Adventurous Organizing
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The
Adventure of Getting Organized (Seriously!)
by
Judy Wolf
If you’re like me, you’ve got piles of somewhat-related items scattered all over your living and work space -- and like it that way. (Hey, if I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist -- and that's no good if I'm supposed to remember to do something with it!) We’ve had our bouts -- whether through some workplace time management scheme or our own spring fever -- with organizational systems that tried to bring us in line with someone else’s notion of what “organized” looks like. And it’s never worked for long.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the average executive loses six weeks per year searching for misplaced information from messy desks and files. According to Organizing Resources, professional organizing is one of the fastest growing industries for servicing residential customers, corporations, and home-based businesses.
This phenomenon made me wonder what people whose work involves helping people “get organized” have to say about it. Is it possible to view “getting organized” as anything other than a sporadic and self-abnegating part of life? Is it possible to view it as an adventure, perhaps?
Most definitely, say the experts I consulted. The trick is in fitting the system you create to your personal style, not cramming yourself into an ill-fitting scheme someone else came up with. Which first means recognizing that you do, in fact, have a personal style.
“There are filers and there are pilers,” says Blair Hornbuckle, a life coach whose Pile Cabinet system was designed specifically to help non-filers find order in their piling systems. “I’ve always had this impression of myself as not being organized. I would buy an item to ‘get more organized,’ and find myself in an uphill battle to make it work.” It wasn’t until Blair realized that he’d been lumping ‘being organized’ into “one big mass -- either you’re organized or you’re not,” that he began to experience success.
“I did a workshop with Steve Veltkamp called ‘Creative Organization for the Hopelessly Disorganized’ in which he talks about how creative people organize themselves,” says Blair. “He introduced an idea I seized on as the most brilliant thing -- it crystallized for me what my organizational problem was.”
Turns out that visual/spatial thinkers are wired differently than a natural ‘filer.’ They think differently, they handle paper differently. “Steve’s workshop created a storm of thinking on my part,” says Blair. “I spent the next several days foaming and frothing and developed a product from Steve’s core idea: How do pilers handle their papers? People who naturally file can use the systems featured in organizing books. Creative types buy books from filers and wonder why it doesn’t work.”
So Blair developed the PileCabinet, a system that helps creative types apply order to their piles (so it’s easy to find things later) without changing their underlying pile style. The first step, says Blair is to accept that this is who we are and how we do things, and then to find a system that fits us -- rather than the other way around. “Not feeling okay about how we do stuff is a tremendous black hole for people. The only ‘problem’ with many of my coaching clients, for example, is that they’re so creative, they’re dealing with too many great ideas and want support moving from idea stage to action stage.”
In order to further explore this idea of organization not as a gimmick to make people feel inherently bad about themselves -- or as a system to sell to large corporations to then impose on their employees -- but rather as an organic part of life, I spoke with Eleanor Traubman, founder of Clean Slate Organizing. Her path toward becoming a professional organizer who is fascinated by different styles of organizing also began with the realization that such a thing existed.
“The first thing that tipped me off to the fact that there were different styles was Dorothy Lemkuhl’s Organizing for the Creative Person,” says Eleanor, who had been organizing anything she could get her hands on since she was seven. She then took a mini-seminar at the New York Open Center, a place for holistic adult learning, with Michelle Passof, who has since written Lighten Up, Free Yourself from Clutter. “Michelle gave a talk about clutter -- defining what it is, how it gets in our way, how to clear a path so we can invite new people and experiences into our lives. I liked all those ideas. I followed up with her and found out there was a National Association of Professional Organizers.”
From there, Eleanor started her own business. She hung fliers throughout her neighborhood, and soon she was experiencing different organizing styles firsthand. “Some people need things subcategorized in more of a fine-combed way and have them separated or labeled as such. Some people like to lump a whole bunch of somewhat similar things together in a drawer or a file folder,” she says.
The challenge for most people, she finds, is often in the process of creating a system that works for them. While she stresses similar concepts in each organizing session, such as “Only keeping things that are relevant to their lives now, that honor the most important aspects of their history, that support where they want to be going, and to let go of being a personal warehouse of information or stuff that they ‘might’ need someday,” she also finds that the journey toward these general goals is an individual experience.
“Every object, be it a sweater or paper, represents some idea you have -- or had -- about life or some action that you need to take,” explains Eleanor. “So going through stuff uncovers what you want or need to do in relationship to a task or in relationship to the object it represents. Like if you have lost or gained a lot of weight, you need to accept how you are now and let go of the clothes that don’t fit you, trusting that the universe will support your need for new clothes if your body should ever change shape again.”
According to Eleanor, the people who tend to find working with a professional organizer most useful are “people who are ready to make a change, who are ready to create more simplicity and efficiency, who want systems that help them feel and be more efficient and productive and experience greater peace of mind.”
Along with this readiness to explore a shift in processing incoming information, tasks, paperwork, and demands on one’s time, it’s good to have perspective on what the process requires. “Because there is stuck energy in undealt-with stuff, especially old belongings, unpleasant feelings can come up when you organize -- like guilt that you never took care of something,” says Eleanor.
So in the end, as long as people are willing to experience these feelings -- and accept themselves as flawed human beings (just like everyone else) -- the process of exploring and developing a system that truly fits their lifestyle, rather than imposing a system championed by “experts,” can be a powerful and rewarding experience. According to Eleanor, organizing is a learned skill. “It’s a muscle that, if you exercise it, gets stronger with time. It’s a good feeling to flex that muscle.”
Eleanor’s Organizing Tips:
Eleanor Traubman of Clean Slate Organizing shares the following advice on keeping ahead of clutter:
- Go through mail daily -- refer, act, file, toss
- Have a basket for papers -- keep everything in one place until you are ready to go through them
- When sorting, keep only things that are (1) relevant to your life now, (2) honor the past, or (3) support your goals
- Keep the things you use most often closest to you, within easy reach
- Keep things used less often higher up, farther away
- Have a big garbage can! -- if you have to empty it every five minutes because it’s tiny, you’re going to think twice about throwing stuff out
- Have a designated places in the home for give-aways so everyone can participate in moving things along
- Wait until you’ve gone through your belongings to buy containers for your stuff -- otherwise, you are simply adding to and reinforcing your clutter
- Set goals
for the year, month, week, day as guideposts (not mandates!)
Copyright (c) 2005 Judy Wolf
About
the Author:
Judy Wolf (www.judywolf.com)
is a world traveler, freelance writer, speaker, and whitewater kayak instructor.
She's taken many extended solo journeys around the world, traveling by
foot, bus, jeep, camel, truck, boat, train, plane, elephant, and bicycle
to over 30 countries on five continents. She currently lives in upstate
New York with her husband and border collie, where she's working on a
book-length travel narrative about her most recent adventures…that is,
when she's not plunging off waterfalls or entertaining the dog.
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