Getting Organized: The Desk
I am not known for having a pristine home.
Clean, yes. Tidy? Not so much. And this has two causes.
One, tidying up is not in my top
priorities. It doesn’t really hold much interest for me and besides, I usually
know exactly where things are in the piles. Once it’s cleaned up, that’s when I
get lost. But it’s also not a top priority because I have limited energy. If I
spend it on tidying, I rarely get anything else done. So I make a choice to
live in what can best be described as organized chaos.
The second cause of the chaos is my
disability. I can’t do much of the physical labour involved in cleaning and
tidying up. For one, I can only reach my furniture at a certain level. This
means that tables and other surfaces are used as horizontal filing areas. It
also makes it very difficult to organize and Put Things Away.
I do have attendants coming in, but the
time I have tends to be used for other things. As well, cleaning with someone
really only works when they had the same cleaning style as you do. Otherwise,
it just becomes another kind of mess.
The last six months haven’t seen much
tidying. I didn’t have it the energy for it when I first came home from the
hospital and after that, didn’t have enough energy to do my work and clean. After
six months, as that organized chaos of yore is now just chaos.
And it’s driving me crazy. I can take a
certain element of mess, but when every single surface of my home is occupied
by disorganized piles of Stuff, the urge to throw it all out and start over is
overwhelming.
I have therefore made myself a promise. To
slowly and gradually get this place organized. And to keep myself accountable
and motivated, I’ve decided to share it online.
Because: blog fodder, right?
The first step was my desk. This is what it
looked like a week ago
Although my desk is often what other people
might call messy, it’s not as messy as this. Every now and again when the
craziness lets up, I’ll do something about it. One wrinkle in this is that I
can’t use most of the drawers in my filing cabinet on my own, so what needs to
be filed just gets relocated to another horizontal surface. As well, my filing
cabinet needs culling and organizing before I can file those things, so it’s a
bit of a vicious circle. In other words, what had been sorted into the piles on
the desk soon becomes a sea of paper again.
Enter Locker Gear.
This is a new thing at Staples. Or if it isn’t
new, then I’m newly aware of it. Magnetized receptacles for school stuff so
your locker’s organized. And it works brilliantly out of school, too.
A while back, I bought a thing for markers
and put it on my filing cabinet and it’s been wonderful. Easily accessible, yet
Put Away. Earlier this week, I wandered into Staples for entertainment purposes
and found something else.
Will you look at this:
Isn’t that amazing? This now contains several
different types of materials that previously took up residence on my desk. One,
stuff I use for sending letters, etc., such as stamps and address labels.
Another compartment contains pieces of paper that requires an action. And the
third has an envelope in which is located cards and postcards for specific
occasions. That will migrate elsewhere once the filing cabinet has been culled
and something else to take its place. Or maybe it will be empty. Imagine that!
At the moment, this brilliant piece of
equipment is located front of my filing cabinet. Once the filing cabinet has
been cleaned to a point when I can use it myself again, it’ll get moved to the
side of the filing cabinet next to my desk.
And will you look at what this has done to
my desk
A week after cleaning up, my desk still
looks like that. This is unheard of. It has never happened before. Usually
within a week, the paper mass has have distributed itself into an
archaeological dig again. I’m ecstatic. Lucy is less so, as she liked lying on
the paper. She used to jump up on the desk as I was working and settle down on
the paper “cushion” to sleep between my monitor and my keyboard. These days,
she jumps up and wanders restlessly around, then stands across my keyboard and
looks mournfully at me.
I’m thinking of placing one – ONE – piece
of paper on my newly pristine desk. For the cat.
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