Maniacal Rage

A friend asked me the other day whether or not I found it difficult to keep my apartment as neat and organized as I do. My answer was no, but really it’s yes, then no. It’s difficult to GET organized, not terribly difficult to STAY organized. In fact, being neat and organized has several benefits that are self-sustaining.

Once you organize everything and find a place for all your stuff, you rarely need to redo it. Sure, occasionally I move things from one place to another to better suit my needs, or I add a new bookshelf or something, but for the most part, everything in my apartment has its place. And once everything is in its place, it’s very easy to clean up after yourself.

When you have a very messy apartment, there’s no easy way to deal with the mess. If you never keep your shoes in the same place, how do you decide where to put them when cleaning up? If you leave stacks of papers and magazines all over your living room, where do you put them when you want to keep them but have company over who you don’t want to judge you for being a dirtball? Once everything has a specific place, these are no longer questions. When people are on their way over, you grab the magazines and put them in the magazine rack hanging over there. You put the papers in your inbox in your office. You put your shoes on the rack.

Cleaning up even an extremely messy—but normally tidy—apartment is very easy and quick. I make the rounds, putting things where they go and then I’m done.

Another benefit to everything having its place is that it allows you to quickly decide whether or not you need to keep things that DON’T have a place. If I’m cleaning and I find an item and I don’t know where it goes, I can quickly decide either A) on a new place, or B) whether or not it’s worth keeping at all.

These same habits tranfer over easily to my computer usage as well. I have a specific set of folders that I use (archive, inbox, etc) and if a file doesn’t fit into a good category right off the bat, then I know I need to decide if I need to add it to a new folder or trash it.

Of course, the one side-effect to being organized is that I panic when I lose something. Since I like to think of myself having put everything in its place, when something ISN’T in its place I have no bearings as to where it could be. There have been plenty of times when I’ve looked all day for something, only to find it in a somewhat-logical place, just not the RIGHT place that my brain wanted it to be. Of course, messy people have this problem too, they’re just more used to it.