Organization: Hide the Stuff You Need

I have a much more topical post brewing, at least for here in New England, but I wanted to start this blog off on a positive note so, instead, let's talk about organization.

It's always been a tough thing for me. One one hand, I'm lazy and messy. On the other hand, I'm a bit OCD and anal-retentive and really like having everything in its place. Unfortunately, the messy and lazy usually win out. Buying a house came with more space for my accumulated crap, both useful and useless, though, and for once I find myself not having to cram everything I own into the closet of the small room I have in an apartment with two or three other dudes. Of course, now things can spread out and I don't quite know where to put anything. Silverware goes in the silverware drawer, sure. But where do Christmas decorations go? What about the full-sized Frylock costume I spent a month making in 2004 that I can't bring myself to throw out?

At some point I stumbled upon a system that's been working well for me, though. The key idea is to hide things you'll specifically go looking for but leave out, in the forefront, things you want to be reminded of, things you'll forget about if you have to actually go find them.

I've found that this works in a whole bunch of different situations, too. Take the fridge, for instance. That's what inspired this in the first place. I found myself going shopping and buying vegetables only to come home, put them in the vegetable drawers in the fridge, and forget about them until it's time to scrape them off the bottom of the drawer and throw them away. The beer, however, is sitting on the shelf and I see it every time I open the door. I'm going to go looking for that and not necessarily forget I have it, though, so why is it right there? I started putting the beer in the drawers and the veggies on the shelf. As a result, when I open the door to grab a beer I'm reminded that I have kale and leeks and should make a stir-fry for dinner. Of course, now you're wasting the magical "crispness" and "freshness" properties of the drawers on beer. Let's ignore that for now.

To answer an earlier question, we use Christmas decorations exactly once a year. We're always specifically going to go looking for them, so put them somewhere you won't trip over them all year: the attic.

We finally renovated our laundry room late last year and got new appliances. In my apartment days, I either had no laundry in my building or I had an all-in-one ventless machine that was absolutely no fun to use so, as a result, I got used to living in a quarter of my wardrobe and letting laundry pile up for weeks before spending an entire day doing it. In doing so, my clean clothes always fit in my reasonably small bureau because I only ever had so much clean at one time. With awesome new machines, though, laundry is easy. However, I had no idea where to put all my stuff now that it's clean—my bureau and closet were overstuffed. I did end up donating a bunch to thrift stores but also adopted the same system from the fridge. I put suits and dress clothes in a closet in my study. I never see them, but I'm going to specifically go looking for them three or four times a year. Voilà, I've gotten a third of my closet back and now, when I open it every morning, I can actually see sweaters I'd forgotten I had and wish I wore more often. I stacked pants and jeans on upper shelves of my closet, too. I can now see them all instead of the top two in the drawer. Removing those from drawers freed up a lot more space for essentials like socks and t-shirts.

We did this in the kitchen, too. We had one big drawer of tools and random stuff. Spatulas, thermometers, corers, skewers, etc. We also had a drawer right below it with two phone books and nothing else. Solution? Well, take the few items used every day and put them right at hand in a utensil crock next to the stove. That was a no-brainer and, of course, doesn't fit this scheme. After that, though, take stuff with a specific use – stuff we'll go looking for – and put it out of the way in that lower drawer. This consisted of things like rolling pins, cheesecloth, beaters, corers, and the like. Now the more-used drawer is less cluttered and contains general-use things like tongs, extra spatulas, and skewers. It's the drawer I'm most likely to jump to in a rush and thus has the stuff I wouldn't necessarily have planned out ahead of time.

You can scale this to anything in the kitchen. Put spices you don't usually use closer on the spice rack and put the cumin further away. You're more likely to say "hey, some dry mustard would go nicely with that cumin." Put weird things like coconut milk in the front of the pantry where you're more likely to use it, then put rice in the back because you're always going to go looking for it. As an added bonus, now when you're reaching to the back for the rice you're more likely to think "hey, let's cook that rice in some coconut milk; it'll be tasty and will also use up this coconut milk I bought for something a year ago and never used."

That could just be me, though.

np: Belly - Every Word