Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
The Perfect Daughter Manifesto
The 200th newsletter! Reaching such a milestone seems to call for some sort of celebration, and for the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about how I would mark this anniversary but nothing came to me. However, as I was cleaning up files on my laptop, I came across a “Perfect Daughter Manifesto” that I had been working on a while back. I’m sure much of it will seem familiar to some of you, but I wanted to share it anyway. When we organize, it isn’t just about creating orderly stacks of sweaters and eliminating clutter and late fees, though those things are important too; really, it’s a bigger project we are involved in. As each year is warmer than the last, as our digital devices pull our attention, I want us to put our efforts to organize into a larger context.
The Perfect Daughter Manifesto
At The Perfect Daughter, we aim not just to help our clients find their own, sustainable system of organization but also to think deeply about their relationship to stuff, to buying, to owning, to discarding. None of us are perfect and the answer doesn’t have to be extreme or absolutist, but there is a connection between the sheer quantity of stuff we have and the rise of organizing as a profession.
We absolutely understand every impulse our clients have: to buy cute stuff, to upgrade to better stuff, to try to fix problems by purchasing stuff—but none of it works. We have seen the dark side: the huge, black trash bags full of perfectly good stuff tossed in the garbage, the charities that turned down perfectly usable items because they were overwhelmed by too much stuff; we’ve even witnessed expensive computers that no school or charity would take. Rather than being discouraged, we at The Perfect Daughter want to challenge ourselves and our clients to think very carefully about every purchase, to try appreciate things that are worn (but not worn out) and to see the beauty in objects that have achieved a patina of age.
Yet things are only half the problem. Time is the other piece. We are busy, at the beck and call of work and family and the tiny, omnipresent masters that are our phones. But we can shift the balance. We have the power of choice; we have the option to slow down communication and structure our own days and be our own masters. To achieve this, we need to be conscious of our time, to create systems and habits that enable us to use our time efficiently, but we also need to schedule vacations, and dedicate time to eat without our screens in our hands and talk to other humans in person. These things may seem silly, but reacting quickly isn’t the same as being organized. Why be organized if all we achieve is more output? We want you to be organized so that you can enjoy life, so you can take a walk in the woods, or go to the theatre or invite friends over to your home without the ever-present, nagging worries that you need to take care of something.
We at The Perfect Daughter believe that organizing isn’t just a trendy subject for ladies’ magazines, but rather the first step towards a more mindful, sustainable world.