Paper Piles Got You Down? Here’s Why

If you think organizing paperwork is far more laborious than organizing objects, you’re right! Here’s why:

• If you have 5,000 sheets of paper, you can fit them all into one standard copy-paper box.
• If you have 5,000 various objects, you’re going to need at least one good-sized room to hold them.

To organize either the objects or the papers, you’ll need to make up to 5,000 decisions (fewer if you begin with some metadecisions). So the amount of work is the same, but when you’re done, you’ve either organized an entire room (whoo hoo!) . . . or one measly box of papers.

And if you have 10 boxes filled with papers, you have as many decisions ahead of you as organizing an entire house. Now there’s a daunting reality.

Use this math to reframe your expectations. When you have papers to organize:

• Plan your time accordingly. Expect one box of miscellaneous papers to take many hours, and perhaps more than one day. If there is anything painful in those papers, give yourself even more time.
• Recognize your accomplishment. Remember that getting through just one box of papers will be a success equal to organizing an entire roomful of objects. Celebrate that!

 

Key Concept: Meta-decisions

The prefix meta- means “about itself.” A meta-decision, then, is a decision about deciding. Meta-decisions make an organizing project much faster, both in the reducing phase and in the arranging phase, because they eliminate the need to decide about each item, one by one. A single meta-decision covers an entire category of future decisions.

Some examples of meta-decisions in reducing:

• We can discard any expired coupons.
• We can discard all coupons except [this favorite store].
• We can donate any clothes smaller than size [number].
• We must keep all Legos.
• We can shred any bank documents older than [year].
• I’ll donate any CDs that I also have on iTunes.
• Any broken toys can go.
• I want to save any of my kids’ artwork.
• All expired food items can go.
• [These are just examples, not directives!]

Some examples in arranging (the actual organizing):

• All towels go in this [closet, rack, cabinet].
• All spices go in this [cabinet, drawer, carousel].
• Everyone’s shoes go [on this rack, in their own closet].
• The mail goes in this [container, rack, spot on counter].
• Dirty clothes go in this/these [hamper(s), basket(s)].
• Household tools go in this [drawer, cabinet, area].

What meta-decisions can you make to speed up your organizing project and/or add efficiency to your household or your job?

 

The Meaning of Furniture

Before furniture was cheap and plentiful, it used to represent family wealth. To inherit one’s parents’ furnishings was similar, if not equivalent, to inheriting an investment portfolio. Status was maintained as each successive generation was able to preserve the family heirlooms; it was lost if those heirlooms were lost.

This is where we got our now-ill-fitting reluctance to discard furniture, even if we already have plenty, and it’s also an ingredient in the pain of having to abandon or sell items when moving to a smaller home. To leave behind the excess couches and sideboards and desks and sewing cabinets was, historically, a tragic loss of face, not a blessed freedom from encumbrance.

If you must downsize, you can treat it like your own personal Trail of Tears and mourn the impossibility of carrying your accumulated wealth on your back. Or, you can treat it like your own personal Yellow Brick Road and celebrate the ease of carrying your accumulated wealth in your head and heart.

 

Quick Thought: Having the Time

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A great truth: We make time for what we want to make time for.

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Buying Nothing Is Not Criminal

Boston Market used to have a salad that I found especially delicious. I discovered the “used to” part the last time I went there with a hankering for that salad. When I learned they had discontinued it, I stepped out of line and left without buying anything. I wasn’t mad, didn’t make a scene–I just wanted what I wanted, and I wasn’t going to settle for something else just because I was there.

The employees and the other customers all gave me the same look, one that said, “Seriously? Aren’t you hungry? Just pick something else.”

But I wanted a salad, none of the others appealed to me, and I knew that Panera has another salad that I find especially delicious, so I went and got that one.

I see too much settling-for-less among my clients. It makes me loath to do it myself. If they don’t have what you really want, sometimes you might have to settle (if you’re too hungry to wait, say), but more often you could just leave emptyhanded.

This is not something that came naturally to me. As a child, I acquired the message that people who leave a store without buying anything probably stole something. I don’t know who taught me that, but I know it’s a belief I carried well into adulthood. I felt like I was doing something wrong if I couldn’t find anything I wanted and left the store emptyhanded. I felt like I had to buy something to legitimize my presence there.

Eventually, I came to resent this and I started to leave without buying-just-to-buy, but it felt really strange. I felt like all eyes were on me–especially security. I was careful not to hurry, to keep my head up so I wouldn’t look guilty, to hold my hands away from my body … all contortions to demonstrate my innocence.

I hadn’t done anything wrong, but leaving emptyhanded felt criminal.

Maybe stores perpetuate this feeling intentionally. Have you noticed how many of them make it difficult to leave without going through the checkout lines? My favorite is to leave a warehouse club without any purchases–no receipt for the suspicious door person to mark off with a highlighter. Oh how they scrutinize me as I leave emptyhanded. The irony there, of course, is that pretty much everything they sell is in huge packages. I couldn’t fit a pallet of paper towels in my pocket or my very small purse. So they look at me like, “Nobody leaves here without buying. Where did she hide it?” At first it rattled me, but now it gives me smug satisfaction.

Try it sometime: Go to a warehouse club, look around at the things you don’t need, and leave without buying anything. Join me in the resistance.

 

Belonging(s)

Why is it that we call our stuff “belongings”?

My cellphone is a Sprint HTC. It’s a “smart phone,” I guess, but it’s not an iPhone. This belonging does not allow me to belong in the Apple community–something I am aware of, but not troubled by.

Although now that I’m amplifying the idea, I am troubled by it. I’m troubled by the notion that an object makes me mindful of a way in which I don’t belong. This item–this “belonging”–is more of a not-belonging. Why should a thing tell me something about where I fit in humanity? Recognizing that I don’t belong there doesn’t bother me, but it bothers me that it bothers many other people, including a lot of my clients.

To measure your belongingness by your possessions: What a profound burden.

Wait … possessions. We also call our stuff “possessions.” My cellphone is a possession, but in which way? Do I possess it, or does it possess me? A good question to ask myself on this very day that Sprint becomes an iPhone carrier and I could simply click, upgrade, and become an Apple person….

What is the nature of your belonging as expressed by your belongings? In which direction does the possession exist between you and them? Does the need for belonging(s) possess you?

And is all of this as you want it to be?

 

Trust the Ones You Have

How confident are you that you can find a particular item when you need it?

There’s a direct inverse correlation between this confidence and the likelihood of overacquiring. The more confident you are that you can find it, the less likely you are to buy excess. On the other hand, if you know you have it but you doubt you can find it (or if you’ve forgotten you already have one, or several), odds are you’ll buy another one. You think that from now on you’ll be better able to find it, but it never works that way, does it? Because every time you acquire a duplicate, you make your space a bit more unmanageable.

Overacquiring feeds disorganization; disorganization feeds overacquiring. Which side do you want to address first?

 

Gorgeous Disorder

Here in Day Two of the deluge of tributes to Steve Jobs, I’ve found a photo that makes my heart sing:

If you didn’t know before his death, you’ve had ample opportunity now to learn that Steve Jobs was brilliant–so much so that to call him brilliant is becoming an awkward understatement.

Now, look at his home office. Notice the rafters and the brick walls … looks like it’s in the basement. Notice the furnishings… as basic as it gets. And the books, in their gorgeous disorder. And the piles of stuff on the desk, under the desk, on the floor…. Beauty.

I’m in the business of helping people to find clarity through organization. Why does this photo please me? Because it proves that genius can thrive in an imperfect environment. Some people already have clarity without spatial organization. To tidy up would not help (at best) and might interfere (at worst). For them, it is a truly fine mess.

Thanks to photographer Diana Walker and her willing subject, this is no longer just my opinion. If you are excellent at what you do, and you do it at a messy desk in a messy office (with which you’d be perfectly content, if not for the nagging), your boss and your family don’t have to take my word for it that you’re fine as you are. They can look at this photo and recalibrate their opinions.

That’s Steve Jobs in the picture. If it were a regular Joe, or even a regular genius, many (maybe most) people would see it as just another messy-office guy struggling to keep up. Maybe they would see a self-employed contractor or architect or web designer who has to work in his unfinished basement to save money, and whose work is inferior because he’s disorganized and stressed. They probably wouldn’t imagine that the guy is a billionaire whose work changed the world and the house above his head is a mansion. But they are. Thanks, Steve Jobs, for putting a ding in this stereotype.

 

Quick Thought: Buy One Thing

You’ve heard of a wolf in sheep’s clothing–something that appears harmless but is actually dangerous. Some organizing practices can be like that: obsessions in efficiency’s clothing.

How often do you go to the store for just one thing? Never, you say? That would be inefficient, you say, and a waste of gas, so you find a few more items to make the trip worthwhile? Because that’s the organized way to shop, right? Hmm….

This is also what my shopping-addicted and hoarding clients say.

Sometimes it’s a net gain to go to the store for just one thing.

 

Content Is Not Garbage

I attended a workshop recently in which the presenter, talking about clients’ thoughts, said, “Content is garbage!” His topic was ways to help clients reduce anxiety, and he said that focusing on the content of a person’s thoughts–the story, the interpretation, the “why”–is counterproductive.

This presenter is well-known for his work with anxiety. He showed an impressive filmed demonstration in which he used his techniques to help a client recognize that her anxiety is controllable. As a counselor, I can see how his approach could be a life-changing breakthrough for some clients.

But there were two problems.

First, this presenter wasn’t speaking to a group of therapists. This was a conference for professionals, mostly organizers and coaches, who work with chronically disorganized and hoarding clients. The few therapists in the room could be expected to recognize the limitations of this approach, particularly with our client population, but those without mental health training were placed at an unfair and potentially harmful disadvantage.

The second problem: Content is not garbage to our clients. In fact, this memorable exclamation carries a heavy emotional charge of its own for our clients who struggle with their attachments to objects. At first, many in this audience thought the presenter was saying that our clients’ belongings are garbage. Once we realized that he meant the content of their thoughts, it was less offensive, but the idea still didn’t sit right with many of us.

We can’t address hoarding or even the relatively simpler problem of chronic disorganization without addressing content–both the cognitions (thoughts) and the emotions attached to the disorganized or hoarded materials. It is ineffective and often harmful to tell a client, “It doesn’t matter why you’ve kept it, you just have to get rid of it” or “It doesn’t matter why you feel anxious about change; you have to just change.” A person can’t understand her or his own mind without reconciling the “why”; to charge ahead with change that tramples that “why” is nothing more than a forced cleanout.

Content is not garbage–it’s gold. Our challenge is to help clients recognize that the value they perceive in their excess belongings does not reside in the items … it resides within themselves.