Organizing Gifts

This newsletter isn’t about organizing presents that people give you – it’s about benefiting from naturally occurring opportunities that help us become better organized.

Situations when things can't be found or put away because the space where they go is too full, or when others pressure you to clean up or clear out often provoke frustration, irritation, resistance, and stress. However, a better way to look at these occasions is that they are GIFTS.

Organizing gifts are opportunities to gain insight into how to make your immediate situation better, learn to organize better, and perhaps make your whole life better. You may not be happy about needing to do instant organizing, but taking advantage of large and small opportunities can make life much easier, especially if you look at the larger issue of system needs. To only be upset about the extra work is missing a precious opportunity.

Seeing Organizing Gifts When They Happen
Some organizing gifts occur on a seasonal or periodic basis:

spring cleaning often inspires energetic cleaning and clearing out
winter holidays may spur cleaning and decorating
working people typically use Saturdays as their major cleaning day

Some organizing gifts result from outside pressures:

preparing for a visit from a landlord, buildings department, or other inspectors
preparing for visitors often spurs fast clean-ups
needing to find specific materials such as documents to file taxes, insurance claims, or deal with legal issues such as a custody battles or lawsuits
needing to find a bill, document you must respond to, or appointment information
coping with infestations of rodents or insects

Some organizing gifts are created by internal pressure such as a desire for:

a better self-image or self-esteem
a more comfortable life
space for special projects, such as crafts, jigsaw puzzles, sewing, or building projects
being ready for an upcoming life change, such as a move, household change, or retirement
fixing something about your home that annoys you, is hard to manage, or forces you to do extra steps

Many small gifts occur constantly:

when you go from one room or area to another
while waiting for something to happen (water to boil, food to cook)
needing to find a particular item for some necessary or desirable task

Every function that doesn’t work as well as it should or could is a gift, a powerful message about where systems can be better, a clue that will help you figure out what needs to be done. Momentary inconvenience is a small price to pay for such a gift. Solving such problems reveals the benefits of thinking backwards – doing so helps you identify the underlying difficulty that must be resolved to solve the problem (mentally re-trace the steps that lead to this snafu).

Accepting the Gift
You have several choices when an organizing gift arises:

be annoyed at the extra work and resist the work, message, and gift
accept that the task must be done, stop resisting, and work with as much cheer and energy as you can muster
go beyond the immediate task of solving the problem to resolve the larger organizing issue

Being annoyed just means that the gift will be wasted. The original problem remains, but you will not receive any additional benefits. Acceptance lets you solve the problem without wasting time or energy on complaining, getting upset or angry, or procrastinating. Going beyond immediate needs to see the larger issues and use it to prevent similar problems in the future will improve life considerably.

Using Little Gifts
Tiny organizing opportunities pop up for all of us constantly:

Whenever you have to find something in a pile, take an extra minute to sort the pile: Toss, Recycle, Give away, Donate, Put away, Goes to _____ room. Put sorted items in bags or boxes for that destination and take them there as soon as possible.

When going from one room or area to another, look for whatever needs to go in that direction. Better yet, create a designated spot in each room for things going elsewhere until you are ready to go there

When doing any task, think about HOW you are doing it. Ask yourself if there is an easier, smoother, faster way to do it. Perhaps re-arranging the items used to do it, or finding a better storage place, or different way to contain items?

Identify tiny tasks in each room that take less than 5 minutes and improve the area. Train yourself to do these tasks whenever opportunity arises. Examples of such tasks: wipe off counters, fridge, or stove, sweep, put away clean dry dishes, put away clean laundry, gather up dirty laundry, neaten a surface. Make a game of seeing how many tiny tasks you can do in a given amount of time (such as during the commercial breaks on TV, while waiting for water to boil or food to cook) and give yourself points for each ‘score’.

Use tiny gifts to improve the organization of whatever area you are in. What small task would make that area function more smoothly, easier, faster, more reliably, or look better?

Understanding the Gift
Specific messages are conveyed by not finding particular items:

Things needed for going out (keys, wallet, hat, sunglasses, umbrella, jacket) mean that you need a consistent place, perhaps near the door, where these items belong and where you always put them when you return.

Bills or similar documents mean that a system to manage them is needed. A tray or bin for financial documents that have not yet been acted upon, such as bills, receipts, and tax documents keeps them safe and available. Once you have done whatever the document requires, it should be filed, recycled, or shredded.

A specific clothing item means that closets and drawers need organizing. If they are so full that you can’t organize them, it is time to both clear out and organize. Having more clothes than fit in your drawers and closets makes organizing nearly impossible; eliminate items not used except for seasonal items that can be put in inactive storage between seasons.

A specific book means any of several possibilities
- More bookcases are needed – this is quite common; people often have more books than storage for them – or you need fewer books
- A better system for storing books is needed; alphabetical by author's last name or by title works but requires that your memory function well. Organizing books by subject taxes memory least. You might need sections for science, humor, history, fiction, books related to your work, or many other potential categories.
- You need to be more disciplined about putting books back where they go.

Using Big Gifts
Most of us have far too much stuff, even when we prune back on a regular basis. We acquire with little thought for the burden that this creates, progressively becoming more and more weighed down by our belongings. Organizing gifts encourage us to prune the over-growth, to unburden ourselves before we are lost in the tangle.

So while even small gifts provide opportunities to clear out and become free of the burden of too many possessions, large gifts, such as spring cleaning and visitors are often the most effective in this regard. They are so powerful that I recommend exploiting the heck out of them:

put Spring Cleaning on your calendar / to-do list every year. Depending on your health and energy level, you may need to plan on one day for cleaning and clearing for each room in your home (trying to get it all done in a day is for the young and strong), or for some of us, one week or even one month per room. Take every box, bin, drawer, tray, closet, or nook apart, and review its contents: what is still needed (i.e., used), what needs repair (either do it or get rid of the item), and what can go?

Use the prospect of Visitors to make your home as nice for them as you would like it to be for you (why do we treat visitors better than we treat ourselves?). Having visitors over is usually about making the surfaces in each room clear and sparkling (if you have visitors over who open drawers or medicine cabinets, you need to re-train them, stop inviting or allowing them to visit, or treat the situation as one more gift, or all of the above). Try seeing each part of each room as if you had never seen it before; this will show you what is out of place or unsightly.

Inspections are generally serious business. Some buildings, like the one I live in, have multiple inspections every year, others only when they suspect a problem. Regardless of the schedule, landlords have the right to come in and this means that your home needs to be as safe and clean as possible:

Eliminate all fire hazards
Make access to plumbing and lighting fixtures easy
Do everything you can to eliminate or prevent pests

Every misplaced or unfindable item, every visit or event that causes a belongings-related crisis is telling you a story. If you listen and follow its guidance, your life will become easier and more manageable.

The more that you take advantage of small organizing gifts, the more that you are likely to prevent major crises that require huge organizing efforts, time, and postponing all other activities. You will also likely feel more secure, comfortable, and able to handle events and better about yourself. And your organizing skills will improve the more that you use them.

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