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Sunday, November 9, 2008
I need an organization intervention!
I’m cluttered by nature and struggling to keep my family of five organized.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hello, my name is Theresa and I am umm … organizationally challenged. I have always been a cluttered person, but now that I’m keeping track of five people’s lives, things are getting out of hand.
I’m pretty sure my problems stem from saving too many things — especially school work, school notes and financial documents — and then putting them in temporary storage instead of where they belong. (At least that’s my husband’s diagnosis.)
I routinely spend a lot of my time searching for stuff. The babysitter knows it’s going to take me while to figure out where I squirreled away the check book, and my poor mother is still waiting to get back the flashlight she loaned me because I couldn’t find my own.
I had a particularly bad week last week losing three major items in a matter of days. My keys, my driver’s license and the kitchen telephone have all been MIA lately.
In my defense, that phone was lost over a weekend so I think my husband was equally responsible. We’ve also lost the back to our upstairs phone but that’s because I sometimes take the battery out so the baby can “call” people without dialing 911. (The kitchen phone was found about a week later, but now my son has lost the back off my cell phone.)
Two Fridays ago while loading bags into my car at my mother’s house, I sat my rather large ring of keys down and couldn’t find them. We searched for more than an hour — completely unloading my bags and going through each one. Finally, I had to call my husband to bring over the extra set of keys. I was embarrassed, and he was not happy. (I did find my keys the next day. They had fallen down a hole at the base of the minivan’s seat into the stow-n-go storage. Not an obvious location.)
On Tuesday, I realized my driver’s license was missing right before I went to vote. I’m pretty sure the baby has absconded with it. I saw her taking things out of my wallet earlier in the week, and I thought I had recovered them all. I guess not. I spent an hour looking for it and finally voted on an expired license. But hey, at least I found that one!
My husband sternly lectured me that these things do not happen to normal people, and I needed to make changes in my life. (I told him he needed to stick it up his …)
I will cop to the fact that as an individual I am a messy person. I hate to hang clothes. I don’t put things in the same place every time, and I tend to get easily distracted from picking up. My dorm room was always a disaster.
However, in my defense, I do have at least three other people working against me as I try to keep track of everything for this family.
My three little darlings move piles around on my desk. They knock things off my desk. They take my cell phone and my wallet from the bin they’re supposed to be in. They wander around the house with library books and leave shoes on the back porch, by the swing set and every once in a while in the shoe tree where they belong. It’s very frustrating to struggle with my own with organizational issues, as well as theirs.
Much like an alcoholic visiting AA, I do feel better getting this problem out in the open. I am committed to trying harder to be better organized. I will try to put things where they belong and not just where I happen to be. I will try to write down the dates for things in my planner and not keep duplicate reminders. I will try to purge unnecessary files and paperwork from our lives! I will try to find a higher location to store my purse. And I will try to make the children work on Michael’s desk and not mine!
Are you organizationally challenged? How do you keep your family organized — especially the school notes, school work, activities and bills? What is your filing system? Where do they keep their backpacks, shoes, jackets, library books, etc … Where you do you hide your purse? How do you protect the piles on your desk?
You can reach Theresa at ajcmomania@gmail.com
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