Organization Quest

The Universal Trait of the Persistently Tidy

 

A while back when I wrote about the whole dishwasher dilemma, I talked to--who else?--Stacy, the Designated Neatnik where I work.  I thought I'd get points for being all concerned and worried about how to effectively convey whether the contents of the dishwasher were clean or dirty, a fantasy that faded as Stacy furrowed her brow in bewilderment.  "What's there to 'convey'?" she said, a little petulantly I thought.  "Wouldn't it just be easier to put the dishes away when they're clean?"

Obviously, she just didn't get it. 

Or could it be:  I'm the one who doesn't get it?  And I realized that I'd stumbled upon the the Universal Trait of the Persistently Tidy:

Neatniks Are Simpletons

I know:  I'm misusing the word "simpleton"here.  Oops!  But you know what I mean:  Neatniks keep it simple.  They don't make e-l-a-b-o-r-a-t-e strategies for, say, indicating whether the dishwasher is clean or dirty.  They unload the dishwasher and move on.

They have a do-it-now approach.  They don't assume they will have "more time later" to do the task at hand.  In fact, they feel the opposite:  they don't know when they'll have another chance to do the task before them, so they figure they might as well do it now.

Neatniks are results oriented, rather than process oriented. They aren't interested in comprehensive "systems" or rituals that require time and energy to maintain. They don't have to have an item on their "To-Do" list (written on special paper!  or input and categorized on their Blackberry!) to do the chore. When bills come in and they have the money, they write out a check and deduct the amount from their account, simple as that. They don't require special pens or stamps or for their desk to be perfectly tidy in order to do the job. 

They don't backtrack:  if they do something that's not on their list, they don't go back and write it down so they can cross it off. The Naturally Tidy that I know aren't interested in keeping logs and lists, schedules and who-did-what-when-and-how-much record-keeping.  Because they keep things simple, Neatiniks don't build up a huge store of dread about doing what needs to be done, which in turn makes chores easier to do.  

Contrary to popular belief, Neatniks aren't perfectionists.   They value timeliness over so-called "perfection."  If they don't have time to shop for the perfect gift, they give a gift card.  If they don't have time to pull out all the furniture when vacuuming before guests arrive, they vacuum the heavily-trafficked areas nonetheless.  Neatniks avoid an all-or-nothing approach.  They figure something is better than nothing.

The idea that being organized is actually easier than being a slob is perhaps the hardest to swallow and yet that's exactly  what professional organizers like Regina Leeds promise.  Certainly if you are not among the blessedly, naturally tidy, you have struggled enough with this issue. If you're like me, maybe the break-through you need is to think of getting organized as finally abolishing pointless routines, non-value-added rituals, and over-stringent standards.

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Photo by Alpay Ulku.

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.

Cleaning the Basement: Gina's Back and on the Quest, with a "Before" Picture!

If you've been following the Quest for a while, you may remember Gina from the series I ran in September on pack rats.  For those of you new to the Quest, Gina isn't a pack rat; it's her husband, Matt, who's got a bit of the P-R thing going on, not that I'm one to throw stones here.  Anyway. In the original post, I mentioned Matt was adorable, and this is what I mean:  he actually arranged for a professional organizer to help Gina purge-and-organize the home office!  "Matt doesn't  get the organizing thing," Gina wrote me, "but he loves me enough to let me go for it!"  

In the meantime, Gina sent me this "before" picture of her basement.  Maybe the mask threw me off, but at first I thought she was wearing a hazardous-waste jacket.  I've since realized the bright stripes are from the camera flash. As for the mask, I'm not sure if it was needed for health reasons or if its purpose was to protect the innocent. In any case, I can't wait for the "after" photos, as well as the before-and-after pix of the home office makeover.  Rock on, Gina! 

This Is What The Quest Is About

In the last year, I've had exactly five guests:  my father, my brother, my best friend from grad school, my best friend at design school, and Melissa, the Crazy Cat Sitter, so (affectionately) named because of her ability to analyze, in enormously gratifying detail, exactly why our cats are so adorable. 

No matter how bad my house may have been in the past year, my dad, brother, and grad school friend, have seen it much, much worse.  My design school friend is one of those blissfully serene and equally generous types for whom unkind thoughts don't come easily.  And then there is Melissa, who saw us through the worst of the worst this past year in more ways than one; she was unfailingly there for us and for our beloved Mau-Mau, who passed this June. No matter how bad, disorganized, messy, disgusting, or just plain gross the place got, Melissa not only pretended not to notice, she did so convincingly, thus earning a permanent place on my gratitude list.  This is a woman I trusted with my pre-Quest refrigerator.  If that doesn't speak volumes, I don't know what does. 

So when I finally did clean the refrigerator, I thought of Melissa.  I wanted to call her up and tell her:  you have to come over!  You won't recognize the fridge without all the weird, multi-colored growths! Of course I was over-confident, figuring it would take a couple weeks to get the place in good enough shape to invite Melissa over for a social visit.  A couple months was more like it,  but what does it matter now?  I was finally able to extend an invitation this week. 

Next week we're looking forward to having our favorite "couple friends" over for brunch, then the weekend after that I have a talkfest scheduled chez moi with a friend I haven't seen in an age.  It's great to feel comfortable having people over again; I'm excited about re-connecting in a way I haven't for a long, long time, and am looking forward to the good times ahead.

Happy weekend, everyone! 

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.

Tips On How To Deal With The Pack Rat In Your Life

Yesterday we looked at how anxiety and difficulty making decisions are what's often behind a pack rat's hold on his or her hoard.  Today we'll review some techniques that may be helpful in dealing with the pack rat in your life.

Remember:  Attitude is everything

Compassion is key.  The biggest factor that will affect your ability to positively influence a person who has a hard time throwing things away is whether that person feels you genuinely have his or her interests at heart or if you're merely intent on ridding them of their things.  Calling these things "junk," "trash," or worse will only kick in the desire to "protect" the hoard.

Have an open discussion about the hoard

If living spaces can not be used in the way they are intended--if chairs or couches are piled so high you can't sit down, or if desks, tables, or counters are covered with so much stuff you can't use them--or if you regularly have to twist and turn to get around things in your path, or if there are only narrow pathways in any give room, most likely the pack rat in your life would qualify as a hoarder.  It might be useful to have on hand the references mentioned in yesterday's post and start by talking about how your loved one feels about the hoard.  You might be pleasantly surprised by his or her desire to reduce the hoard and become more organized.

Ask how you can help

Hoarders tend to have a certain constellation of personality traits that feed into hoarding; among them is something called "over scrupulousness," which often presents as an exaggerated sense of responsibility for one's things: anything that passes into one's hands, no matter how arbitrarily, is one's responsibility.  It's helpful is to talk about this. If your loved one is like most hoarders, they probably actually resent this "responsibility". A helpful attitude a non-hoarder can take is: "it's not fair to you that you have the responsibility for all this stuff.  Why don't I take responsibility for X?"  In my case, this is what Alpay did with the junk mail.  Because I tend to feel (rather ridiculously) that I actually need to open and read every piece of mail that happens our way, it tends to pile up when I'm the one who's responsible for dealing with it.  Our agreement is that when I am able to deal with the mail on a daily basis, I can do so, but once it piles up, Alpay takes over, even if it means I don't get to open up and make fun of all the solicitations we get.

Set reasonable boundaries

The mail agreement above is one example of setting reasonable boundaries, in which I agreed to a certain standard and to the consequences of not keeping to that standard.  I've also agreed to read newspapers on line and to not to have any magazine subscriptions.  I still buy and enjoy the occasional magazine from time to time, but since they just tend to pile up when they arrive week in and week out, having subscriptions is counter-productive to my Organization Quest.

The boundaries could be by type, i.e. certain types of junk mail (card offers; the stuff that comes with bills), or availability (if something is available on the Internet, it's okay to throw out).  If you don't have your own business, then you probably don't need things like old water, sewer, cable, electricity, gas, and phone bills.  Even if you do have your own business, you can throw that stuff away after 7 years.  So maybe another boundary is that anything older than 7 years gets to be thrown away.

Pack rats typically hoard things that are broken and in need of repair with the idea that they will "fix" it one day. If this is your pack rat's problem, maybe they would agree to a time limit on fixing items; once the time limit is reached, the item can be thrown away.

Establish what's okay to throw away

You can  develop the no-brainer toss technique for things like clothes, i.e. to toss those that can't repaired.

If possible, isolate the hoard

One of the reasons we decided we needed three bedrooms is so we each could have our own space in addition to the bedroom we share.  This means that Alpay's study is explicitly off-limits in terms of my stuff; it also means I'm free to do with my own study as I wish.

In Gina and Matt's case, Matt has an office just off the kitchen. An ideal option would be if this office could be relocated to an out-of-the-way bedroom with a door Gina could close. Remember that pack rats tend to fill the space they have, something to consider before the entire basement is consigned to them.

Offer to help organize what they do save

Pack rats like their things; helping them organize what they do keep can be a huge motivating factor for some.  The motto I've found helpful is "choose the best and get rid of the rest."  This ensures that I have access to the things I most value because they are no longer hidden or obscured by masses of other things I've kept over the years out of guilt or with the idea I "might need it someday."

Pack Rats: 101

Yesterday we met Gina, who has it all:  great kids, great house, great job, and great husband, who would be even greater if he wasn't such a pack rat.

What's a Quester to do?  How can you make progress on your Organization Quest when a member of the household can't let go of clothes they never wear, products they never use, or paperwork that serves no current purpose?  And why, oh why would anyone not only keep this stuff, but actually defend it with the fierceness of a mother bear protecting newborn cubs?

Yes, we will get into specific tips.  Tomorrow.  But first I think it's useful to try to understand the pack rat's world, and his or her relationship to things other people very well might consider junk or trash.

What I've learned is that hoarding is often associated with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which itself is subclassified under Anxiety disorders.  With recent developments in MRI imaging, they have actually documented "a unique pattern of brain activity that was distinct from that seen in either non-hoarding OCD patients or controls," according to Sanjaya Saxena, M.D., Director of the UCLA OCD Research Program at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. You can see the complete article, "The Neurobiology and Medication Treatment of Compulsive Hoarding" on the OC Foundation website, which has a great section hoarding and the effects hoarding has for both the hoarder and his or her family. 

Basically, the upshot is that it has been documented that horders have severe differences in brain function in terms of decision making.  The article also mentions that "compulsive hoarders had significantly higher anxiety . . . than non-hoarders." Which is to say that Gina's husband is not hanging onto the two-year old agenda from the fire fighters union meeting, not to mention boxes of other, equally absorbing (to him), equally useless (according to her) paper stuff, just to be difficult.  What it means is that he's scared: because what if he ends up needing it someday, only to realize he's thrown it out?

According to Randy Frost, Ph.D and co-author of the book, Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding , hoarders share the following traits:

• Problems with information processing (e.g., problems categorizing or making decisions)
• Beliefs about possessions (e.g., a sense of attachment to possessions, or fears of forgetting things)
• Emotional distress about discarding, which leads to avoidance of discarding

Tomorrow we'll get into specific techniques that may help Gina help Matt loosen his hold on his hoard. 

Hope For Pack Rats

Last week, we met fellow Organization Quester Marie, whose main struggle is how to find the time to organize between working two jobs and raising kids. 

This week, I'd like to introduce another Quester:  Gina.  Gina has a life a lot of people would like:  she has three cute-as-can-be kids, a highly-skilled job where she is well-liked and respected, a house in the country, and an adorable, fire-fighter husband. At times when Gina throws herself in creating the order she longs for, however, it does rather seem that Matt's adorable quotient is in adverse proportion to the sheer quantity of his stuff.  Matt, you see, is a pack rat.

The whole issue of hoarding is one I have neatly side-stepped since starting this blog.  I have, however, had perhaps a dozen conversations which all start when an acquaintance seeks me out and says: "My husband/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/son/daughter/roommate is such PACK RAT!  You have NO IDEA what it's like trying to organize with a PACK RAT in the house!"  At which point I usually manage to stutter:  "Wow, yes,  oh boy, sounds terrible!" And before they can ask how an organized person like me would deal with a pack rat, I turn tail and get the hell out of there. 

Because you see fellow Questers, I am a pack rat; I guarantee that anyone who has ever lived with me has suffered.  I have no doubt that a dozen or so family members, former roommates, and ex-boyfriends would eagerly explain just how terrible it was to live with my newspapers, magazines, catalogs, clothes, shoes, belts, scarves, books, files, make-up, albums, CDs, tapes both audio and video, containers, cooking gear, linens, and knick-knacks, to say nothing of the boxes upon boxes of old bills and receipts, pamphlets, user manuals, junk mail, school assignments, advertisements, flyers, recipes, to-do lists, and journal entries.  In spite of this, for years I had a hard time actually admitting I was a pack rat; it seemed so . . . . unseamly.  When forced into into a (cluttered) corner, I might concede I had a problem, but I'd also point out that it wasn't as if I was a child-beating, crack-dealing, knife-wielding cannibal specializing in the organs of toddlers.  So I'm a bit of a receipt-keeper, I'd say. So what?

That the sheer volume of my stuff adversely affected not just me and my life but those of everyone with whom I have ever lived, I just couldn't face.  But around 18 years ago or so, I did begin to loosen the reins on the horde, starting with a garage sale before taking off to live in europe for a year.  When I returned, I found I wasn't really interested in the furniture I had stored at various relatives' homes, and gave much of it away. 

It's been like that, on and off, on and off; some periods I make astonishing progress; at other times, I backslide. I've made more progress since starting this blog than I have in the past four years combined, and within a week or so I expect to be at a point in which I'll be able to say that the living area in every room has pretty been much cleared.  That's not to say that my closets aren't full-to-bursting and there aren't plenty of boxes I still need to go through, or that my Quest will be, in effect, over; rather, I'm looking forward to a new phase of the Quest in which I'll finally be able to concentrate on improving my stroke now that I'll no longer be drowning. 

Tomorrow I hope to offer some insight into the pack rat phenomenon, and perhaps offers some suggestions on how Gina might help Matt change the relationship he has with stuff that really doesn't serve him, but gets in the way of so many things, not the least of which is a high score on the adorable husband scale.