I have something to confess. I do my laundry every week on the same day. When I sort the laundry, I put the piles in exactly the same place every week.
I have a list of what to do after dinner every night to get the kitchen clean. The list is prioritized, with putting away food first on the list and sweeping the floor last. We have a shelf in our house where the library books go. I have a weekly menu template: each week we have one dish each of beef, chicken, pork, bean, pancakes, including one cooked on the grill and one in the crock pot. We plan our menu on Sunday, I go shopping on Monday. This summer I even had a monthly menu: meals planned for a month! I still can't quite believe that we used that for 4 months.
I am confessing this because I want you all to understand that I am not a born organized person. In the past, I've been proud of my unpredictable habits and freewheeling, spontaneous personality. The truth of the matter is that these habits have been developed out of self defense. If you don't plan your menu, it gets to be 5:00 and there is nothing for dinner. If you do laundry spontaneously, people run out of underwear. When I run into problems like this, my thought is "I got a PhD in math. Surely I can think up some way to make sure that the people in this house have what they need without being in a constant state of emergency."
I have been wondering if these habits make me an organized person. I don't feel organized, and there are lots of people who are more organized than I am. Anyone who has not received the dozen Christmas cards I write every year knows I'm not organized. Anyone who sees the piles of paper in our house, some important and some not, knows I'm not organized.
Perhaps it is a continuum. Or, more likely, people practice organization in some areas of their life and not in others. Even the people I think of as being completely organized are likely disorganized in some aspect of their life. And even the most disorganized chaotic people probably have at least one aspect of their life that demonstrates order, even if it has been developed out of self defense. The challenge is to find out what works for you to make your life feel better, and dispense with the advice that makes your life more stressful.
How about you? Do you have any organizational skills that you came to because you felt like you had no other option?
I have a list of what to do after dinner every night to get the kitchen clean. The list is prioritized, with putting away food first on the list and sweeping the floor last. We have a shelf in our house where the library books go. I have a weekly menu template: each week we have one dish each of beef, chicken, pork, bean, pancakes, including one cooked on the grill and one in the crock pot. We plan our menu on Sunday, I go shopping on Monday. This summer I even had a monthly menu: meals planned for a month! I still can't quite believe that we used that for 4 months.
I am confessing this because I want you all to understand that I am not a born organized person. In the past, I've been proud of my unpredictable habits and freewheeling, spontaneous personality. The truth of the matter is that these habits have been developed out of self defense. If you don't plan your menu, it gets to be 5:00 and there is nothing for dinner. If you do laundry spontaneously, people run out of underwear. When I run into problems like this, my thought is "I got a PhD in math. Surely I can think up some way to make sure that the people in this house have what they need without being in a constant state of emergency."
I have been wondering if these habits make me an organized person. I don't feel organized, and there are lots of people who are more organized than I am. Anyone who has not received the dozen Christmas cards I write every year knows I'm not organized. Anyone who sees the piles of paper in our house, some important and some not, knows I'm not organized.
Perhaps it is a continuum. Or, more likely, people practice organization in some areas of their life and not in others. Even the people I think of as being completely organized are likely disorganized in some aspect of their life. And even the most disorganized chaotic people probably have at least one aspect of their life that demonstrates order, even if it has been developed out of self defense. The challenge is to find out what works for you to make your life feel better, and dispense with the advice that makes your life more stressful.
How about you? Do you have any organizational skills that you came to because you felt like you had no other option?
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