To paraphrase the opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, organised people are all alike, but each disorganised person is disorganised in their own way.
Now, before launching into my own peculiar disorganised ways, I’d like to claim that while working on things, like my new stage adaptation of Anna Karenina, (shameless plug) coming soon to Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, I can be well organised doing that particular thing. The trouble is everything else goes to pot.
Some can, some can’t
It is a cruel quirk of nature that some people have apparently infinite capacity to organise their lives, but others, like me, can’t organise our way out of a paper bag – unless ‘paper bag exit’ is the thing I’m working on at the time, in which case, I’d probably organise it into some kind of theatrical spectacle.
As a freelance arty odd-job woman, I often have to work on several things at the same time, and it can feel a bit like juggling puppies, on a unicycle, riding backwards – which to a puppy-juggling unicyclist might be fine, but to me is just cruelty to imaginary puppies… and I would organise that analogy into something that makes sense if I wasn’t quite so busy.
‘Peak juggle’
Right now, I’m in ‘peak juggle’, and with so many puppies in the air, all the non-work-related stuff of my life has been piling up chaotically around me.
The smart thing to do, when things get less busy, is to deal with these chaotic piles of neglect, dust them off and file them away somehow.
Naturally organised people do this automatically, usually on a Sunday. They make regular trips to recycling depots and skips.
They alphabetise bookshelves, colour code kitchen cupboards. They spend the whole day labelling and numbering the stuff of their lives in order to kick off the following week with a clear, uncluttered house and mind.
Never on a Sunday
And I admire that, I really do. But wild horses couldn’t get me to do it on a Sunday, especially when I’m up to my eyeballs in work.
However, where wild horses would fail, somehow my super-organised housemate, Sally succeeded in persuading me to re-organise my bedroom last Sunday.
It took all day. I didn’t do it alone – as if. I don’t have it in me to spend more than an hour max on this kind of thing.
But Sally ran the ‘Gut Lesley’s Room’ project with the iron fist needed to get me past the hour mark and into a deep-dive discovery of clothes I’d forgotten, boxes of keepsakes, acres of documents, notebooks and diaries, curious nick-nacks belonging to god knows who, an alarming range of failed and discarded bunion correcting apparatus, and whatever else had accumulated under my bed since I moved in four years ago.
Keeping the focus
All day, Sally remained focused, bagging things up, cleaning, hoovering, repositioning things, and she kept saying, “This makes me so happy”, which I was glad of.
At least one of us wasn’t just dancing around to 90s pop classics, putting on fancy dress outfits from two years ago and trying to collapse the whole thing into a party.
Because now that my bedroom is re-organised, re-configured, clean, and I know what’s under my bed, I do feel less cluttered. Plus, I’ve discovered the key to my being more organised: get someone else to do it.
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