I’m entering the 11th month of my year-long foundation project. The focus of this month is on organizing – mastering your physical matter to maximize the benefits these things offer while minimizing their ongoing costs in terms of sorting, storing and spending. Those interested can check out my first ten months here: fitness, productivity, money, food, reading, outreach, sleep, reflection, connection and focus.
My weakest foundation
I’ve been nervously looking forward to this foundation since I announced the project last year.
While I have no expert on many of the previous foundations, most of them are not bad at baseline. For example, I have made incredible steps in my fitness aspect during the course of this program, but the measurements I made before I started were still above average age.
On the contrary, I was a disaster when it was neat and organized. This is not entirely due to a lack of attempts. A few years ago, I was frustrated with how often I searched for books on bookshelf, so I decided to organize them alphabetically by the author. This works very well. But as the books keep coming, I ended up running out of shelf space.
Many of my books for this project relax on the shelf at the bottom. Frustratingly, I even lost a textbook about the relationships I’ve read – I had to turn to Chatgpt Exploration Course Course for reference for the original research, because I couldn’t find this book!
Books are the tip of the iceberg that I can’t seem to be orderly. My bedside table at home usually has a bunch of books, notebooks and sketchbooks. The crawl space below our house had some neat documents and old books (again, more books!), but followed by a bunch of old baby stuff, unused decor and random accessories, equipment I no longer owned.
My paper documents are another example. When I occasionally clean and reorganize the default state is a bunch of mixed files, most of which should probably be chopped. When I actually need one of them, my first instinct is to try to find the document online again, so I don’t need to go through the stacking.
Why can’t I sort it out?
Reflecting on my obvious weakness, I can think of some key reasons:
- I keep too much stuff. Although I had no problem throwing things away, in the past, when I went to sort out, I defaulted to “keep” when I wasn’t sure what to do. As a result, most of my sorting attempts are going to mess up the mess rather than get rid of the mess.
- I don’t have a special place to put things. As a result, many of the objects living in my home are wanderers, wandering from tables to shelves, as there is no obvious answer to the question of where to put them while organizing.
- I’m usually not good at prioritizing low-savage family tasks. As my Productivity Foundation discusses, keeping it neat is just one of the most important trivia I try to keep it. I also let small home repairs last for several months and I postponed unurgent housework.
One explanation I think is that it’s hard to keep it neat because I’m sharing my space with my wife and kids now. Many of our items in our homes were shared and I was reluctant to throw away shared household items or toys from older kids. I may have different priorities for shared spaces, so sometimes I’m eager to get rid of things my wife values and vice versa.
After reflection, I must reject this is the reason for my confusion. While I do need better policies to sort out the projects that aren’t exactly my own, I still have complete control over things and space. For example, my office is full of chaos, even if I work there most of the time.
If anything, my wife is better at sorting out than I do, so it is unfair to blame yourself. She was almost always a leading effort when we were doing a partial reorganization. If it all depends on me, I’m sure the chaos would be worse!
Some cautious optimism
I don’t want to declare victory too early in my chaos. But I also suspect that this problem is far from irreparable. Instead, I suspect my confusion stems from a series of bad habits and is not giving me a consistent focus in this field.
When I started thinking about this project a year ago, my initial plan was to take a month to sort it out. But when I started reading Marie Kondo’s book, Mage, sorted out the magic of life a few days before the start of a month, her strong prescription was shocked by it. She believes that the finishing needs to be fully completed or it won’t last.
To follow this advice, I decided to do a complete reorganization and finishing for at least a few days in a row.1
Fortunately, this month also happens to overlap when I was planning to move my office, so packing everything and moving it provides natural motivation and opportunity to completely reorganize my space and make sure to start over.2
Can I be a neat person?
As mentioned above, the basis of the biggest change I’ve seen is fitness. Although I wasn’t in much physical condition before I started, the idea of being a person in good condition was not a key part of my identity. It’s not that I don’t think exercise is important, but I think my life seems to be peripheral.
I think the biggest change for me is not only from more regular exercise, but also because of this shift in identity. While I never thought about being a serious athlete, the benefits I experienced over the past year shifted what I had before at the periphery to a more important part of how I view myself.
If you work this month, it will not be a fulfilling one. Instead, I need to change some of my beliefs. I need to think of myself as a fundamentally neat person who doesn’t keep it rubbish and messy.
Take out an identity that is far from my current identity, which is somewhat alien. Indeed, I don’t know if it can be achieved until I really succeeded in the initial tidying. But I do think the end result must include a consistent and neat idea, rather than a one-time challenge or reorganization effort.
Will it work? I’m not sure, but as usual, I’ll let you know how it’s going!
footnote
- I don’t think it’s a reluctance to schedule an entire weekend (and maybe even a weekday) to do it, which is also a sign of my lower priority sorting for this field. One of the biggest benefits of this foundation project is that each month creates an “excusation” that makes something that never* feel like the most important thing of the month. For example, before this project, I didn’t improve my sleep habits because there was always something else.
- One downside of this month is that I will be heading to Europe for two weeks of family gatherings. Normally, I don’t want to change the original project schedule for such public projects, but I think this month is important and if I can’t finish the full reorganization at the end of the calendar month, I’ll postpone the final focus for a week or two to make it fit. Since I’ve posted this with a three-month delay, I’ll stick to the original release schedule, but I think it’s just fair to make changes to the plan.
