My Organization Odyssey: Part One–Goals

By Candy

Finals were rough this year. Not that they are ever especially fun, but for some reason I had an inordinately difficult time sitting down at my desk and forcing myself to write. And once I did, I would realize that I didn’t have the right book in the right place and I couldn’t find these notes or those notes and I could hardly type with the mountain of work piling up, threatening to topple over onto my keyboard at any moment.

I found myself in that predicament because I tend to get unorganized when I have a lot of stuff to do. Dangerously so. Which is bad, because I have a hard time concentrating when things need to be straightened, or cleaned, or filed away. I can’t work unless my workspace is clean and everything I need is at hand.

And so, I thought that I would take the first weeks of the summer before I start classes in July and totally reorganize and idiot-proof my office, and, as massive an undertaking as it will be, my entire home.

I tend to keep things clean, but not especially organized. I don’t have any systems for keeping things in order and whenever I really need to find something, it takes me at least half an hour. Which is sad because my house is fairly small. But between my and my boyfriend’s stuff, we hardly have an inch of free space.

Here is a tentative list of my goals for the project-

In four weeks, I want to:

–make a concerted effort not only to get everything into order, but to also get rid of/donate all the stuff that’s just lying around, taking up space. Not only will it make our small living space easier to navigate, it will hopefully make for easier cross-country moving when we leave in a year.

–make the best use of the space and materials we do have

–create a system for bill paying, homework, and filing that I can maintain

–create a better system for storage

–start a cleaning schedule that I can maintain

–declutter declutter declutter

–find a better way to display all of boyfriend’s memorabilia without overwhelming the house or creating clutter.

And all of this on a budget of no more than $100.

And so the posts to come in this series will (hopefully) include:

Part One: Goals

Part Two: Research

Part Three: Planning

Part Four: Execution

For the next post, hopefully I’ll have found some websites and books that will give me some good ideas. If you have any website or book suggestions, or have undertaken a similar project and you have some wisdom to impart, let me know! I need as much help as I can get!