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 I’m an artist in my offline life, so I have a ton of graphics files on my computer. Every time I touch it I receive ominous warnings about how my start-up disk is is almost full, and I need to delete some files Right Now or everything will go boom.
Fortunately, I recently inherited a new computer. My cunning plan is to use one computer for my online life — blogging, etc — and the other for my offline, artsy, graphic-intensive life. That means transferring files and programs from one computer to another.
It’s times like this that I’m glad I have a Mac. For most of my life, I was stuck using obsolete hand-me-down PCs. They were slow, difficult to use, and I had to keep track of what I named, and where I stored, each and every file — this was hardly an ADD-friendly system. I couldn’t even use YouTube on my last computer without crashing it.
In my experience, Macs are more searchable than PCs. I don’t have to worry about exactly what my file name is, or where I put it, as long as I get one of the words right. It’s also much easier to transfer files from various locations, because you can just click and drag. It’s all visual, right there in front of you.
The downside, of course, is that Macs are expensive. A new MacBook is $900 if you’re lucky. A new PC laptop can be had for as low as $148. Continue reading ADD-Friendly Computing: Macintosh or Hackintosh
 Managing a to-do list is a complex task. In order to make the list, you need to remember or notice what needs to be done. Then you need to remember to do it. Ideally, you also prioritize your tasks — you figure out whether one task needs to precede another, like grocery shopping before cooking, or whether one task is more important than another. These are things that non-ADD people take for granted. People with ADD consider themselves lucky if they remember half of what they need to do, and if it only takes them twice as long as the time they have to do it.
But tonight was one of my success stories. I did the grocery shopping at the usual time, after my art lesson. I got home at ten to 7, and received a message from my husband that he would be arriving at the train station at 7:23. I successfully remembered that the groceries needed to be put away before I left the house — especially the refrigerated and frozen stuff. I also remembered that tonight is garbage night, and that it’s much more pleasant to take the garbage out while it’s light out, instead of dark, cold, and foggy.
But then!
Then, I noticed that we had no clean dishes. With no clean dishes, we couldn’t eat dinner. Furthermore, I actually figured out that I should start the dishwasher before I left to pick up my husband so we could eat in a timely fashion! Yay me!
With all of this in mind, I put away groceries so they wouldn’t thaw.
Then, I loaded the dishwasher and started it.
Then, I started on the garbage, because I figured out that I could finish it after I got home.
Then, I got the the train station on time to meet my husband’s train.
And then, we got home as the dishwasher was halfway through its cycle, so the dishes would be ready when dinner is.
Now, all that remains is cleaning out the cat box, washing up thoroughly, and putting the leftovers in the microwave.
I’m kind of feeling like a badass right about now 
 I’ve often complained about how boring my car is.
Like many people with ADD, I’m prone to speeding. When I’m driving fast, I feel more engaged with driving, as if the high speed forces me to pay attention. My car, which is an under-powered late-nineties Toyota sedan, has often been a source of frustration for me. It accelerates slowly, which means that I can’t get around slow people who have the temerity to be in front of me on the freeway. And that drives me nuts.
But at its 100,000 mile service last week, my incredibly boring car vindicated itself. Continue reading ADD Hack: Buy a low-maintenance car
A few weeks ago I was invited to do a guest post by Eva Wallace over at Clutter Control Freak, the organizing blog associated with Stacks and Stacks. Stacks and Stacks is an online catalogue of organizing solutions, and I’ve often found that they have obscure products I just can’t find anywhere else. I was gratified to attract the notice of a blog that has had guest posters of the reknown of ADD coach Jen Koretsky. Yay me!
I wrote a piece about using humor to overcome Fear of Filing. It’s sort of a capstone to my three-part post on creating my filing system. Please head over and check it out. While you’re there, check out the other guest bloggers for more tips and strategies.
Just to bring you up to speed on my filing adventure, I have cleaned the Agean Stables sorted through two years worth of papers, and I have determined that I have some categories that are huge precarious stacks of paper, and others that are a single sheet. I’ve dealt with my biggest category already — recycling.
 This was the easy part.
This is when I consult my two books, Organizing From the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern and ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life by Judith Kohlberg and Kathleen Nadeau.
As I wrote in Part I, these books offer organizing support in very different ways. Julie Morgenstern offers sound advice on the basics. Reading her chapter on filing systems, I realized that I have too many categories, and some of them are way to narrow — like the category that simply contains my bank card PIN number. Others, like my pile of paper with three years worth of business receipts, are too broad for me to find anything.
This is the part where I begin to panic again. I was doing OK when I was sorting mindlessly, tossing every other paper into the bag of recycling, and putting the rest into off-the-cuff categories. Now that I need to invent categories I can stick to, I can barely make myself touch those papers. It’s just so overwhelming.
After staring blankly at my paper for half an hour, I decide that a good place to start would be with my receipts. It’s the biggest pile, and I know that in order to file them usefully, I’ll need to file them by year. It’s tedious, but straightforward.
And you know what? Once I start, it’s not that bad. In fact, it gets easier with each receipt I touch. Unfortunately, many of them are wadded up from being stuffed into the pockets of my jeans, and many more of them have been left in the sun to fade to the point where I can’t read them anymore. I put these in the recycling bag and hope I never get audited.
Then I look at my other piles. I consider my box of file folders. It’s a system of ten clear plastic color-coded hanging files and twelve folders. There are five colors, so I start working on some broad categories for the hanging files, and smaller sub-categories for the folders to put in the files. And I try to make it fun, because if I don’t, I know I won’t use it.
So instead of categories like “Art Show Documentation” or “Receipts 2009″, I came up with the following:
- Red is for the category “Creative Juice“, relating to art shows and other opportunities. This category includes
- Fabulousness: contracts and programs for past shows and performances, so I can document that I am pursuing art as a profession instead of a hobby
- Becoming Fabulous: instructional materials on how to apply for grants and residencies
- Look At Me!: Slides of my work to be submitted to galleries
- Orange is for a category I named “Authoritah!“, a reference to Eric Cartmann on South Park. I chose Orange because it’s a bright, alarming color. This category includes
- The Man: Paperwork relating to a traffic ticket I received, appealed, and actually won — but I had to pay the fine along with the appeal, so need to follow up with the city to make sure I get my money back
- Dangerous Knowledge: IRS info and my bank card PIN. I chose the name because “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”, and this is sensitive personal information.
- Yellow is for money earned, since it makes me think of gold. Since I’m an emerging artist and I don’t earn much making art, I called this category “Pennies” — as in “pennies from heaven”. This category includes
- Earned: Invoices for work sold or teaching
- Granted: This isn’t a category yet, but if I ever apply for (and get) a grant, it will be
- Green is for expenses. Since my “incoming” money is called “Pennies”, I decided to call this one “Penury”, since art supplies are so danged expensive. This category includes
- $pent: Receipts for things I’ve bought, like paint and studio lighting
- Given: Receipts for charitable donations to all the non-profits my friends work for
- Blue is the color I had left over for my “Day Job” category. This includes the folders
- Dronage: Documentation relating to my work as a retail drone
- BRAAAAAAAAAINS!: Documentation of my ADD and learning disabilities, in case I need it to get workplace accommodations
This left me with a few extra categories, as well as a few extra hanging files. I decided to use a red file to store some workouts that had been written down for me, and called this category Butchness. I decided to use a blue hanging folder for my collage images, which are yet to be sorted into smaller categories, but which I’ve decided to call Pretty Pictures. I separated these files from the others of the same color so I wouldn’t get confused.
 Meet the files: Creative Juice, Authoritah!, Pennies, Penury, Day Job, Butchness, and Pretty Picures And now I’m done. I can scarcely believe it. I bought that filing cart in the Fall of 2008, and I’ve been putting off this project ever since.
I’m going to take some time to stare at my files and just say “wow”.
Greetings, Chaos Demons, and welcome to the second installment of my series on Taming the Paper Tiger — how to create a filing system that works with your ADHD.
I’ve never had a functioning filing system before, and setting it up is proving to be more emotionally challenging than I thought. As I mentioned yesterday, I have some pretty traumatic memories associated with papers, and I suspect I’m not the only adult with ADD in this situation. So far, there have been several times when I’ve forgotten what I was doing and almost wandered off, and one time when I actually have — I found myself at the front door, going through the mail. I never go through the mail. When I came back into my studio area, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked like someone who is expecting tragic news.
Anyway, I have finally gotten to the point where I have touched every single piece of paper I own, and sorted them into piles:
 Paper would be less boring if it didn't tend to be white, and mostly the same size. Continue reading ADD and Filing: Taming the Paper Tiger; Part II — The Sort
OK, Chaos Demons, this is the moment of truth. I am going to test my organizational skills with the ultimate challenge. I’m about to attack my filing cabinet.
 Here's where I dumped all the papers from my old file cabinet -- the pile on my kitchen table. So far, here are the steps I have taken in preparation for this undertaking:
1. I acknowledge the traumatic memory of my fourth grade teacher standing over my desk, which is too full of papers to close properly, as she sarcastically catalogues every extraneous paper inside, piece by piece, for the benefit of the my mocking classmates.
2. I acknowledge the pain and shame of that memory, and I set that memory aside.
3. I gently remind myself that a cheap bottle of Trader Joe’s vodka is not a clutter buddy, and I set it aside.
4. I grab a handful of almonds and munch thoughtfully on them.
5. I notice that the dishwasher needs to be loaded and run, but I recognize this as a procrastination attempt, and I set it aside.
6. I make myself a cup of “Easy Now” tea to try and relax.
7. I get a brown paper bag to put recycling in.
8. I turn on some energizing music.
9. I realize that making this list is an attempt at procrastinating, and I set it aside.
I’ve gotta say, this is much harder than I thought it would be. I’m on my own this time, with nobody here to teach me skills or make suggestions (and no fourth grade teacher to humiliate me either). It’s just me, my piles of paper, and two books: ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life and Organizing From The Inside Out.
ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life, by Judith Kolberg and Kathleen Nadeau, has a lot of fun little organizing tricks in it. My copy of this book is pretty dog-eared, and one of the dog-ears is in their chapter called “Fear of Filing”. There are two pieces of advice in this chapter that are striking to me. One is to “verb” your files — to use words action words like “call”, “mail”, or “buy”, in order to jar your brain into taking action.
The second trick is the reason I have the courage to try tackling my files in the first place — Kohlberg and Nadeau call it the the “muttering” system of filing. Instead of using a logical, rational, boring name for your file, choose a name based on your emotional response to the piece of paper — such as “this will come back to haunt me” or “this proves my point”. When I read this I realized that I could inject some humor into my filing project, and make it a lot less scary in the process.
Julie Morgenstern’s Organizing From The Inside Out, is an old favorite that I refer to again and again. I’ll need her advice for which papers I can just get rid of, and which categories of files might be apply to my individual situation. A writer, for example, might have broad categories like “Stories”, “Reference Materials”, and “Finance”. These categories might be broken down further; i.e., “Stories” could include “Current”, “Past”, and “Story Ideas”.
I’m an artist, and my paper consists solely of items that pertain to my art business. Things like the household credit card statements, insurance paperwork, and vital documents are in the household files. My own papers include receipts for art supplies, information about grant opportunities, things pertaining to my various day jobs, and collage images that I want to have on hand.
Since I haven’t started my filing project yet, I have no idea which system, or which combination of systems, I’ll wind up using. I just know that in the past, I’ve tended to get overly specific with my categories, or else see so many potential classifications that I go crazy and throw all my papers back in the box. In order to get through The Sort, I’ll need to keep that from happening. Tune in tomorrow, Chaos Demons!
Well, I did it. After a year of allowing my kitchen table to become submerged under an ever-growing pile of random clutter, I finally reclaimed it:
 It's a work table with work on it, even. This is exactly the kind of work I need to be able to do on this table. I have a large piece of handmade paper with flowers pressed into it, but it’s so delicate that the flowers are in constant danger of coming off. I need to put down a layer of medium to make sure they stay put.
Here’s what the table looked like when I began:
 Kitchen Table, Before I started by separating everything into piles on the floor according to my categories. I discovered that I had five categories: art supplies, medications and first aid, cooking utensils, stuff to go upstairs, and papers to be filed. Since the rest of my home is pretty organized, dealing with these categories was pretty straightfoward — art supplies were put away in the studio area, first aid stuff in the medicine cabinet, and cooking utensils in the kitchen drawers.
The “upstairs” stuff had been the pebble that started the landslide, way back last Spring. I have a bunch of knick-knacks and stuff that I have no place to display, so I’m keeping them in a closet upstairs for now. For whatever reason, when I reorganized my studio last Spring, I didn’t ever get around to putting them away. As a result, the table started attracting random crap, and the situation snowballed.
This is an object lesson for a treacherous part of the organizing process. You see, by the time you’re about 90% done with your organizing project, you will stop, and you will take a look at what’s left to do. You will think to yourself, “I’m almost done. I’m tired, and I’m bored, and I’ll just finish this tomorrow.”
Well, don’t, because you won’t. You’ll forget about it, and pretty soon your chaos will be like you never tried to tame it. So learn from my sorry tale, kids, finish the job the first time.
In my last post, which was supposed to be published last week and instead was published yesterday, I wrote that I was going to do some maintenance organizing on my art studio. Since I did a major re-org last Spring, I thought it would be pretty easy — just put stuff away, do some cleaning, The End. The hard part, I thought, would be the kitchen table, which was under a famous pile of crap and hadn’t been seen in almost a year. The hardest part would be the filing system I have yet to create.
Well, it turns out that my studio wasn’t as organized as I thought:
 Duplicates, Triplicates, and Quadruplicates. Something here isn't working. Continue reading Art Studio Drama
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. Continue reading Still here, still crazy … and cleaning my studio
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