This is the first of five blog posts about organization and how I got some, against all expectations. They started life as an attempt to get my thoughts in order for a session on efficiency in bookselling that I’m presenting next week and got out of hand. I assure you nobody is more surprised than I am that I’m hosting a session about organization, but these posts explain how that happened. I think. (Though the session is specifically about efficiency and bookselling, these posts address efficiency and organization more broadly. I’ll post notes from the session later in the month.) Placing after a jump because it’s long.

Since I knew what it was to be organized, I’ve wanted to be it, and failed at it. Efficiency appealed to me in the same way that every challenge does: bright, shiny, taunting. I am this thing that other people do, it said, and you have proven incapable of grasping me. This is because you are useless. Ha.

So of course I wanted to chase after it until I grabbed it by the neck, to hoist it over my head. But as it is not really possible to get angry enough to become an organized person, that never worked, and I kept being a mess and making a mess.

Last winter in the depths of the holiday season, I came home from work every night exhausted, nervous, overwhelmed, pulled the covers up over my head. Stayed late and let myself feel virtuous about it, instead of confronting my forgetfulness and the fact that I couldn’t get things done on time. Read and read and read and read, ignoring more tasks. Cried. Cried more. I felt myself backing towards a clinical depression, that dark sucking pit. Was no one to blame but myself and I knew it, which is part of what makes the pit so appealing, as you might already know. That’s where I was at the beginning of the year.

I liked my life but I did not like how I was living it, because it seemed to me that there had to be a way to go about it that was not always stressful all the time. It also seemed like other people knew what that was, and that it was called “organization,” and at other times, “efficiency.” Both of those things seemed to require file folders. That was all I knew.

Then in late January, at a bookselling conference, I got the opportunity to go to two workshops about efficiency. The first workshop did not help. Everyone in it was as anxious as I was, it seemed. A room full of people on edge: we knew we should be organized, we were defensive about not being organized, all we wanted to talk about how computers might help. The room vibrated with blame, everyone in their own pot, stewing. I walked away jangled, hating organization more than ever.

Everyone was just tense, you know? Efficiency can do that to people.

As a result, I went to lunch feeling not especially jazzed about the second workshop, which was with David Allen, whose name I vaguely knew from my mom’s lifelong obsession with organizational programs. I was late to the workshop, took my time getting tea, because I’m often late to things, especially when they’re important. Here’s the first thing he said, as I was walking in:

“I came up with it because I’m lazy, and I wanted more time to do the things I wanted to do.”

I just about spilled my Earl Grey down the front of me. This was the first time I’d ever considered this rational approach to efficiency.

Being organized and efficient had, up to this point, seemed more like a character trait: something you were born with (something I was not born with) and nurtured (something I did not nurture), a kernel of something that made you look at the vacuum cleaner and want to use the attachments (I did not even know what the attachments were for). I had never imagined that efficiency and organization could be something that you did on purpose so that you could spend more time enjoying things.  It was intriguing to me that there could be reasons to be organized beyond because it was a Good Thing to be organized, and that self-interest could be the key to keeping my life in order.

I sat down and absorbed everything he said for the next hour. I felt like I had to listen, and hard, to anybody who’d admit to being lazy in front of a whole room of people. This was probably the smartest thing I’ve done all year. I took a lot of notes. It was the beginning of taking a lot of notes. So it began.

Tomorrow: What I Did.