A very simple rule of thumb

Back home after a 3-day weekend in Maine, I briefly contemplated the story I needed to file for the Globe, the emails to be answered, the ticket form to fill out for Tim’s graduation, the popsicles to procure for Holly’s Field Day, and the camp registrations for both kids due in tomorrow’s mail, and then invoked what I call Gayle’s Rule for Returning Home: Always unpack before sundown.

Well, that may be a slightly romanticized version of Gayle’s rule, which I don’t think actually involves the solar calendar per se but merely states that you should always unpack before bedtime on the day you return from a trip.

And in fact, I don’t think Gayle herself even considers it a rule. But I do. For me, ever since I heard about it, it’s been a fundamental practice for self-organization.

Gayle was my sister’s college roommate, and my sister happened to mention a few years ago that she remembers being impressed at how no matter how late in the day Gayle might breeze in from the airport or how full her suitcase might be, she always unpacked right away. I was so intrigued by this basic notion that I emailed Gayle right away to ask about its origins. Was it something her parents had required when she was young? Did everyone in her family follow this tenet?

Gayle responded that she really hadn’t given it much thought. It was just something she always did and never really considered it a fundamental practice.

For me, it was just one of those times when a habit someone else takes for granted becomes something worth emulating. Until that moment, my typical practice had always been to consider unpacking a low priority. A suitcase could sit in the corner of my bedroom for days, its rumpled contents untouched. 

Eventually, when I needed something that was buried at the bottom of the suitcase, or when I was getting ready to do laundry, I’d get around to unpacking. Or at least partially unpacking. The rest of the job might go undone even longer, for weeks sometimes. Possibly, if I was feeling really busy, I might even wait until the next time I needed the suitcase.

But Gayle’s notion stuck in my head as a simple way to make homecomings more organized, to cut down even if only ever so slightly on the frazzle that often comes with the end of a trip. This weekend was a perfect example. I felt swamped by the number of little tasks, work deadlines, and matters of administrivia that awaited me.

But I unpacked my suitcase, and the whole situation somehow looked brighter. No bag of dirty clothes in the corner of my room: surely that proved I couldn’t be quite as disorganized as all that if I’d managed to accomplish that singular task.

Several years ago, there was a popular website called The Fly Lady, in which a guru of personal organization and housekeeping disseminated wisdom: her standard rule was to clean the kitchen sink every day. And Gretchen Rubin, author of “The Happiness Project,” writes that the single most popular tactic developed in her book, according to feedback from her readers, is to make the bed every day.

I still have deadlines and tasks awaiting me, and they won’t go away on their own. Gradually I need to tackle them all. But I still maintain that Gayle’s Rule is a fine approach. Put away those clothes and toiletries. Maybe even start a load of laundry. And somehow the rest starts to fall into place.

A place for everything

I decided a couple of weeks ago to empty out my email in-box.

I didn’t intend it as a symbolic gesture, but, as sometimes happens with clean-up projects, it took on a larger meaning once I got started. It wasn’t that I expected to delete all of the sixty-two messages in my in-box; I just wanted to sort them all into folders. In general, I’m pretty good about using email folders for work-related projects and volunteer committee work, but so many correspondences seem to defy easy classification. And so I just let them sit there in my in-box.

It occurred to me that perhaps, that signified a bigger problem. It didn’t seem like I should have any correspondence that I had no way of classifying. So I resolved that I would put every single in-box correspondence into a folder. Anything I felt I needed to keep was hereby required to be assigned some kind of identity. And no cheating by using “Miscellaneous” or “Random” labels either, I told myself.

But some emails just contained little intriguing quotes from my daily inspirational email subscription. Okay then, I decided, there would be a label for “Inspirations.” And some were emails complimenting articles I’d written. Well, then, why not a folder for “Compliments”? Confirmations of items I’d ordered but not yet received became “Pending orders.”

What I quickly discovered with this simple exercise was the beauty of taxonomy, of determining that there’s a place for everything, even if it’s a virtual rather than material place. From that point, it was easy to make the analytical leap to conceding that anything that defied labeling probably wasn’t an email I needed.

Once my email in-box was empty, I resolved to go through the same exercise every day. That part was easy. But then I took a critical look around my house and wondered if the same principles that worked for virtual correspondence could be applied to household clutter. In theory, I already had a designated place for everything that mattered: recipes, pay stubs, pet medications, office supplies, tickets to upcoming events, musical instruments. And yet still, random items piled up on shelves and tables, in closets and in corners, just as they do in everyone else’s house. Is it possible, I asked myself, to make a rule that if I can’t figure out where it should be stored, then we probably don’t need it?

It strikes me as a fairly aggressive approach to household clean-up, and we’re not quite there yet. I still can’t figure out where to put empty candy boxes that Holly has decorated with ribbons and stickers, or vacation postcards whose images I want to admire just a little longer, or a pretty bottle that once held olive oil. But just thinking about it this way helps a little. If it really matters, figure out where it goes, I tell myself, and within minutes, the ever-accumulating clutter piles have been reduced.

True, those piles grow back, just as my in-box accrues new emails every day. It’s not a perfect system. I still lose emails because I can’t remember how I labeled them (but gmail makes it easy to search by sender or topic), and I certainly haven’t quite defeated the clutter problem in our house. But it’s an interesting way to approach the problem, and I haven’t given up yet.

Checklist

Here's how yesterday went for me:

I dropped Holly off at day camp – just two miles down the road – at 9:00. I came home, posted my daily blog entry (which I'd written the night before), made coffee, toasted a bagel, and drove Tim to his friend Will's house at 9:45. Then I headed for the supermarket. I'd promised to make cupcakes for Holly's last-day-of-camp luncheon, and the ones I'd made the night before were a disaster, so I had to buy some instead.

I was home by 11:00 and had time to make final revisions to two press releases I'd written the day before. Then at 12:00, back to Holly's day camp for the last-day reading ceremony at which each girl read her favorite piece she'd written that week.

Home in time to check emails; then I dropped Holly off at a friend's house at 2:00 and headed across town to pick Tim up at Will's house. Will's mother invited me to stay; she and two other moms were sitting by the pool snacking and chatting. I would have liked to, but with only one full work day left before we leave for vacation, I had to get home and meet some more deadlines.

Tim hadn't had lunch, so I helped him put a sandwich together and then headed out to pick up a friend's children at their day camp because medical conditions are preventing my friend from driving at the moment. I found the kids, brought them to their house, and headed back home.

Next, I contacted three sources for interviews related to the arts column I need to submit today. The topic of the column is 3D photography, and it turns out that artists who are interested in this kind of work really have a lot to say about it. I took notes as fast as I could, one eye on the clock, because I knew by 5 I had to start loading up the car to go to the transfer station.

When my phone calls were done, I headed out to the garage and started piling bags of trash and bins of recycling into the back of the car. When the car was full, I mounted one of our bikes on the bike rack; I told my sister I would deliver it to my parents' house so she could use it over the weekend. Next, on to the transfer station to unload all the trash and recycling. There I ran into the neighbor who has just started boarding cows at my parents' farm; he wanted to talk cows, so I listened to his theories about udder malfunctions and slaughter schedules while I threw trash bags into the compactor.

I was right on time to pick Holly up at her friend's house at 6:00. I loitered for a few minutes chatting with her friend's mother; then as we were leaving remembered that I was supposed to do a phone interview at 6:30 with an 11-year-old runner who plans to take part in the Chicago half-marathon next month. And Holly and I still had to drop off the bike at my parents' house. They weren't home, so we left the bike in the garage and the mail on the bench and hurried off, but halfway home, I remembered that the bike helmet was still on the seat next to me. Much to Holly's dismay, we doubled back to my parents' house and left the helmet.

The Chicago runner and his mother, both on speakerphone, called just as I was pulling into our garage. I rushed inside to start up my laptop so I could take notes. It's a good story; I'm looking forward to writing it up.

Once that call was over, I indulged in a rush of relief. All my scheduled events for the day were done; moreover, I'd left the house six different times for six different pre-scheduled drop-offs or pick-ups and hadn't forgotten or even been late for a single one. I'd also met a number of small but necessary work goals for the day: finished the press releases, done the interviews for my arts column and the marathon article.

So then I washed the dishes, put away food, and did the dreaded chore of removing mouse droppings from the cabinet under the sink. It seems every three or four days, I find enough down there to warrant a clean-up. I don't understand why, because there's no food under the sink and I never find evidence of mice anywhere else in the kitchen or the rest of the house. It's as if they wiggle their way through the hole near the drainpipe, wander into the cabinet for the sole purpose of pooping, and disappear again. My friend Sheila recently told me about a new mouse repellent she's very happy with; I'll have to put it on my To Do list for today to get to the hardware store where Sheila found it and buy some.

Ah yes, today's To Do list. Because every 24 hours, there's a new one. I managed to get through a lot yesterday, but today there are still more work assignments to complete, more errands to run, more household jobs to do. And yet yesterday felt like a particularly notable accomplishment; I was pleased with the way all the pieces had fit together – the six rides, the transfer station, moving the bike – and rather than feeling beleaguered by all that needed to be done, I was pleased that it had all turned out to be manageable and, more importantly, that I hadn't forgotten anyone anywhere.

When I was younger, before I had children, I honestly believed there were secrets, keys, to good organizational skills, and all I had to do was read the right book or attend the right lecture with the right expert and then I too would understand how to Be Organized. I even occasionally signed up for personal organization classes. Eventually I grew skeptical that there was any one answer, but these days I look around and feel a sense of accomplishment. It's not anything I learned from a book, and it's not anything I could write a book about either. It's not any particular key or slogan or trick or shortcut. It's just...living your life. Meeting your obligations. Keeping track of it all.

And it turns out that experience really is the best possible teacher.