organization is relationships
we tend to think of organization as a physical task – putting things in the place where they belong so that we will be able to find them when we look. in this view, organization comes to be seen as strictly a matter of discipline, and we ascribe a lack of organization to laziness: we aren’t organized because we don’t take the time to put things away.
in actuality, however, a lot of the work and frustration comes not from not putting things where they go, but from not knowing where to put them to begin with. my mother says that the key to cleaning is the mantra: “a place for everything and everything in it’s place,” and over the years i have realized that, when stuff piles up, it is often because there are at least a few things in the pile that i simply don’t know what to do with, and it’s too much of a hassle to think about it. when everything really does have one clear place to go, putting it there is mindlessly easy.
this is because organization is not really a physical task at all. it is a mental puzzle.
the answer to the question “where does this go?” is the same as the answer to the pair of questions “what about this thing makes it meaningful to me?” and “what place can i use to represent that meaning?”
organization is linking a place with a thing by way of a key characteristic of the thing.
being better organized is finding better places as a result of a better understanding of the key characteristics.
from a physical perspective, books arranged neatly on a shelf look the same no matter how they are organized. but libraries would be pretty intimidating places were it not for the card catalog and its descendants, which employ a keen understanding of what it is that people are likely to know when they come looking for a book, and how that knowledge can be used to guide them right to it.