A Well Ordered Life

I am a person who likes his clothes scattered about the floor, his hair unkempt, and his work piled up all over his desk. In other words order and organization do not come naturally to me. Chaos can often comfort me, aide in my creativity. However it also has downsides it is a distraction to my productivity, it feeds distraction rather than focus, and it clutters up my bid’ness. Because of the latter reasons, I’ve been working on creating a well ordered life. While I’m still musing on how to apply this principle to my life as a whole, I’ve begun applying it to different pockets of my life. I began by pairing down my sentimental/photo/junk items. Growing up we moved around a lot, and as a result I have an odd habit of holding onto random objects or pictures that remind me of the past. Now I’m not saying it’s bad to have keepsakes and the like, but it’s also not ok to be a pack rat. Eventually the time comes when I started to wonder why I’m moving these boxes around with me that I rarely open, and what’s inside them. I open them to discover old hobbies, significant memorabilia, and junk that might have held some significance in the past but now is just adding poundage to the overall weight of the items I own. Facing the pile of junk and memorabilia I did a good job getting rid of things so that I won’t have to open the boxes and start throwing things away again. When in doubt throw it out. Keep only what is really significant. So I did a lot of throwing away, in that department, it felt pretty good in fact. Later on I’ll have to go back and give order to all the old photos, and memorabilia, but for now its a step in the right direction. The next area I have been adding order to is my library. In particular I have been cataloging my books in an attempt to both get a feel for all that I have, and to allow me to easily find what I’m looking for. In order to expedite the process I purchased program called Delicious Library. It is a mac program which is free to try (up to 25 items I think) check it out here. Basically it allows you to catalogue & sort your library digitally, either by scanning, entering the ISBN, or searching for you book. Although I’m using it for my library you can use it for other items such as cds, dvds, and pretty much anything with a barcode that is on amazon. It even allows you to check out items to people so you can remember who forgot to return Little Women to you. I’m not finished with the book project as I’m still working on sorting out some categories, should I create a category for my favorite authors or put their books in the categories which they address? These are the problems that plague me and keep me up at night… Not really I sleep like a baby… with clothes scattered about the floor.

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