I promise this is not a Mary Kondo-change-your-life task.
Everyone can have a systematized space. From the sailor, who keeps every item locked in place on the rolling ocean, to the soldier, who needs every item they own accessible, to the artist, well — maybe not the artist. Many walks of life come to study under the holy practice of organizing.
I offer 5 commandments for your studies, in order of importance:
A home is an assigned spot an item can return to when not being used. It must be a dedicated storage location. When an item is in its home, it can stay there. It doesn’t need to be moved when the room is cleaned, a new project is started, or another item needs to be reached.
When something is missing a home, it becomes a floater in your space. It moves from bed to desk to chair to floor. It causes a chaotic spark that makes it harder for other items to find their homes and descends your space into a cacophony of lost pens and stepped on clothes.
For the transient item, like a battery or a half used notepad, a junk drawer can be a home. It allows you to keep a little pocket of disorganization without the spark of chaos. A necessary evil and a home for the perpetually troubled and troublesome trinket. Just keep it contained, and keep it small, or it will threaten to tip you backwards into the mess.
Your space can become a part of your organization system. Hang your life on your walls. Install some floating shelves (it’s not as hard as you think, even with your two left hands.) Create a space that forces you to return things to their homes lest it drive you mad from inconvenience.
In molding your space to your system, you will find your votives. The items that allow you to pray at the altar of organization. Allow push pins and binder clips to become the body and blood of your new martyr. Perform your organizational prayer with the items that suit you. Once you find these, keep them stocked, and in their own special home.
Finally, know in your heart that an organized space is not always a tidy one. Do not strive for the unrealistic standards portrayed in the media. Eventually, you will settle on your own unique system. Or maybe not. I’m not your mother.