The end of a season is a good time to assess where your stuff is. But figuring out how to organize can be overwhelming. Read on for the easiest tip on where to put things.
My Organizing Journey in a Nutshell
Do you ever stumble across exactly what you needed, but didn’t know to look for?
I found The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Organizing Your Life by Georgene Lockwood in a Free Little Library at exactly the right time, and entirely by chance. I was out of town, visiting a friend in Winston-Salem. While I tended towards malaise on the couch, she, an Enneagram 7, wanted to do and move. So we took a walk and I encountered the book.
At the time, I was overwhelmed with my late ADHD diagnosis and how to self-manage. My apartment was a frustrating mess, and I didn’t know how to fix it.
My problem, which I didn’t realize at the time, was that I was organizing like Tetris. I spent so much time on the front end finding the perfectly-shaped space in closets and cabinets for an item. Then, I spent equally large amounts of time on the back end searching for an item. Completing tasks is hard enough with ADHD, and I was making it harder to even get started. Often I forgot what I had.
Like many people with ADHD, I kept doing something that didn’t work for longer than a neurotypical person would have. (Something I just learned from Taking Charge of Adult Adhd, Second Edition: Proven Strategies to Succeed at Work, at Home, and in Relationships by Dr. Russell A. Barkley [affiliate link]. If you’ve ever felt like the standard ADHD checklist doesn’t really get at your struggles, please take a look at Dr. Russell’s book, or these videos.)
How to Organize
Ms. Lockwood changed how I use storage. Go by an item’s usefulness, not where it physically fits. There are three types of storage space where you live: Prime Real Estate, Secondary Storage, and Deep Freeze.
| Prime Real Estate | Secondary Storage | Deep Freeze |
| The easiest-to-get-to or most visible spaces | A harder-to-get-to but not completely out of-the-way space | Out of the way/least accessible space |
| -Current action files and what you need at your fingertips, -Things you use daily or on a regular basis, -Active files, like bills you’re waiting for payment confirmation on | -Secondary or reference files, -Stuff you use or need to access/check in on, but not every day, -Seasonal sports equipment | -Seasonal/once-a-year items, -Archival, i.e. important records that are active (ex., up to 7 year’s taxes) or essential (birth certificates, immunization records), -Very little should be here, so beware of using it as a catchall |
| Example Places: -In your office/wherever you do paperwork at home, -The storage closet that has most of your activities or that you use the most often; -(In the general-use areas of your home, not the attic) | Example Places: -Closet or the clunky file cabinet you don’t like using often (not on your desk or the nearest filing area), -Garage | Example Places: -Garages, -Attics, -Back of file cabinet |
It’s out of print, but you can buy a used copy (just know that her technology references are way out of date).
Your Enneagram 7 friend sounds like a real gem! <3
She is! It is wonderful to have a friend who both gets you and pushes you.