Habits: Organize ALL the Things!

The time of moving draws nigh! I'm headed up to Minneapolis on the 7th, again with my mom as co-pilot, though thankfully it's a one-way trip this time. As I'm not working and don't have any big time commitments, I've been trying to keep myself busy and stave off boredom, which has oddly uncovered some latent organizational tendencies. This picture (from Allie Brosh's amazing Hyperbole and a Half) sums it up pretty well:

I have never been the hyper-organized, clutter-free sort. But I guess something finally clicked in my head that threw me into a getting-rid-of-stuff frenzy. I suspect that all that time I've spent on Apartment Therapy, looking and lusting at rooms has made me realize that I had too much crap entirely.

Here's a picture of part of my room at the co-op (from a year or so ago), on a good day.

Since I had to keep all of my stuff in the same room, rather than spread out throughout an apartment, I really had to confront how much stuff I had accumulated throughout college. When I moved out, I gave a bunch of stuff away, but I still had a lot of unnecessary miscellanea.

seriously, what is all that? and why was I taking pictures?

Getting work done on that desk was an accomplishment. Though it did seem to be getting a bit of action as a music stand.

Although my space has gotten a lot more organized and less cluttered, it still has pretty far to go. The ideal for me is something more akin to this:

Being super-selective about what I bring with me is going to be important. As much as I love my books, it's laughably unrealistic to expect I'll have much time to read for pleasure once classes begin. I really don't need a full shelf to pick from, much less books that I read in college that will likely never be inclined to pick up again (I'm looking at you, Thomas Aquinas.) So, I'm limiting myself to one box (excluding cookbooks), which is even less than I initially brought to my freshman dorm.

I've cleaned out my wardrobe, which has resulted in the startling discovery that I have enough hoodies to make a stack a few feet high. I got rid of half of them, which still leaves me with a lot of hoodies. And while I cut down on clothes by a lot, like six-garbage-bags-full a lot, I still have too much. I figure this is stage one of the moving process; I got rid of a third of the things I had stashed in my room, and when I start packing to move, another third is going to be left behind. Ideally.

What I'm really hoping results from this is that it inspires a continued desire to keep stuff organized and fairly simple, for both physical objects and for routines. Probably where I got into the most trouble in college was having a scattered approach to my classes; things would often not get done because I didn't organize my time very well, which inevitably led to me panicking at the last minute and trying to learn a semester's worth of German in the week leading up to the final or writing papers on Wittgenstein the night before. As stupid as that approach is in undergrad, trying to do that in law school would essentially be academic suicide.

I think that these past two years after college have given me the necessary distance to evaluate what worked academically and what didn't. My extreme embarrassment at turning in (several) sub-par papers isn't as immediate as it was in 2010, which makes this examination a little more comfortable. When I try to remember what routines I had, I realize that I didn't have them at all. Which explains a lot, actually.

I think how well I do in law school will depend a lot on how well I can set up schedules that I can stick with, which will really play a huge part in how I budget studying time but will also extend to more basic stuff like sleeping and cooking/eating. While it's impossible to commit to a study routine before I even know when I'll be attending class, I can start getting ready by setting up the mental framework of organization. And that starts with, at least for me, getting my living space in order.

sidenote: I know this post was essentially about cleaning my room. Future topics should be more exciting. But then, what topic wouldn't be?

Related:

Hyperbole and Half: This is Why I'll Never Be an Adult (context of the first picture)
Apartment Therapy: Liz's Well-Edited Half of a Durham Duplex (lustworthy apartment)