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organization book rec
8 Jun 2016 05:07 pmI was intrigued by a few recs for this book, which says upfront that the salient feature of these methods is prioritizing efficiency, simplicity and speed (the author says your goal should be for each 'zone' to be pick-uppable in 2 minutes, before a short attention span can run out), so they don't need to be adhd-specific.
Organizing Solutions for People With Attention Deficit Disorder: Tips and Tools to Help You Take Charge of Your Life and Get Organized
It's mostly actually about spatial organization of things, and unlikely to directly prevent me from losing things (which was my original aim when I started googling), but I got into it anyway.
Some of the stuff is laughable (throw out your DVDs in favor of streaming service only if you literally don't care WHAT you watch as long as you watch anything, FFS) or extreme (I'm happy to allow myself more than 5 tupperwares), but there's enough left over that was useful to have rendered the book totally worthwhile.
At one point I was so galvanized I leapt up in mid-sentence and cleaned the desk space around my computer monitor.
And later, in a less impulsive manner, I was inspired to reorganize the entryway shoe storage, the dish cupboards, the pots and pans, the tupperwares, and the pantry, all just in the last 2 days.
My mom is a hoarder of objects - I don't mean a clinical hoarder, in the rats and garbage sense, just a creator of hoards of things like art, salt and pepper shakers, dragon and chicken tchotchkes, antique teacups, teapots, excess tables and chairs, kitchen gadgets, tools, art supplies, broken things that might be reusable later in an art project, fabric scraps, books, magazines, spices, containers, linens... etc. My parents've been in the same house for 26 years. They have an organizational problem too, but a book whose basic philosophy is to make things easy to find by not having your storage be too crowded to see and access the things in it is not going to work for them without a few months' worth of sorting, slimming, and tossing first.
I think the advice could still be helpful to her and people like her (provided the extremity of the suggestions didn't panic them first!), although more so if she had a coach standing by to help her throw things away, because even if an exhortation to throw away 90% of your tupperware only gets you to throw away 20% of it, that's still an improvement.
Organizing Solutions for People With Attention Deficit Disorder: Tips and Tools to Help You Take Charge of Your Life and Get Organized
It's mostly actually about spatial organization of things, and unlikely to directly prevent me from losing things (which was my original aim when I started googling), but I got into it anyway.
Some of the stuff is laughable (throw out your DVDs in favor of streaming service only if you literally don't care WHAT you watch as long as you watch anything, FFS) or extreme (I'm happy to allow myself more than 5 tupperwares), but there's enough left over that was useful to have rendered the book totally worthwhile.
At one point I was so galvanized I leapt up in mid-sentence and cleaned the desk space around my computer monitor.
And later, in a less impulsive manner, I was inspired to reorganize the entryway shoe storage, the dish cupboards, the pots and pans, the tupperwares, and the pantry, all just in the last 2 days.
My mom is a hoarder of objects - I don't mean a clinical hoarder, in the rats and garbage sense, just a creator of hoards of things like art, salt and pepper shakers, dragon and chicken tchotchkes, antique teacups, teapots, excess tables and chairs, kitchen gadgets, tools, art supplies, broken things that might be reusable later in an art project, fabric scraps, books, magazines, spices, containers, linens... etc. My parents've been in the same house for 26 years. They have an organizational problem too, but a book whose basic philosophy is to make things easy to find by not having your storage be too crowded to see and access the things in it is not going to work for them without a few months' worth of sorting, slimming, and tossing first.
I think the advice could still be helpful to her and people like her (provided the extremity of the suggestions didn't panic them first!), although more so if she had a coach standing by to help her throw things away, because even if an exhortation to throw away 90% of your tupperware only gets you to throw away 20% of it, that's still an improvement.
