productivity,  time management

Can Creative Chaos be Organized?

September 8, 2013

I’ve been bitten by a bug.  Not a real bug, thankfully, but a bug to organize and prepare for the next season.  It’s an urge I get a couple of times a year and doesn’t just involve the change in weather.  It’s the urge a squirrel must have when he begins to hide food for the winter; although the urge I have has nothing to do with food.

Well, I take that back.  I am cleaning up around my gardens and I’m going to be storing away my garden decorations later this week after what I expect might be one of the last really hot weeks of the year.  Once the gardens are all cleaned up and ready for the fall, my pumpkins can wreck as much havoc as they choose once they can stretch out to invade the areas they haven’t been allowed to inhabit until now.  I admit it feels good at the end of the summer when the gardens need very little attention.

I’m also preparing for the next season of projects.  It’s a funny thing what happens when I’m in the middle of writing a book.  I tend to make a lot of piles.  Piles of articles or magazines I need to read.  Piles of paperwork I should spend time going through.  Piles of books I’d like to read.  Piles, piles, piles.

Any why so many piles?  Because I spend so much of my time working on my book that I tend to get behind on everything else.  I try to get through the piles, but I get through them much more slowly. 

So, now that I’m not in the process of continuously writing but with the knowledge that very soon I will be, I must clean up those piles to make room for the next version of creative chaos which will soon surround me.

And when I get the bug to clean and organize…watch out.  My family knows to steer clear of me because they’ll just get in my way.  Getting organized means getting back on track.  To stay on track, I need to continue to stay organized.  Creative chaos is one thing but getting too far behind on many tasks to the point of feeling buried is quite another.    

So what do I do to stay organized? 

I do use piles, I will admit, but many would argue that piles are no way to stay organized.  It works for me but it’s finding the time to get through the piles that becomes difficult.  So once again, I need to focus on time management and, maybe, I need to limit the need for so many piles.

I use a day planner, as well.  I make list upon list of what I need to do, need to buy, who I need to call, errands I need to run, etc.  But eventually, those lists become useless if you never find the time to cross everything off the list.  Again, there’s the issue with time management and, maybe, learning not to fatten those to-do lists beyond what I’m capable of.

I also like boxes.  I have boxes for items I need to store, items I need to go through, items I need to file away, and items I need to save in a scrapbook or photo album.  But eventually, those boxes pile up, which turns my space from creative chaos to just plain clutter. 

To dig myself out of the clutter, I like seeing new ideas on how to stay organized.  I was recently reading through a magazine from one of my piles and there was an ad for some websites designed to help organize all areas of a person’s life.  Intrigued, I checked them out and overall they do appear to have something for everyone for every area you could think of…

I like the idea of so many options to stay organized so I thought I’d share since I’m always on the lookout for any new tool or idea that might help me stay organized.  Speaking of that, I better get back to what I was doing so that I can prepare for another busy week. 

Until next time…

 

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