Morning, faithful readers, and Happy Wednesday! I'm part of the way through organizing my desk/office area, and I'll have a video blog for you once that gets done, but the office is the biggest mess of my apartment by a large margin, so I'm doing it in stages when I have a free evening to just sit at the desk and listen to music and sift through things. In the meantime, however, I wanted to answer a question I got from a reader: Once you've purged, what do you do with the stuff you're keeping?
My answer to that is baskets. Lots and lots of baskets. My roommate and I each have a flat plastic basket on the bathroom counter for the stuff we use all the time, and the bathroom cabinet has several metal baskets that I got from Wally World (the kind you give college students to carry their shower stuff in), and each one has a 'type' of bathroom thingy in it - skin/hair care, cold and allergy stuff, medicine and supplements. Make your own system, and toss things in the baskets. Then, when you need something, you can rummage through the basket and not knock over every bottle in the cabinet. The ones on the counter make it far easier to clean the bathroom, since moving a basket is one step, whereas moving all the bottles and tubes and toothbrushes is like twenty-seven.
I have a stack of three 'inbox' style baskets on my desk, for all the papers I never feel like filing. If they're in those inboxes, I know where they are until I get around to filing, and if I need to move them all, I just move the baskets, and there's less risk of me losing something as I shuffle them around. Oh, sure, I could be all industrious and say I'm gonna file something the minute it comes across my desk...but I know myself better than that. I hate filing. I hate paperwork. It annoys me, and I want to just burn all of it. So instead of trying to change how I feel about an entire process, I adjust my environment to fit my way of doing things. Don't try to be a different person - try to make changes to your environment so your stuff is contained in a way that makes sense to you.
In the kitchen, all the dog treats/toys/baggies are in a big bowl on the bar. All the produce that doesn't go in the fridge is in another big bowl on the counter. All the tea stuff is on a tray in the corner by the kettle. It's out, because I use all that stuff regularly, but it's in something, so that I can move one thing instead of five when I need to wipe down the counters.
Do you see the beauty of the basket system? You don't have to put things into them in a particular way, or with a particular level of neatness. Your stuff's in a basket. It's in a smaller place so you can find it more easily, and the eye sees the basket first and not the pile of stuff on the inside. Dumping out a little basket and digging through it to find your nail clippers is far easier than dumping out all the drawers in the bathroom to accomplish the same thing.
Yeah, but what goes in the drawers, then? I can hear you asking. Bigger things. The box of Q-tips. Your baggie full of hair things. Brushes and combs. For the office area, software and small electronics, like cameras and things. I got one of those compartment organizer thingies for my desk, so one of the drawers has all my paperclips and business cards and thumb drives and little fiddly things that turn into a big pile of crap or get lost so quickly if they're not kept separate.
You have stuff, and there's nothing wrong with that. Just make places for the stuff, and make those places easily accessible. I'm left-handed, so my inboxes are to the left of my monitor. It's a natural progression for me, which is why it's easy for me to keep things in the baskets. Oh sure, they spill out sometimes - I've had a huge pile o' crap on the desk for over a month now - but cleaning up that spill is easier, because the baskets are there to catch most of it. The place looks cleaner, and I feel like I can deal with One Basket far easier than I can A Desk Of Mail. It's all about tricking your brain into doing what you need it to do.
My final tip for the day is this: when you do get mail in, throw away the envelope it came in and any extra pieces of paper that you don't actually need. Same with packaging for bathroom stuff; you don't need the box the saline came in, you just need the bottle of saline. When my credit card bill comes in, I throw out the change-of-address form, the envelope the bill came in, and the envelope they provide for sending payment since I use Bill Pay through my bank. That's three pieces of paper that I don't need, and that make it far too easy for me to lose the actual bill, which is the thing I need. Throw away the extraneous paper, and just keep the parts you need for your records or to fill out and send back. It's a great way to keep the stuff you have from getting lost in the stuff you don't need.
Have a great rest of your week, everyone! I'll catch you next week, hopefully with another video blog.
Hugs,
FNCB
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