However, heading outside can be also [...]]]> A lot of people with ADHD find that they love being outside.  Personally, I feel like my ADD vanishes the minute I leave civilization.  I’m usually the first one to spot wildlife, catch birdsong, or to notice a change in the weather.  Maybe there’s something to that whole Hunter/Farmer thing.

However, heading outside can be also be intimidating if you have ADD.  We forget things a lot, and when we’re packing to go out into the wilderness, that can be a scary prospect.  If you’re traveling to Paris and you forget your water bottle, you can buy another one.  If you’re traveling the John Muir Trail and you forget your water bottle, you might be toast.

Well, my buddy Deb Lauman, aka Ramkitten, has just the thing for you.

Ramkitten befriended me when I was brand-new to the communities over at Squidoo.com and Tagfoot.com.  It turned out she’s an avid hiker (as serious as I would like to be, but am not) and had recently visited my favorite place on earth, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.  She’s also a Search And Rescue volunteer.

Her SAR work made her realize how many rescue situations could be prevented if people set out with the proper equipment.  This led her to invent the 24-Hour Pack.  It’s a day pack that comes pre-packed with all the supplies to get you through a night in the wilderness if you find yourself unexpectedly stranded.

The keyword there is “unexpected”.  Nobody Ramkitten has ever rescued expected to be lost, hypothermic, dehydrated — or, in the most tragic cases, dead.   Fortunately, many of her missions end happily.  Deb blogs here about why she never feels silly carrying her 24-Hour Pack, even when she’s only expecting to be gone for a 20 minute walk.

I’ve got to admit, I’m not always as cautious as I should be, and I know better.   I’m an experienced backwoods canoe camper.  I’ve been a wilderness guide and a Girl Scout leader.  But I still take chances I shouldn’t.  Let’s be real; I have ADD.  I’m impulsive.  When I’m outside, I hate to sit still … which means I’m constantly fighting the inclination to head out farther and in worse weather than I really should.

Ramkitten’s writing has gotten me thinking deeply about the precautions I need to take next time I head out on a hike, even if it’s just up crowded Mt. Tam.  If you’re an ADHD hiker you should check out the following:

Hikers: Common Mistakes to Avoid If you think you know everything about hiking, you don’t.

The 24 Hour Pack: Hike Smart, Be Prepared, Be Safe If you’ve already got a day pack or three, read this article about what to put in it to make your own 24 Hour Pack.

The PRE-Pack: A Pre-Equipped Day Pack for Hikers New to hiking?  Lost your gear in a flash flood?  Let Deb do the work for you.  And remember to read Common Mistakes To Avoid before you head out!

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.