You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (38 page)

Make Liberal Use of a Trash Can:
The trash can is an indispensable aid in the war on clutter. Each item you discard reduces the quantity of stuff you have to manage. Of course, some impulsive ADDers may use their trash cans to excess and end up rummaging through the debris to locate the tax refund check they hastily discarded by mistake!

Some of us, however, tend to keep everything. Perhaps
we do this because we can’t trust our memories or our organizational skills and are scared to death we’ll discard something important. It seems easier to keep everything so we don’t have to make any decisions. The more things you can clear out, however, the more comfortable you’ll feel about managing the remaining stuff.

Schedule an Inventory Review:
It is important to schedule review sessions
to reassess organization decisions. During your inventory review, go through the contents of your stored boxes. Have you had to refer to your content’s lists to find something you needed? If so, leave it where it is or move it to a more accessible location.

If your boxes remain untouched, it’s probably time to make liberal use of your trash can. After several periodic checks, you’ll probably
end up with boxes considerably emptier than when you started. If you still can’t bring yourself to throw out some of the unused items, consider moving them to a fourth,
Almost Ready to Discard
box. Remove it from the main part of your house and store it in your garage or attic. Keep your list handy in the unlikely event you need something in it. At least you’ll remove these objects from your living
space and perhaps convince yourself that you really won’t ever use any of this stuff!

We’ll leave it to the organization experts to help you with managing most of the stuff of your world. You can get ideas from a self-help book in your local bookstore. But let’s look at just a few sources of household clutter.

Newspapers and Magazines

We bet that when you do your household inventory, you’ll
find miscellaneous magazines and newspapers in many places other than your magazine racks. The clearing out part of mess management is the most important part of dealing with the clutter of these reading materials, so get out your trash can and use it!

If you find more than two unread back issues of a particular subscription, don’t send in the renewal notice when it arrives. Save a few issues
if you really think there’s a chance you’ll have the time to read them; throw out the old ones and resist the temptation to buy any more.

What about the newspaper? Do you typically put a week’s worth of unread issues in your recycle bin on garbage day? If this happens regularly, cancel your subscription and buy a
newspaper at the corner stand only when you know you’ll have time to sit and read
it. It’s amazing how available space grows when the piles of newspapers and magazines are discarded.

If you want to keep some articles for future reference, don’t just stack them in the corner. Tear out the pages you want to save and put them somewhere you have a chance of finding them again! A labeled file folder might work. If you prefer keeping the entire issue, note the article and page number
on the cover as a prompt. Otherwise, you’ll repeat the cleaning process when you come across the issue later and wonder why you kept it.

Miscellaneous Stuff

You’ve read our suggestions, referred to organization self-help books and organized some of the household clutter. Now what do you do with your car keys, sunglasses, bike-lock key and miscellaneous puzzle pieces? They need permanent homes
so you’ll be able to find them easily.

If you have an assortment of keys, try hanging a key rack with labeled hooks right by the door. A key rack in the line of traffic is readily accessible and prompts family members to use it. Dropping your keys in your purse or belt pack is fine, assuming you can remember where you’ve tossed them! Purses and belt packs can be moved, but the key rack is always
in the same place.

What about those puzzle pieces? Some children can manage to get the big toys put away but don’t know how to handle the miscellaneous pieces. A labeled box in the corner of the bedroom or playroom can be a collection bin for these things. The child can drop them in her
Lost and Found
box for your help later in finding their rightful places. You can make a project out of painting
the box or personalizing it in some way to encourage its use.

A box also works well for items that family members need to take with them. Your child’s backpack or the dress that needs to go to the cleaner’s can be dropped in this box. If people have
to practically trip over the box to get out the door, there’s a better chance they’ll pick up the items in it.

General Office Management

If you
take the time and effort to carefully design your Clearing Out and Storing Mess Management System, you’ll begin to feel more in control over the disorganization in your world. Unfortunately, household stuff isn’t the only source of organization problems.

We started with these general stuff issues because they’re the easiest to manage. After you get some of these things under control, you need
to think about some of the tougher issues of time and space management. These involve the daily handling, sorting and storing of a multitude of details—appointments, bills and “to do” lists. Time and space issues are tough because they change frequently and require persistent, ongoing attention.

You can think of these details as home-based work that doesn’t pay any salary. The payoff comes in
peace of mind. Let’s take a look at these management issues and some strategies that may help you realize your personal payoff.

Design a Personal Work Space:
When you’re on the job, you have a work space. It might be an office, a construction site or the backseat of your car if you travel as a salesperson. Regardless of the parameters of this work space, it provides the framework for the tasks
you perform. When you’re at home, your work space is usually less well defined. Without a plan, it’s easy to become disorganized.

Do you have a specific place where you handle paperwork? Or do you handle it wherever you happen to be at the moment? When you note an error in your utility bill, do you have to go to several different places before you have the pen, stationery, postage stamp and bill
you need to write your inquiry letter? To
avoid this waste of time and energy, you need to set up an office where you will handle the organizational details of your life.

This space will become a structured place for your work. Ideally, this space would be unused for anything else. If you don’t have this luxury, set aside some space that will be exclusively yours at certain times. And it needs
to be a place that makes you feel comfortable.

We were recently in a newly constructed business office that had virtually no exterior or interior walls. There were several large conference rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows and views of the rooms across the hall and the courtyard below. It was absolutely beautiful and totally useless for a distractible ADDer! Your office doesn’t have to be big
and beautiful. But it does need to be designed to match your style so you’ll be more inclined to use it regularly and consistently.

So where will you set up your work area? Of course this depends on available space. Even if you don’t have a house large enough to accommodate a separate room for your organizational chores, it’s imperative that you find a space somewhere. Is there an unused corner
in your attic? What about the garage? Don’t forget one end of your living room, particularly if the family seldom uses it. With some ingenuity and an inexpensive freestanding screen, you can create your office within a room.

Organization experts emphasize the need to assess individual needs in determining the best place to work. Do you prefer having a good supply of light in your work space?
When is the best time for you to work?

Do you need to be able to look out a window or is this too distracting? Are some colors more comforting to you than others? Is the space in the line of incoming traffic? Do you work better away from family activity or right in the middle of it? If the space doesn’t have a telephone, can you add a phone jack?
What about storage space? Is there a place for
a filing cabinet or drawers for your office supplies?

Think about these questions as you take a house tour with pencil and planning notebook in hand. Take a look at the spaces and note the pros and cons of each. If other family members use the space, how does the timing of their use correspond to your needs? The kitchen table may fit the bill for your work space. But if it’s always in use during
the early-morning hours you prefer to work, the space may not be a good choice. You might not come up with a place that perfectly matches your needs, but you can find one that fits your greatest needs.

Consider the Ergonomics of General Office Organization:
“Ergonomics” is a fancy word with a simple meaning: a design for easy and comfortable access. It’s a key component in organization. If your
telephone is within reach but the phone directory is in the closet across the room, you may opt to ignore making the call. It’s just too much trouble to walk across the room to find the number you need.

Do a personal office inventory in much the same way you inventoried the space and stuff in your house. Look around your space. Do you ever use the hole punch you keep in your pencil holder? If
you use your stapler every day, do you keep it in the back of your drawer? Rearrange your space so the frequently used items are within easy reach. Store the hole punch in the closet and move the stapler to your desktop.

Note: If you’re using shared space for your office, you’ll need portable storage for your supplies. A rolling file cabinet or a box divided into sections may do the trick.

Practical Tools for Mess Management

As you design your work area, consider some of the tools and equipment you can use. Undoubtedly you’ll equip your space with a desk or writing surface and some file folders, pens and
pencils. But there are other, less obvious things you can use to make your life easier. You might want to add them to your supply basket.

Postage Scale:
If you frequently mail more
than just letters, consider buying a postage scale. Weighing your mail at home saves the time and trouble of driving to the post office. It also enables you to complete your task and get the extra paperwork immediately off your desk. Without a scale, your paperwork may end up on your desk a second time when the post office returns it for insufficient postage.

Assortment of Postage Stamps:
To
avoid wasting money on excess postage, keep a variety of stamps on hand for your special mailings.

Return Address Stamp:
Along with these mailing supplies, have a stamp made with your return address and several others for people you correspond with frequently. Although a rubber stamp is more expensive than paper mailing labels, it reduces the quantity of materials you need to handle. It also
eliminates the problem of remembering to mail the reorder form before you run out of labels.

Letter Opener:
This might seem like a rather silly item to list as an important tool. Your fingers probably work just fine for this job. But it really is a useful contribution to the order in your office. Torn envelopes are messy and don’t lie flat in a pile. The postage date or return address you need
for your records might also be unreadable. Neatness isn’t essential to a sense of order, but it doesn’t hurt!

Staples:
Why would we bother including this in our list? Of course you have staples in your supply basket. We’re not trying to insult your intelligence! We bet, though, that when your stapler is empty, you might reach for a paper clip instead. In a word: don’t! Paperwork clipped together
has a mysterious way of becoming unclipped! Then you have to take the extra time
and trouble to find the missing page and reattach it in its proper place. Always keep your stapler loaded so you have to do a task only once.

A Computer and Printer:
This is an invaluable aid for the organizationally impaired! One advantage of a computer is the reduction of the sheer quantity of paperwork and files.
Much of what typically has to be stored in files in a cabinet can be stored instead inside the magical electronics of the computer. The monthly chore of writing checks and reconciling your checkbook can easily be accomplished with accounting software. Better still, sign up for automatic debit bill paying.

As seasoned computer users we want to caution you about the limitations of computer magic!
If your hard drive crashes and burns, you’ll lose your data forever or at least until a data recovery expert charges a keen fee to retrieve it. Make sure you follow the suggestion of computer users everywhere: BACK UP YOUR DATA!