So the New Year came, along with my annual resolve to get organized, and I didn’t know what to do. I lost my 2006 calendar, and couldn’t get past 10 a.m. I was rudderless. I blamed my family, the deliveryman, and the phase of the moon.
For 15 years I’ve used the same calendar system, a book whose daily pages tell me who to call, what to do, where to go and when to buy more vacuum bags. In short, my calendar book provides high-speed dial-up to my brain, which would otherwise wait all day for connections.
Every November the calendar reminds me to order the next year’s calendar, and I obey.
When my 2006 refill arrived, I put it with the boxes that stored past years, 2003, 2004, etc. As I went to set up my calendar for the New Year, I discovered my past and future had vanished. I shook down my office, and in the process cleaned every shelf and cupboard. I shook down my family, who, seeing how I’d been ransacking the house, went to their rooms and said I couldn’t enter without a search warrant. I shook down the dogs, the fish and the refrigerator. (I’ve found stranger things than calendars in the vegetable bin.)
I sent out a UPS tracker, which confirmed what I already knew: The package had arrived, and I was going nuts. Feeling out of control makes me do things that give me the illusion of control. Namely, I power clean. I clean like a Molly Maid on espresso.
After working over my office, I started on the oven. Next I swept the garage so hard the kids flew off into the street and didn’t come back until after high school graduation. Left dangerously alone, I pulled everything out of the garage and reorganized it. I overhauled the mudroom. That still didn’t bring back my past and my future, but my office, the oven, the garage and the mudroom looked great. I don’t know what hurt worse, ordering the $60 system again, or losing two years of my life.
“So order a new calendar and forget the past,” my practical husband advised, as I made him raise his legs one at a time so I could look under the sofa cushions. “Who cares what you did in 2003?”
“I care! My future biographer will care!”
He made a funny choking sound. “Your – ahem – future biographer won’t care that you brought snack for the gymnastics team the month of June.”
“Fine, make fun of my life. But how else will I track important facts, like how long I went between hair coloring appointments two summers ago?”
“Like I said,” his voice trailed off.
And so I entered the New Year in a tailspin of loss, aimless organization, and pitifully low family support. A week later, my second 2006 calendar arrived. That day I recruited my reluctant family to take down holiday decorations. As the kids took ornaments off the tree and nutcrackers off the mantel, I took a poinsettia from its perch. Six weeks earlier, I’d set the poinsettia on the floor where it looked too low, so I built a perch and draped it with a holiday tapestry. As I pulled the tapestry off the makeshift base, I shrieked as if I’d found a severed head. There lay three stacked boxes, 2003, 2004, and 2006. My life and my future under the poinsettia all this time.
When I shared my lost calendar story with Cynthia Ewer, editor of OrganizedHome.com, she said, “Imagine what you could have accomplished if you’d put that cleaning energy into creating home organizing systems that would be working for you in March?”
Imagine.
So I asked her how I could get a grip on my home this year. Here’s her advice:
Create cleaning habits:
Find the bare minimum of household tasks you need to do to make your home run smoothly, then make those chores into habits.
Do all the dishes before bed. “If you have to move the dinner dishes to make breakfast, you’re already behind.” Even better, set up the coffee pot and set out the breakfast dishes for the next day.
Clean bathrooms weekly. This way if you miss a week it’s not so bad. Don’t wait until you need to call in the toxic waste crew.
Keep washed what has to be clean – socks, underwear and school clothes – Don’t fall behind. Anyone who has ever dried his kids’ underwear in the microwave knows the importance of keeping up. (Incidentally, microwaving underwear makes the elastic gooey.)
Create organizing habits:
Set up launch pads. Whether a dishpan or a custom cubby, every family member should have a place (by the door works well) to land on and leave from. Here they park backpacks, school projects, coats, keys, glasses and anything they need for school or work the next day. Otherwise they leave an ant trail behind them as they drop belongings through the house.
Sort mail over the trash. Take what’s left and immediately sort it into a file for bills, mail that requires action and calendar items. Don’t set unsorted mail on the counter or it will mate and reproduce.
Keep a calendar. A calendar is where time, money, child rearing, career and your social life come together, said Ewer. It’s crucial to driving a home. “The fact that you are so completely dependent on your calendar tells me you’re using it correctly.”
One for my side. Then she added, “Unless, of course, you use it to prop the poinsettia.”
Marni Jameson is a nationally syndicated columnist who lives in the Denver area. You may reach her at marnij@comcast.net.
