This is the fourth 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.) The first post is here and the second post is here and the third post is here.

It worked because I was harder on myself, and easier.

It was too easy to cut myself slack before. It’s so easy to make your job more important than what it really is, especially when you work with people all day, because their energy just vibrates right into you and you can’t do much about it. So I would come home from work and feel sooooooo exhausted and give myself permission to lay around and try to outdo the cats in some sort of nap competition.

I had to suck it up. I went with a lot of mantras that are too embarrassing to share with other people. Whatever I had to think to get over my little EOD pity parties, I did. This became less and less necessary over time, because all the things that I thought were so hard that nobody could possibly be expected to do them after a full day of work turned out not to be all that much work after all.

On the other hand, I did lean very heavily on one of Allen’s favorite phrases: perfect is the enemy of the good. I found there were many areas of my life (too many related to copyediting) in which I was putting in just an insane amount of time because the thought of something entering the world with a mistake was horrifying. This was in large part because I was always overwhelmed by not being able to remember what I was supposed to do after I finished the copyediting. When I suddenly had a list of what was next, I found that I could live with some general comma uncertainty.

Also, I had these notions about how often something had to be done, like that I had to vacuum the couch every day, owing to the aforementioned cats, and that if I couldn’t do that, I shouldn’t even bother. Now I vacuum it every few days, and I bought some lint rollers to make up the difference.

I don’t think I would say that any day this year I have been fully efficient. But every day since I embarked on this strange journey, I have done at least one thing that wouldn’t have gotten done if I hadn’t made some changes. So on the whole, it’s worked.

It worked because:

·      I wrote things down

·      Whenever I could

·      Assuming it wasn’t something I could just do right then

·      And made the things as do-able as possible

·      And did them so I could check them off lists

·      And battled a bit with the reasons I didn’t want to do that

·      And made myself be less of a baby

·      And was grateful every day for what I got done

That is the best template I can give for “things you should try in order to be more organized,” if you’re looking for one.

(I’m sorry to say that a minor reason why it worked is that I spend a lot less time on the Internet than I used to. Oh well. I miss you, cat blogs.)

Tomorrow: How I’m Different Now; or, Why Organization is Really Good Therapy for People Who Can’t Afford Therapy