Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
One Place or Many
One place or many? It’s one of the first questions an organizer confronts. I’ll be working with a client, shredding papers, and I’ll accumulate a pile of paperclips. When I ask where the paperclips go, my client says, “Well, there are some in the kitchen, and some in that little box on the desk, and some in a dish by my husband’s chair in the den.”
Okay. What do you think? Right or wrong?
It depends. It may seem like keeping things in multiple places is efficient, but usually it just makes it hard to manage your inventory.
In Julie Morgenstern’s book, Organizing from the Inside Out, she writes about zones, which means having everything you need in the place where you perform the activity. So if you use scotch tape in the kitchen, you should have it there. When I originally read that, I thought it was crazy, because I was living in a small apartment and it wasn’t a big deal to get up and get a stapler or tape, because it was never that far away. However, now that I’ve worked in many bigger homes, I see her point. It’s silly to only have one stapler in a large house. You may want one in the kitchen and one in each child’s room as well. Give some thought both to where you use things like tape, staplers, rubber bands and paperclips—and also to where they end up.
As I work with people, we find stuff. Usually, they have no idea that they have four staplers, six open boxes of paperclips, a peanut-butter jar full of binder clips and a lifetime supply of rubber bands.
So for the aforementioned paperclips: If they’re in a dish by her husband’s chair because he reads reports from work and discards the paperclips, but never uses them, then I would say they should be merged with the ones on the desk. Likewise, if the stash in the kitchen gets used for paperwork, then it makes sense to keep them there, too. If not, move them to the place where they get used.
You may find that if you make that tiny effort to put the paperclips from the dish by the chair back into the box on the desk, you’ll never need to buy another paperclip.