Neatness and order are not the same. It is possible to have neatness
without order, and order without neatness, but the consequences are different.
Neatness without order
If you have neatness without order, your house will look gorgeous
inside and you’ll have lots of bins and drawers and places to put things, but
you will still feel like your life is in shambles and like you can’t get a
handle on everything. (Duplicates
everywhere. Things getting lost.)
Neatness without order is often what one achieves when you
have to clean up the guest room for people coming to visit but you don’t have
time to organize it all so you just stash things in boxes and hide them away.
Neatness without order is also what advertisements are
selling when you see a picture marketing the newest desk or closet system or
garage-rack-hanging-from-the-ceiling.
It’s visually appealing. It makes you think if you only had that thing, then you could be organized
and live a less-cluttered life.
What it doesn’t show you is the mental systems that are
in place to create order and which maintain order over time. It doesn’t show
you the work that people do to keep things looking neat and organized over
months and years. (Yes, it is a little bit of work. It’s just spread out and made habitual over time of practice.)
Order without neatness
Order without neatness is not particularly visual appealing,
but it works. The consequences of order without neatness is that a person’s
life flows pretty well, they are on top of things…but they may have a feeling
every so often that they want to escape the complexities of life. Or they might stare longingly at home decorating magazine spreads of minimalistic interiors. Systems are in place to handle things,
but they aren’t very pretty.
Sometimes people think that order-without-neatness is not
really organized because it doesn’t look nice. I disagree. The purpose of organization is to help us deal
successfully with life and live happily, while not missing appointments or
losing things, or neglecting important responsibilities. If you can do that with your systems,
you are living successfully. The marketers selling the spiffy
organization aids don’t want you to think so, but you are. You don’t have to listen to them.
If you want to try to create more visual appeal for your
systems, you can. If you have
order without neatness, odds are you have enough wisdom to see beneath the
surface of any object designed to organize and tell whether it is really going
to help you or whether it will actually become a hinderance. (Yeah, hindrances exist, I’m sure you
can think of at least a few examples.)
Happy medium
I have a certain amount of order-without-neatness. I have
personally noticed that if I try to add too much neatness, I actually create
more of a burden for myself. (Or this could be ADD tendencies...)
Specialized containers for odd-shaped things can break and then are hard
to replace. If something breaks
from a matching set of containers, it is almost impossible to find a
replacement for that either. If I
let categorization can get too granular it can be too unwieldy to
maintain. Bags in boxes in
containers in crates make things hard to get to for often-used things, but they
are okay for things rarely accessed.
I think the key is to prioritize functionality over style. It
is best to find a happy medium. Your home may not look like a Better Homes and
Gardens organization issue feature, but it will be attractive and really functional.
