Organization Quest

Organization Quest is now on Twitter!

 Few experiences in adult life offer the potential for the kind of mortification and angst so common in middle school, which is why social media was invented, so we could all channel our inner teenager.

A few (which is to say:  three) people have emailed me asking if I'm on Twitter, something I'd never before considered, but who am I to question such a mandate?  So I set up an account under the name Organization_Q, and installed a "follow me on Twitter" button in the column to the left, under the Quest banner and navigation bar.  I invite you to come and join the fun.  Right now it appears I'm the only one following myself, but I'm sure the other two people will catch up to us eventually. 

If you tweet, let me know in the comments section below.  It'll be fun to get to know readers and besides, I'm feeling a bit like the new kid in the cafeteria right now, with no one to follow except a celebrity organizer (Regina Leeds) and a pen store in New York that tweets once a month or so. 

This Week on the Quest: My Organization Breakthrough

 

Almost two years ago, I announced that “every room in the house was clean and clear,” which was probably true for the few weeks it took before things got junked up again.  Within two months, I had to admit that “half the house has gone to hell in a handbasket” and the disorganization basically snowballed from there.

 

What happened?!  I was doing so well!  I got the clothes closets cleared, the craft closet organized.  I’d organized the kitchen cabinets.  I’d organized my recipes, and had spent hour upon hour slogging through my Supreme Paper Mess.  And yet:  there I was, not even two full months later, putting off both entertaining at home and needed repairs because things were in such disarray. 

 

I spent a lot of time thinking about what, exactly, had gone wrong, and this summer I had the chance to make some changes. We tweaked one daily routine that has made all the difference in the world, and I also figured out a few small things I need to do a couple times a week to keep things running smoothly.  

 

The really big change, though, was in re-evaluating how we wanted to use the very limited space we have. We ended up making a huge, if perhaps unconventional shift, re-purposing the rooms to fit our needs. In the process, we ended changing not just how we used the space, but also the habits of maintenance and storage that had been imbedded in those rooms over the course of a decade.  This week on the Quest, I’ll share with you the changes we made, with an eye to strategizing what changes you can make to fashion your own Organization Breakthrough.

 

 Maintenance under control:  today it took all of an hour to tidy the living room, bedroom, and my studio, which included sweeping and vacuuming, doing some dusting, polishing mirrors, cleaning glass-topped tables, picking up, and making the bed. And I'm not a fast worker, folks.  
  

Back on Board with the New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone!

All right, so it's been, let's see . . . .let's just call it a while. The Short Version of What Happened is:  I went back to school.  Remember the Back to School series I wrote in September?  In doing so, I pulled out old textbooks, notes, projects, and binders to photograph in order to illustrate the concepts, and in the process I began, in the manner of packrats everywhere, to re-read and look through everything, which is when it struck me:  wow, I really loved studying design.  And:  I wish I was the one going back to school, which led in turn to: why, exactly, wasn't I in school?

I did recall withdrawing from one of my courses that last quarter, after the instructor told me, in front of the class, that I was "unteachable."  What I couldn't remember is why I would believe him.

Other people may have control over any number of things in our lives--from our salaries to when we are able to catch a bus on a particular corner--but they don't get to decide our character. My former instructor had indeed been unable to teach me.  But that didn't mean I couldn't learn.

What I love about January is the renewed hope and promise of a fresh start the new year brings.  No matter what your goals, the focus of new year resolutions is in the present and the in future. All transgressions are in the past--instructive, perhaps, but ultimately irrelevant. 

The New Year is carte blanche to reflect, hope, plan, and prioritize.  What do you want for yourself this year?  Dream big! Dare to defy the limitations you place on yourself and those others place on you.  It's a new year, a new decade.  Take a few minutes this weekend and ask yourself:  who do you want to be, what do you want to do, how do you want to live in the years to come? Decide on one tiny step towards that goal--whether it's replacing chips with celery for a snack, doing a load of laundry every day until you get caught up, making a point to work in a walk a few days a week, or looking into getting your GED, Associate's, Bachelors, Master's, or Ph.D.  The first step in getting what you want is realizing that you want it. 

PS I took the same class--perspective drawing--this quarter with a different professor.

I got an A.

 

The Quest Has Been Selected By BlogBurst!

After a week of serious space-reclamation projects, I came home one evening this week to an invitation to join the BlogBurst network.

BlogBurst is a news service that brings blogs onto sites like the Washington Post, USAToday.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Reuters.com.  I'm so happy and honored to be part of the BlogBurst network.  Thank you, BlogBurst!  And thank you, readers, for all the comments, emails, suggestions and support. Quest on!

The Face Behind the Quest

When I first started this blog in July, I imagined it would be important to maintain anonymity.  I'm sure I had a reason, but I just don't remember it.  Maybe I was afraid people would point to me in my favorite pizzeria and say:  "Look!  The woman with Supreme Paper Mess!" And my identity would forever be linked to my inability to file promptly.

This is before I realized the only people who read my blog were Stacy, the Designated Work Place Neatnik, her mother, my sister in-law, her sister, and my own sister.  Which is to say I've been able to eat my pineapple-and-onion extra thin crust pretty much undisturbed, even on 1/2-off pizza Wednesdays.

As I continued on my Quest and with my blog, I began, in turn, reading more blogs and I always found myself searching for the About Me page, without any thought of heckling the blogger or disrupting their dinner.  The great writer Joan Didion once wrote that people don't trust the tale until they know the teller, and I suppose that was what was behind my desire to see who was writing what blog.  It's just nice to be able to put the face with the words.  

So here's a photo Alpay took of me this summer; I'd include a more recent one but it's hard to smile when the weather's -17.  I'm pretty much the same now as I was then, only then I had Summer Hair, which is fake and lighter, and now I have Winter Hair, which is also fake but deeper.  I'm a big believer in season-appropriate fake hair color.  

I've added the picture and an "About Me" page on the navigation bar, in which I assert my qualification for writing a organization blog, even though I'm not particularly organized.  Other recent changes include a better search engine--type in any word in the bar near the top of the right-hand column, and it will find every post in which the word occurs, unlike the previous search bar.  There's also a super-cool new comment feature that allows you to post your picture or "avatar" when you post a comment; see the latest comment exchange here on the Quest for a look-see.  

When I first started this blog, I didn't publicize my email address--not so much because I was afraid people would email me and write, "I can't believe you have such a stupid system for organizing receipts" (although this did, in fact, worry me), but because  I was hoping to encourage the exchange of comments on the Quest, the better to build a sense of community.  Having emailed other bloggers privately, however, I can understand how there are times you want to keep an exchange private.  So I got busy and secured an email address everyone can remember:  organizationquest@gmail dot com.  Just exchange a period for the word "dot," get rid of any spaces and there you go.  Readers may not be lining up to email me, but automatic spammers may very well be, and so it pays to be careful.  

Basement Horror Story

Yesterday, we posted a "before" pix of Gina in her basement, so I thought today I'd come clean with my own basement pix that I promised back in July:

Mind you, this was ten years ago, when we were renting what is quite possibly the Ugliest House in the World.   And, it turned out, one of the spookiest.  I never felt good in that house;   at the time, put it down to the tiny rooms and awful green siding.  But oftentimes--in the kitchen, the living room, in the  dreaded basement-- I felt as if someone was standing directly behind me.  Of course, no one ever was, and over time I trained myself not to look.  One day I was by the window, petting our Maine Coon cat, Mau-Mau Kitty who was standing on a nearby desk,  when I felt the familiar presence behind me. I ignored the feeling and turned my attention back to the cat, whose fur was now standing on end.  His eyes had turned from half-closed slits to enormous orbs, fully dilated and worse, Mau-Mau was looking past me, over my shoulder.  And then, still looking over my shoulder,  he bared his teeth and hissed. 

Thus scared out of my wits, I suggested to Alpay that a little house hunting might be in order, nevermind the fact we'd just renewed the lease for another year.  A week or so later, we ran into our neighbor, a wary, quiet man who kept to himself.  I told him the story about the cat and he nodded.  The place had been empty for more than a year, he'd said.  "You ever go down to the basement?" he said then.

It turns out that something very bad had indeed happened in that basement.  I pretty much stopped going down there, which in turn explains why there's no "after" pictures of my basement makeover project.  The only thing close are the pictures of our storage unit, which we got in short order in preparation of moving.

When house hunting, we'd considered a stately old Georgian with two full stories, a big backyard, a garage and, yes, a basement.  I'd always thought a basement was a must-have for any home we'd consider buying:  where else would we store the roof-top car shell we'd used once and never again used?  What about odds and ends of furniture I didn't particularly like but somehow might need some day?  Or the boxes upon boxes of . . . what?  What was in those boxes?  Could I even say?

The convenient thing about a garage, a basement, an attic or a shed--or a storage unit, for that matter--is that you can store things without thinking much about them, and that is what I had wanted.  That is why a basement was on my must-have list for a house.  But standing in the Georgian's basement, I kept thinking about the basement in the ugly house.  And suddenly I wasn't so sure I wanted a basement after all.

It's been a big adjustment to live in a condo.  That's what we chose:  1200 square feet with a bird's eye view of the city.  Parking spaces but no garage, and no basement either.  It's forced us to make decisions; it forced us to be choosy.  That first winter, I estimate we gave or threw away 10 dumpsters worth of stuff.  Over the following two years, we got rid of enough stuff to get rid of the storage unit, too.  Perhaps the biggest surprise is that I don't miss any of it.  Nothing.  Not a thing.  Not the stuff.  Not the space.  I've found that  I actually like compact living:  I like having everything just steps away.  It's easier to clean.  It's easier on the knees--no trudging up and down stairs.  And I like the selectivity that a small space enforces, how I've developed the attitude to "keep the best and toss the rest".  My closets can get a little scary at times, but nothing like the basement in the ugly house.  And believe me, that's a good thing.

The Case Against Storage Units

According to the Self Storage Industry Fact Sheet, nearly 10% of US households rented a storage space in 2007.  Between 1984 and 2007 alone, "rentable self-storage square footage" increased by 740%, or 1.9 billion square feet. 

I can believe this.  Growing up,  I didn't know anyone who kept a storage unit.  People (sometimes) got storage units when they moved; that's it.  Whatever didn't fit in the basement, attic, garage, shed, cellar, or carport got thrown out or people had a garage sale. 

As I grew older, the percentage of people I knew who had storage units grew, let's see, probably by 740%. I myself jumped on the storage unit bandwagon.  The first time we kept the storage unit for a year; the second time, when we moved to our condo, we kept the unit two years.  The entire time we had it, I worried:  what if our stuff got damp? What if it got ruined?  Was it even covered by our homeowner's insurance?  And even if it was, what about all the stuff that had little or no material value, but meant something to me anyway--meant enough to pay $50 a month to store.  And what was that stuff, anyway?  Did I even know?  Or was I, in essence, paying money to store junk?

I thought it might take a year to go through the storage unit; it took two.  In a double-whammy of miscalculation, I'd over-estimated the space we had in the condo and under-estimated the sheer amount of stuff that we had.

When we finally did get rid of the storage unit, it was a huge relief. Not only did we save money--to the tune of $600 a year--but having all of our stuff in one space saved time and perhaps most importantly, peace of mind.  Unlike with the storage unit, the stuff in the condo was readily accessible, at least in theory.  And I didn't have to worry about anything being damp or otherwise getting ruined from being inadequately sheltered.

Over the next several years, as I continued to de-clutter, I just kept telling myself:  it can only get better.  No matter how tempting it might have been at various points to get a small storage unit to absorb some of the great Burden 'O Clutter, I'm glad we didn't.  I think it would have slowed us down in terms of dealing with our stuff, in essence putting off the necessary and the inevitable.  Because in one way or another, each of us has to deal with our stuff. I just wish I'd started before I spent over a thousand dollars to avoid doing so.

Wherein my Organization Quest backstory of the last 10 years is revealed

In the summer of ’99, we’d just moved from Pennsylvania to a suburb of Chicago, where we rented a house from the relative of someone we knew slightly.

I hated that house: small and ugly, with small, ugly rooms inside, but I’d just finished grad school and we weren’t in the position to be picky. I tried to fix it up as much as possible, but the bedroom was so tiny we could barely fit a queen-size bed in it. The chest of drawers went in the undersized closet. There were no other closets, no other storage except for the cupboards in the kitchen—and the basement.

And so to the basement everything would go—extra clothes and boxes of books, camping gear and holiday ornaments, furniture we couldn’t fit upstairs and all the assorted odds and ends of living. I’d been keeping things since our return to the US eight years before, after a stint of teaching English as a Second Language in Rome, followed by a six-month stay in Istanbul. Until we found our "dream home", it was hard to throw anything out, because so much depended on where we ended up. Would we choose a farm house in the country? If so, the hand-crafted pine furniture we’d collected when we lived in Iowa would come in handy. What about a Georgian in the suburbs? The knock-off Chinese rug we’d picked up a few years back would do well in such a place, until we could afford the real thing. I’d inherited some Asian accessories that would look great in the stream-lined modern ranch with Japanese gardens we saw on one of our house-hunting forays. And so it went.

This collection of stuff filled the basement of the ugly house; I have pictures from that time that I will post when I am able to locate them. Overcome with the utter chaos of the basement, I routed around the internet, trying to find some kind of useful information about organizing. I found it on the Get Organized message board, sadly now defunct, at ivillage.

The GO site was different from other organizing sites I’d found. What I cherished about that site was the wisdom, the kindness, and the intelligence of the leader, as well as the women who regularly posted on that board. While the board was always good for suggestions on how to organize Tupperware or how long you should hang onto tax returns, what I valued were the thoughts, the analysis, and yes, the backstories, the women (and occasional man) shared. So while we did keep each other apprised of our progress on various pet projects—I remember one woman referred to the mess in her own basement as the “paper dragon”; others struggled with staying organized with kids or messy partners—what really interested us was the emotional component of cleaning and organizing. The leader of the board, celebrity organizer and feng shui expert Regina Leeds, encouraged us to delve deep for the answers. Why did we get such joy from an organized sock drawer, when everything else around us was falling apart? Why did we so fear being judged for how our places looked—even when they looked perfectly fine? Or if they didn’t look fine: why was that? How could so much dread build up over a small thing like doing the wash?

I lurked on the GO site for over a year; during that time, we indeed found our "dream home"—a highrise in the middle of Chicago, with wonderful floor-to-ceiling windows and views both east and west that extended to the horizon. Out went the knockoff Chinese rug! To Goodwill went the pine furniture! The Asian accessories found homes with friends. But I still had a storage locker full of things—and boxes and boxes of stuff in the 1200 square foot condo we’d bought.

So I delurked and became a regular myself on the GO board. That experience enabled me to clear out the storage bin once and for all, as well as get rid of box after box of things I'd brought hauled to the condo. For the first time in my life, I was Almost Organized. My greatest pride was the sight of my new kitchen on Thanksgiving morning: turkey and stuffing roasting, sides made and in the fridge, everything ready with a minimum of last-minute preparation. And a sparkling clean place, company-ready.

We took a long walk on the beach that morning, my husband and I, having nothing else pressing to do. And it was then that I realized: this is what being organized is all about. It’s not about alphabetized spices—although I admit alphabetized spices are a particular weakness of mine. What being organized is really about is managing your life in such a way that you are able to get the most out of it.

During the GO years, I put up a website for my GO friends on ivillage about my organizing quest; it won an award, and for a time my site and my story were featured on the site. Real life intervened, and a challenging new job that came with a 3-hour daily commute siphoned off the time I had to keep up with the site—or with organizing, for that matter. I would check in with the GO girls time and again, but by the time I was ready to get back on board, the board had closed down and the regulars had dispersed. There is another organizing board on ivillage now, but Regina is gone as are most of the former regulars, and there are but a handful of daily posts compared to the several dozen I recall in the GO hey days. It's just not the same.

So I’m starting this blog with the hopes of recreating a bit of the ambience of the former GO board: sometimes funny, sometimes painful, but always honest and always encouraging. My story is but one; I encourage you introduce yourself and share your own story, and to actively post comments regarding your progress and the nature of your personal Organization Quest.

Backstory

Characters in novels and plays, in television programs and in movies, all have backstories, loosely defined as salient lifetime events that took place before the action starts that had a hand in shaping one’s character.

Everyone has a backstory, although in real life we don’t commonly call it that. “History” and “the past” are two aliases used instead. Backstories help explain the filter we use to interpret events; they influence decisions and play a part in any given predicament in which we find ourselves.

If you have a hard time getting or keeping organized, the reasons are in your backstory. Maybe you grew up with a Messie and you never learned to organize; maybe you grew up with a Neatnik and being messy was the one way you learned to rebel. Myriad illnesses, injuries, and conditions, including depression, fibromyalgia, and autoimmune disorders, pregnancy, diabetes, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, among others, can contribute to the problem, as can a lack of resources, whether financial or social.

In the coming weeks, I’ll share with you a bit of my backstory and how it pertains to my Organization Quest. In the meantime, I encourage you to ask yourself how your backstory fits into your own OQ and identify what can you learn from it, what bits and pieces can you use to shore yourself up, to find a little motivation, to smooth the way, and to ultimately meet your goals and move on.

What's your OQ?

What’s your Organization Quest? Are you one of those people who don’t feel organized unless their spices are in alphabetical order? Or would you just be happy to see the carpet in your bedroom, which, if memory serves, is blue?

My own Quest somewhere in-between: some collections, drawers, or spaces can be rigidly organized chronologically or by color, name, season, or category. But other things are . . . just a mess. Over the past couple of years, it seems the organized-to-mess ratio has tipped ever more steadily towards chaos. By documenting the progress from my current SOS (Sort-of-Slob) status, my goal is to keep myself accountable while, hopefully, encouraging you in your own Quest to clear the clutter and make room for the life you want to live.