You need to have an organized mind in order to be an organized person.

I know that this is hardly a bombshell of a revelation, but I was brooding on why I never seem to get my shit together and the thought suddenly occurred to me. And I think it might explain a lot.

I am, fundamentally, a creative type. This means that I don’t like a lot of rules, I assign my individuality and autonomy very high priorities, and I try to keep a rigorously open mind at all times.

But here’s the thing : open minds are great for creativity, but not so good for dealing with the mundane details of life. And open mind instinctively resists structure, and that precludes any form of organization I can think of right now.

This explains why I have always been a lot better at organizing things than I am at keeping them organized. Organizing things is fun for me. It’s the kind of mental challenge I enjoy. I like coming up with the system, implementing it, making changes to it in order to optimize it, and sorting everything into useful groupings.

But here’s the other thing : Once the system is done, I lost interest. It’s no longer mentally stimulating. It is, in fact, the very sort of structuring that I instinctively resist as a creative person because it restrict my intellectual freedom. More structure means less autonomy and I can’t have that.

Perhaps if I could make maintaining the system intellectually stimulating, I could maintain interest in it. Alternately, I could create a system that I loved so much that I would do anything to keep it running smoothly.

That is not as far-fetched as it sounds. I appreciate the beauty of an efficient system, one that keeps everything running smoothly and effectively so people can just do their work and trust that the system will take care of the rest.

As you can see, it’s human systems that intrigue me the most. Other sorts of systems can be beautiful as well, but they don’t hold my interest for long because what I care about most is improving the lives of people.

I am extremely dedicated to the humanist endevour, and to my mind, the best way to help my fellow naked beach apes is to create better, more humane, more comforting, more efficient systems for them to live and work in.

Now I am not a completely disorganized person. That kind of person probably doesn’t exist. There is some organization in my life, but it tends to be skewed heavily towards the minimum. I have my meals at roughly the same time every day, but not in a rigid sense. For example, normally I eat supper at 6, but tonight I decided I wasn’t hungry enough at six, and had it at seven instead. So when I say “roughly”, I mean “within a one hour margin”.

And I do organize things when their disorganization is getting in the way of what I want to do. But I am adaptable to a fault, and have a remarkable ability to “make do” with whatever occurs naturally.

There is also the issue of my Freudian anxieties that surface when things are too empty, too tidy, too visually simple. But that is a topic for another day.

Now if I was entirely a creative, free-spirit type, I would be messy and disorganized and I just wouldn’t care. But I am an INTJ (click to find out what that means) and we sit at the juncture of creativity and organization. And that means that part of me will always think things should be organized and cataloged and sorted out.

Part of me actually craves structure and order and organization. It is all too keenly aware of how my lack of organization makes my life more difficult than it needs to be, and it is keeping a running tally of all the things that I have done wrong or had turn out wrong because I can’t seem to get my shit together.

But that part of me is increasingly aware that I am simply not capable of generating that sort of structure myself. Like water, I need external structure in order to keep my shape. I am defined by my vessel, and so far at least, I have not been able to change the shape of that vessel myself.

This means I have come to a fork in the road : I either have to become more organized, or stop beating myself up over not being organized. The conflict between the two has become intolerable and needs to be resolved.

It will probably be a little of both. I will have to figure out what I really do care about, deep down, and that should naturally lead to a plan of organization to organize those things. Other things can fend for themselves.

Mostly, I want to be able to find things when I need them, which means putting them someplace and then remembering where they are. Obviously, it is much easier to remember where things are if a) they are always in the same place because you always remember to put them back where you found them, and b) if you put things someplace with a label on it, so even if I forget where I put it, I can figure it out from the labels.

Historically, it is the remembering where things are part that has defeated me. Things I am looking for are usually, in theory, exactly where I left them. If I only remembered the act of putting them down, the problem would disappear.

But alas, my memory just does not work like that. Once I put something down, it is forgotten.

Sigh. Once again, I have wandered far afield of my original topic.

What I meant to say was, I think I get why I have a problem with organization now. And I hope that, because I am now cognizant of this fact, I can work consciously towards a resolution.

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!