Organization is not my forte

Shelves help preserve my sanity.

Even a quick glance at this blog would alert a person to my horrible lack of organization. It’s always been this way. Messy room, papers thrown together, clothes piled in the laundry basket, my car looking like I live out of it. It’s not that I’m inherently a dirty person or that I don’t try, but I become overwhelmed so easily that I can’t maintain the things I have.

Digital files help me get through my day. See this picture of all my makeshift shelves I made by piling bookcases on top of each other? All those three ring binders and shoeboxes are filled with photographs and negatives. Thousands of them. And I haven’t really shot film since 2007. I got my first digital camera in 2003 and have faithfully kept all of my pictures. Gigabytes and gigabytes of images. I used a 4MP camera for three years and still managed to horde the equivalent of many illegally downloaded high quality movies. Not that I’d know.

My digital photos are meticulously organized only because it would become a shitstorm if they weren’t. I have a root folder, “Photographs.” Inside that are more folders, each with a year. Inside the “2005” folder are twelve folders, from “2005 – January” to “2005 – December.” And in each of those twelve folders are days during which I took pictures. So, Photographs > 2012 > 2012 – July > July 12, 2012. This is the only way I can keep track of 40,000+ digital photographs I’ve taken in the last decade.

Yeah, I just checked. That is a stupid amount of pictures. But it’s kind of my thing.

Even my socks don't match.

I’m the same way with my professional photographs that I sell. Those are separated into folders for each image, and then each image folder has subfolders for templates, watermarks, examples and anything else I could possibly need. And therein lies my problem: I’m a bit of a packrat, even in the digital world. I don’t want to let go of something in case I may need it later on.

I take on so many projects with high hopes and dream up wonderful, intricate components. And it’s not uncommon for me to not finish what I’ve started, or at least not finish it gracefully. I do a lot of things half-assed and it’s not because I’m lazy or that I don’t want to put in the effort. I want to make things the way I want them, which gets me overwhelmed, which makes me anxious, which makes me depressed. By the end, I’m happy if I’ve just completed what I set out to do.

So while I tread the blogging waters that I’ve tiptoed back into, I see all the changes I want to make. The header I want to update, the tags I want to organize and the overall direction I want to take my writing. And I feel confident that I’ll get there eventually but I won’t stress over it. Because organization isn’t everything.