Organize (everything)

April 3 | 365 Days of Writing Prompts | Odd couple: Does a messy home (or office) make you anxious and cranky, or is cleaning something you just do before company comes over?

I have a bit of OCD to what concerns organizing. Although I really like a clean space, for me it is more difficult to live/work in a chaotic place. Of course, I am not considering pigsty level dirty. Otherwise, it is impossible to work or live. In other words, what I am saying is that just clean dust in a disorganized placed does not make me feel it “clean”.

“An old document cabinet with small drawers” by jesse orrico on Unsplash

If you organize your brain, i.e., declutter stuff that you don’t need, make it more efficient, easy to fetch what you need, pack up everything in a logical way, then you start to need an organized environment.

For example, if you pack up your stuff just for the sake of “cleaning”, then you are just put garbage in whatever shelves they fit, and that’s all. After a while, when you need to pick up something, you will start looking for what you need everything, removing everything from its place. Then, when you don’t need it anymore, you will not have the time to “organize,” nor the exact place where it was.

Every time I need to organize stuff — yes, even organized people need some refactoring some time — I prefer to remove everything and think logically how can I pack up everything? What makes more sense with the space I have? In this process, you need to declutter and reason about your stuff. Moreover, you need to think of the place that you are organizing as a place that is efficient for you. For example, in your workplace, you should avoid a lot of stuff on your working table or shelves to avoid distractions. A clean and straightforward work environment allows you to be more efficient and focused.

I hope you retain from this very shallow essay about organizing, that the most important is the way you think. How you organize your ideas and so on. If you do that, then it becomes easy to pack up in a way that you are comfortable with and that allows you to take out the most of it.

“A minimal workspace with a laptop, a potted plant and small sculptures” by Kari Shea on Unsplash

Recommendation: check out The Minimalists on Netflix

And their podcast: https://www.theminimalists.com/podcast/