Staying Organized

Why is it so hard to stay organized? Why do things tend to fall into chaos so quickly? I like things organized and put away and filed and neat and tidy, yet it only takes about two days for my quilting supplies to become a raggedy mess. Right now I'm looking around and I have a stack of fabric here and another stack of fabric there. I have rulers strewn about with abandon and thread on nearly every flat surface.

Since the problem certainly can't be me, here are a few reasons I've come up with to explain my disorder.

1. New fabric is hard to put away. I must hold it and look at it and put it where I can see it and stroke it for quite some time until I'm ready to stash it in a drawer. I have bought quite a bit of new fabric lately for the grandbaby quilt and because I got a gift certificate for Christmas, and I can't bring myself yet to put it away. It's way too pretty.

2. Old projects must be left out. If I put away the curtains I'm still trying to finish, they will disappear into the black hole of UFO's and might never get done. If I leave them out on the sewing table, I may be inspired to work on them. May. Might. Possibly. If the stars align.

3. A creative mind is a cluttered mind. I heard this from someone once, that creative people are not very organized. In fact, if they become tidy they are in danger of losing their creativity, because it is the plethora of things around them that inspires them. Yes, that's it. I must not lose my creativity. I clutter, therefore I create, or is it the other way around?

4. If I put things away I won't know where anything is. There is some truth to this. I know the mess looks disorganized, but I know right where everything is. Sometimes when things get put away I forget I even have them. Case in point, yesterday I found a whole package of donuts I had hidden away in a cupboard approximately mid-November so nobody would eat them. Well, nobody ate them. Mission accomplished.

5. I will put things away when I come up with the perfect system. Has the perfect system been invented yet? I do not think so, but until it has been I must not put things in any lesser kind of a system. If perfection is the goal, then perfection it will be, even if that means living in semi-chaos or possibly total chaos for the next 30 years. A goal is a goal.

Sadly, I fear, dear Brutus, the fault lies not in any of the above reasons, but in myself. Sometimes I just get lazy and I don't put things away. Our moms have been trying to teach us this skill since we could walk. Some of us are still working on it.