The deadline in question was the final critique for my art class, a self-directed painting [...]]]> I haven’t been blogging much lately.  My offline life has been pretty hectic, as I mentioned in last week.  But I got through a great big deadline yesterday, so I hope to get back to blogging, organizing, and blogging about organizing.

The deadline in question was the final critique for my art class, a self-directed painting seminar in which the students basically pursue their own projects, only with the advantage of structure, feedback, and people to commiserate with.  It’s perfect for someone like me — I have an MFA, and while my draftsmanship leaves something to be desired, I don’t really need drawing and painting classes that focus on the basics.  As much as I love making art, though, I find that I don’t tend to do it unless I have some sort of structure supporting me.  I need to know that someone will be looking at what I make, that my teachers and classmates will wander over and check out where I’m taking my work.  Even if they don’t give me feedback, even if I ignore the feedback they do give me, the conversations inspire me to keep the art happening.

Which brings me to the end of class, which brings me to the state of my studio space:

The Artist's Studio, With Ladybug Cookie

I was working on three large projects at once, and ran out of room on my table, which was covered in jars of medium, pigment, collage materials, and my lap top, which I have to move whenever I work. So I grabbed an end table from the living room to work on (it cleverly nests under another end table most of the time, so I didn’t even have to clear crap off it first!). That end table wound up with jars of paint all over it (as well as my Spring Cleaning Ritual Candles and Feast, consisting of a cookie shaped like a ladybug). But since it was a small table, and the piece I was working on was large, there are also jars of paint all over the floor, and stacks of National Geographics everywhere, and other random art supplies, as well as a handful of books, and receipts, and other random things.  Seriously, you can walk in here without slipping on the slick surface of a National Geographic.

Only this isn’t the scary part.  This is the scary part:

It just keeps getting worse ...

I know … it looks much better than the first picture.  There are no bottles of paint, jars of medium, collage materials, tottering piles of National Geographics, or random bits of laundry.  But under that big brown piece of paper lurks … paperwork.

That’s right.  My studio, messy as it looks, was reorganized last Spring.  I created a system that’s basically functional.  The only thing I have to do is clear the table, clean the floor, and put things away.

But the kitchen table … that’s another story.

The kitchen table has a backstory.  You see, my partner and I are barbarians who tend to eat in front of the TV instead of at the kitchen table like civilized folk.  This is due in part to the fact that we like to watch TV.   But it’s also due to the fact that the kitchen table tends to become a workspace, whether I want it to be or not.  A few years ago I finally decided to own this; Stuart and I got a nice big coffee table for the living room, and we just eat dinner in there.

With the intent of using the kitchen table to expand my workspace, I was used it as a staging area during last year’s massive Spring Cleaning and reorganization project.  I took everything off the shelves in my art studio, spread them on the kitchen table, sorted them, and put them away.  Then I took everything off the nearby kitchen and pantry shelves, spread them on the kitchen table, sorted them, and put them away.  Then I got distracted.

The tiny pile of “homeless” items remained on my kitchen table.  Then it metastasized.  It acquired other homeless items as the months went on.  The scariest part is that it became a repository for my business receipts and paperwork … and those items are homeless because I don’t have a filing system set up yet, which means that I really need to bite the bullet and create a filing system.  This is going to be the biggest challenge of my organizing transformation.  Wish me luck.

Now that I can actually walk in my entryway, I’m ready for the third step of the process (and the first step of the SPACE process): sorting.

Sorting actually [...]]]> This is the third post in my Organizing an Entryway series. I’m breaking it down into steps that are as small as possible to prevent ADD overwhelm.

Now that I can actually walk in my entryway, I’m ready for the third step of the process (and the first step of the SPACE process): sorting.

Sorting actually contains two smaller steps: the first is to empty EVERYTHING in the space you’re working in. Empty every shelf, every closet, every coat hook (in this case I left the bookshelf alone, since I know I’m getting rid of it and everything on it). I spread some sheets on the living room floor so I’d have a nice big space to put everything I was working with:

Everything in the entryway. Well, except the litter box.

As I emptied the entryway, I did some preliminary sorting; for instance, I made separate piles for clothing, hats, and hiking equipment. Then I started sorting the clothes. I hung all the dressy clothing up out of the way, and was left with a pile of outerwear. I discovered that between me and my husband, we have four fleece vests, ten fleece jackets, and five raincoats. That isn’t counting the one he’s is wearing on his business trip.

That's a lot of jackets

As I sorted, I discovered that my husband (from here on I’ll call him M, for My husband) has two blue fleece vests, three black fleece jackets, two black windbreakers that I never see him wear, and a wind-blocking fleece jacket that he also doesn’t wear. I put all of these on an “ask M” pile. He has a down parka that he needs when he travels to colder climates, but doesn’t need much in San Francisco, so I hung it in the closet.

M's Jackets

As for my own outerwear, I had two fleece jackets, two fleece vests, both of which are a bit large on me, and two raincoats — an ultralight jacket and a heavier rain parka. I’ve recently lost weight, so most of this clothing is too big. I put the too-large fleece jacket in a give-away pile, and kept the one that fits. I’m holding on to the raincoats until I can replace them with something that fits, and one of the vests fits well enough to be useful. The other one I’m keeping as back-up gear, since it doesn’t take up that much space, and I sometimes go camping with newbies who don’t bring enough warm clothing.

A's jackets

I put the “ask M” pile on a chair, and put my own stuff away. The next major category was the dressy clothes that live in the closet:

Long, dressy clothing

The reason our dress clothes live in the entry way is that our home is a converted storefront. The bedroom is a loft, with closets along each side of the room, under the eves of the roof. This provides ample storage space, with only one drawback: the ceiling in the closets comes down much too low to store long pieces of clothing such as dresses, robes, or long coats. The only place to keep them is in the entryway closet, which is an odd place for long dresses, but such is life.

Sorting the dress clothes was a somewhat complicated task. The easy parts were my husband’s best suit and his trench coat, which I hung in the closet. The harder parts were my own clothes, because I had to try each of them on in order to decide whether they were worth keeping. As I finished trying them on, I separated them into three categories: things to keep, things to sell, and things that could be altered to fit me. Given the fiasco with the books, I’ve set a deadline for myself: anything I haven’t taken action on by November 15, I will give away.  In the mean time, I put them back in the closet.

This takes me to step 4: assessing the storage needs of my space.

The second step in my organizing process is a quick pre-sort.  This is a quick way to get rid of two categories of stuff: things that don’t belong [...]]]> This is the second post in my Organizing an Entryway series. I’m breaking it down into steps that are as small as possible to prevent ADD overwhelm.

The second step in my organizing process is a quick pre-sort.  This is a quick way to get rid of two categories of stuff: things that don’t belong in a space, and obvious DTPCA’s.  What’s a DTPCA?  With apologies to Dan Savage of Savage Love, DTPCA stands for “Ditch That Piece of Crap Already”, and it applies to any object that qualifies uncategorically as garbage.  DTPCAs include any item that is broken, that’s missing half its component parts, or things like excess shopping bags and shoeboxes.

A quick look at my entryway told me that there were several things in it that had homes elsewhere.  There were two suitcases that could be put away, and of course, the suitcases themselves contained things that one doesn’t generally store in one’s entryway. The first one had a bunch of spices in it that I’d gotten on my trip, because I wanted to avoid paying the nearly 10% sales tax at the Penzey’s in the Bay Area… after buying them in the Twin Cities, I realized that they’re food and therefore not subject to sales tax.

Suitcase full of spices, even though I don't actually cook in my entryway. Silly chaos demon!

The second suitcase had some t-shirts and socks in it that I could have been wearing this last month.

I was wondering where all my clothes went.

The first thing I did was to the clothes in the wash, and the spices in the kitchen. Then I put the luggage away. The enormous pile of bags and boxes next to the door are mostly DTPOCAs.  The bags turned out to be filled with recycling or with other plastic bags, and most of the boxes were useless.  I kept a few of them boxes to ship books.  The rest I recycled.

Ditch That Piece Of Crap Already

It can be tempting to hold onto boxes. They look so useful, don’t they? You can use them for shipping, for storage, you never know when they’ll come in handy, right?

Wrong. Cardboard boxes are terrible for storage, because you can’t see what’s inside of them. And very few boxes are actually useful for shipping. If a box originally held shoes, or a computer, or a cell phone, the size and shape are going to be too odd to be really good for shipping anything; chances are, if you keep it, you won’t use it. Remember, whether you rent or own, you’re paying for the space you use to store those boxes. Is it really worth it to occupy that space with pieces of cardboard?

Once I pre-sorted, my space looked much more manageable:

Ah, that's better!

I’ll leave you with an image of the worst DTPCA that I found in my entryway — a piece of stale, moldy flat bread, presumably from a some time over the summer.

The fact that I found it in a bag from The Container Store is a nice bit of irony.

The next step is sorting, so stay tuned!

I basically use Julie Morgenstern’s five-step SPACE system (“SPACE” stands for Sort, Purge, Assign a home, [...]]]> I stared work on my entryway today.  I’ll be posting a series of entries on how I’m going about it, step by step, so you can see how a Real Live Person with ADD starts and finishes an organizing project.

I basically use Julie Morgenstern’s five-step SPACE system (“SPACE” stands for Sort, Purge, Assign a home, Containerize, Equalize).If you’ve never organized a space before, it can be hard to know exactly where to start, so I’m spelling it everything I do to the last detail.

To begin with, here is my entryway:

My Entryway

And here it is from another angle.

Nice, isn't it?

It’s a pretty hellish mess.  There are suitcases from a trip I took in September, a grocery bag filled with gods-know-what, and stuff spilling out of the closet.

The sad thing is that I organized the entryway in May.  I found paperwork dating from 2006, but I cleaned it all out.  So why didn’t it stick?

My mistake was that I didn’t finish the job.  I neglected to sort and purge anything in the coat closet.  To make matters worse, I moved an unwanted bookcase into the entryway, and used it as a staging ground to sell some used books.  I failed to put a deadline on that task, so I never finished the job — and six months later, half the books are still in my entryway, taking up valuable real estate.  There’s also a pile of donations that I never donated, and also some just plain trash:

Hey, that's some very important cardboard!

Before I start organizing a space, I do some “pre-organizing”.  That is, I take a thorough look at the space.  I ask myself the following questions: how do I use this space?  how would I like to use this space?  what’s keeping me from using it in the way that I like?  what’s working about the space as it is?  what’s not working?

To answer my own questions, I currently use my entryway as a dumping ground.  Bags, briefcases, and backpacks tend to get dumped on the floor when my husband or I walk in the door.  Because it’s closed off from the living area, the entryway also houses the litter box; and since the mail comes through a slot in the door every day, it also has a recycling bin for junk mail.

I would like my entryway to be a place where I can store coats, hats, and shoes, and find them when I need them.  I would also like it to be more welcoming to guests.

What’s working about the space is a shoe rack where our shoes can usually be found, and a rack of coat pegs mounted to one wall.  What’s not working about the space is the bookcase, which blocks a second rack of coat pegs, significantly cutting down on storage; the closet, which is vomiting forth its contents like a hungover college freshling; the coat tree, which is also overflowing; we have no good place to store hats or cold weather accessories; and the fact that the cat box is the first thing guests see when they enter my home.

Having taken stock of my entryway, I am ready to proceed to the next step: pre-sorting, which I will cover in a new post.

Hmmm, maybe this why my friends never come over …

The charming view, upon entering my humble abode.

For example, [...]]]> Last week I wrote about making up a gmail calendar schedule, but as you’ve probably already learned, it isn’t enough to just get yourself a gmail account and open up the calendar feature.  You have to create a schedule, and then you have to notate it in a way that makes sense to you.

For example, here is my gmail calendar:

My gmail calendar

At the beginning of the summer, I realized that in spite of all the work I’d put into organizing my space, it was getting cluttered and dirty because I wasn’t maintaining it. There are some people in this world who will notice that their space is spawning giant dust bunnies, realize they need to clean, and make time to do it.

I am not one of these people.

I realized that I’d been using my gmail calendar for awhile, and I liked a lot of things about it — it gave me my schedule in nice blocks of color, and I had a number of options to set up reminders of appointments. So why not create a few blocks of time on my schedule called and errands things like that?

Here’s the google document version of the schedule:

Nice and vague.

On the first day that I got a chore reminder, I stood in the kitchen and went, “uhhhhhmmm …”. I knew I was supposed to be doing chores or errands or tasks or … something. I’d gotten a text message that said so. But what was I actually supposed to DO?

After staring at the wall for awhile, I got distracted and wandered away.

I was working with an ADD coach at the time, so at my next meeting with her we talked about my schedule. I told her that I felt overwhelmed by housework when confronted with a vague schedule segment called “chores, errands and tasks”. I knew there was stuff needing to be done, but I was damned if I knew what it was.  I honestly don’t know what people do when they clean.

My coach helped me to make a list of housework that needed to be done on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis, and a quarterly basis:

A bit more specific

We eliminated “errands” from that part of the schedule, because they varied too much to fit neatly into one hour chunks. Then I went home and decided what chores to do on what days:

Monday: vacuum kitchen area, mop food prep area, clean microwave

Tuesday: vacuum main room, clean bathroom, put away clean laundry

Friday: vacuum bedroom, wash bedsheets, put away clean laundry

My Monday chore calendar block looks like this:

Monday Blues

I get that text in my SMS reminder, my pop-up reminder, and my e-mail reminder if I chose to have one. Now, instead of getting a text that tells me to do “chores”, which sends my brain off into outer space, I get a text that tells me exactly which chores to do.