Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter

Time

People think that organizing is about stuff, and sometimes it is, but often- and maybe on a deeper level, organizing is about time.

When I was a kid I was good at entertaining myself, I could spend hours looking at my mother’s coffee table books, looking at myself in the mirror, reading… but as I got older, and both the demands on my time (homework, earning a living) increased, and the size of my world increased (friends, culture, exercise). I realized that there was so much I wanted to do, and I was going to have to be more disciplined with my time.

Luckily, while it wasn’t necessarily natural to me, it was definitely part of the water I swam in. I had a mother whose favorite childhood book was, Cheaper By the Dozen, where the parents are efficiency experts (circa 1930-something). My mother loved to challenge herself to be more efficient, she brought the strategic thinking of a chess-player to her marketing and housekeeping. I’m sure it made it more fun for her, if not for us!

Being efficient is one thing, but why does more stuff make it harder to be efficient?

When I do the laundry these days it doesn’t take me long, but when my kids were young and I did laundry for the whole family, it took a lot longer, especially when my kids started caring about fashion and changing outfits several times a day.  Even if the wash cycle is still 30 minutes… all that sorting and folding added time. Volume added time.

So, it is with some of my clients’ things: more just takes longer. Longer to put away the laundry, longer to dust the tchotchkes, longer to find that important piece of paper, because more, of anything, often means more crowded and denser.

I am not a minimalist, don’t even want to be… but there is a moment where too much of anything: clothes or paperwork or saved to-go containers, becomes a time suck. So next time you find yourself trying to shove one more quart-size soup container into the cupboard, or you can’t find that one black jacket in the midst of all the others, you know what you have to do…

Less is not actually more, but often it is simpler and more efficient.