Organized....disorganized

Have you ever noticed that any time you want to really get organized, you must first become disorganized and make a huge mess? Think about it. If you want to clean out and organize the coat closet, you must first take out all the coats and every other random item you may find in there, lay it all out on the floor, and make a huge mess before you can decide what you try to shove back in the closet. The same thing goes if you want to organize your twice removed great aunt's bifocal collection. You must pull everything out, put it in piles according to shape, style, color, or date, then begin to put it back together. The same thing goes for anything you want to organize or clean. I know there are others out there who agree with me to some extent. One of my many goals this summer was to go through the "dreaded" boxes in our closet and organize them according to category. Everyone knows what I am talking about, those boxes that you tend to shove everything in because you don't know what else to do with it. Those boxes that you tend to keep sealed up and move from place to place wherever you go. I know everyone has those kind of boxes. As Bruce may testify, boxes and I don't get along. I can't stand the sight of them. They make me feel like I am....what?....disorganized. I would much rather see things put in a drawer or a shelf - either way they need a specific place. I had 3 large boxes I wanted to go through. The remnants of these boxes varied like your grandmother's leftover fabric. They contained: papers written in high school and college, seminary and institute handouts, report cards, letters from friends and family, certificates, family history documents, pictures (unlabeled of course), wedding announcements from old friends, ticket stubs to concerts and other events, old scout/young women projects, work from elementary school, newspaper clippings, notebooks from college courses, handouts on every dairy subject imaginable, along with plenty of other odds and ends, knick knacks, and un-identifiable things. My task - to get rid of the boxes in any way that I could. I went through every paper and put it in a specific pile depending on what it was. As you can imagine, within a couple of hours, the entire floor of our second bedroom was filled with piles and piles of paper looking up at me and asking what was to become of them next. You couldn't even walk into the place, it was driving me nuts just looking at it, but I couldn't stop there. I had to do something with it because I didn't just want to put it back the way I found it. I worked on a little bit each day, but I wasn't making much progress. Soon after much dismay I just shut the door hoping that someone or something would make it all go away. If only I had a magic wand to zap and have everything perfectly organized. As we all know, it doesn't happen like that. I ended up throwing away the content of 1 1/2 boxes (who needs to keep all this junk anyway?), and put together a couple of binders. I filled a plastic expandable file with letters by category, and put all the family history documents in a binder. Both of those are now on a shelf on my bookcase. I put together all church handouts and 3 hole punched them. As soon as I buy a 3 inch ring binder, they will be put in it and put on a shelf. I put all of our old papers in a pile, 3 hole punched them and plan to do the same as above. I glued all our birthday cards and wedding invitations into my card binder (see rubber cement blog to learn about that), and went through all our pictures tossing aside the doubles. Everything else I put in a folder and set it on top of my desk. Now the floor is clean, but those piles and folders are now scattering the top of my desk. School is starting soon, so those piles will probably sit there until next summer. At least the dreaded boxes are gone - now all I have to worry about is not creating more of those dreaded boxes and somehow finish the organizational task I set my mind to. I still feel completely disorganized, but I have managed to make 10% progress in my 3 summer months off. I wonder if you can truely ever be organized without an unbalanced amount of being disorganized!!!