The Petri Project

Something about the back-to-school season always fills me with the hope of becoming an organized person. This cyclical optimism is likely seated in a lingering memory of papers carefully collected in Trapper Keepers, pencils secured snugly in zippered envelopes, and the pleasing snap of a three-ring binder. I’m not sure those were *my* tidy papers, pencils, and binders, but nonetheless, this fall I’m inspired to attempt to de-clutter my house.

Since the situation is rather dire, I enlisted the help of one of my hyper-organized friends, who was nearly salivating at the prospect of getting my house in order. He showed up on a recent Saturday morning and implemented a strategy which I believe I’d seen on Oprah. We picked one room to focus on (my bedroom), removed all the clutter from that room (a small subset of which is in the photo above), and piled everything in another room (the guest room), which he termed a “staging area.”

Once all the papers and magazines and books were removed, we thoroughly cleaned the bedroom. And it was marvelous! I saw surfaces I hadn’t seen in years. I felt calm and unafraid of what stacks might be lurking under the bed. I was certain I’d sleep better without all those looming piles of mystery. I felt like an organized person!

That is, until we moved back into the staging area, where I was supposed to *quickly* decide what to keep, throw away, or take to Goodwill. I guess a speedy pace was supposed to elicit my gut reaction to the items in question, but I wasn’t falling for it. How would I know whether I needed all those New Yorkers until I read each table of contents? What if I needed that book for teaching next year? What if that NY Times article would be good blog fodder some day?

It seems I defeated my hyper-organized friend, who remarked, “I didn’t anticipate this attachment to words.” Then he suggested we take a break. Two weeks later, my staging area still looks rather… unstaged (see photo at left), which frankly doesn’t bother me, but I’m betting it’s not what Oprah had in mind. I believe there’s still hope, however. In fact, I found a helpful list of “words to keep you motivated” on the stellar website Unclutterer. There’s lots of great stuff here, but I’ll leave you with a few of my favorite tips:

• You don’t have to unclutter in one fell swoop.
• If you relapse and get bogged down, don’t become frustrated and beat yourself up over it.
• Living an uncluttered life doesn’t mean that you have to live an ascetic life.

I’ll let you know how it goes.