Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Evolution
Things evolve. I recently read a great article on how humans evolve. We like to think that evolution is this beautiful, natural process, but really it’s not elegant at all; it’s crisis management on an epic scale.
A lot of the organizational problems I deal with are like this: a quick solution for stuff that evolves into a bigger problem—or just a different one. Maybe you had too many hats, gloves and scarves for the closet so you picked up a dresser, but the only place it fit was the dining room. It’s a solution: There’s a place for the gloves, but it isn’t optimal, because it doesn’t really make sense. I’ve seen all kinds of things in odd places: evening gowns in the kids’ closet (okay, that’s me—they don’t need all that closet space), old taxes in the linen closet, office supplies in the kitchen.
I understand. You need space and you use whatever corner you can find. But the organizer is here now, and part of my job is to make things make sense. It’s easier to find your gloves when they are near the coats, and I want it to be easy.
I approach these “evolutionary” problems like a game of chess: My goal is to get all the coats and outerwear accessories into the coat closet. In how few steps can I achieve that goal? If you can purge a few knapsacks from the coat closet, can I replace them with two baskets for gloves and hats? Or, if it’s easier for you to part with a few coats, can I use a hanging sweater bag? Once all the gloves out of the dining room, then we can solve the problem of the overflowing drawer of napkins and dishtowels in the kitchen by moving the napkins to the freed-up space in the dining room. Each move reveals the next.
When people have storage problems, they want quick, easy fixes. But those aren’t always the most elegant solutions. My job is to step back and imagine how you might have wanted it to be, if you had known, when you moved in, that you were going to have all this stuff.