embarassing mess « Well-Ordered Chaos

My Organizing Journey: The Great Purge — Trouble with Trash

Oscar has no problem with trash — he LOVES trash!

Adults with ADD are notorious for hanging onto clutter. We’ve being scolded our whole lives for loosing things through our carelessness. If we never throw anything a way, we know it’s there … somewhere. We might not be able to find it right now, [...]

My Organizing Journey: Getting Started — What’s Working? What’s Not?

After identifying Activity Zones, my clutter buddy and I talked about what was functioning well in each area, and what needed to be fixed. I was overwhelmed by the mess, and initially felt that nothing at all, anywhere in my kitchen, was working. Jana pointed out that the Cat Zone was not only functional, but [...]

My Organizing Journey: Getting Started — Identifying Activity Zones

The big day had arrived. My clutter buddy was at my home and by the end of that day I would, come hell or high water, have made some progress on organizing my home. My confidence had received a boost from learning that my apparently chaotic surroundings were actually a somewhat functional attempt [...]

My Organizing Journey Begins

My organizing journey began in the fall of 2005 when my friend Jana called me with an interesting proposition.

“I think we should help each other get organized”, she said.

I was stunned. “Get organized? Help each other?” I asked. “How can I be any help to you at all? You’re pretty organized [...]

Organizing an Entryway, Step 2: The Pre-Sort

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 [...]

Organizing My Entryway, Part 1: Taking Stock of the Situation

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, [...]

Housekeeping hacks: rodent management

When I found out that there were rats in my roof, I went through a moment of shame. I’m used to thinking of myself as a terrible housekeeper, a total slob, so I automatically felt that the rodents were somehow my fault. Even though I’ve been pretty organized for a couple of years now, [...]

Today I Cleaned My Kitchen

Well, part of it anyway. But I cleaned that part of it really well.

I’ve been bitching a lot this week about feeling all tired and hibernatey. Low energy, low motivation, blah blah blah. Today I had to get it together because my partner’s coming back from a business trip, and I know [...]

Well-Ordered Chaos

Now where did I put that post…