Ramblings from an organisational spree

I found the picture-hanging strips again.

I had found them yesterday too, which is probably why it annoyed me. The first time, it felt useful. The second time, it was just a reminder that I had noticed the problem and then left it exactly where it was.

They were in the drawer with the measuring tape. That is not a ridiculous place for them. That is the annoying part. If they were somewhere obviously wrong, I could just move them and feel briefly competent. But they were in the drawer with the hooks and the little screwdriver and some cable ties and a few other things that also live in that vague category of “small household intervention.” So now the drawer has a defence. Not a good defence, but enough of one that moving them becomes a decision rather than an obvious correction.

This is where organisation starts becoming irritating. It is not usually the big things. Plates are easy. Towels are easy. Books are not easy, but at least they are openly difficult and do not pretend otherwise. The problem is all the little things that almost belong in several places. The things that are not used often, but when they are needed, they are needed immediately. The things that are too useful to throw away and too awkward to classify properly.

A drawer is often just where these decisions go.

Not always. Some drawers work. I am not against drawers. I am not even against messy drawers. A messy drawer can be perfectly functional if the mess has some history to it. You know where to put your hand. You know what has to be lifted out of the way. You know that the tape is probably under the old batteries but above the little packet of hooks. That sort of thing may look untidy, but it is still a working system. A very ugly one, perhaps, but working.

What annoys me is the version of tidiness that only makes sense when nobody is actually using the thing. You see this with a lot of organisation advice. It assumes a person who has both hands free, enough time, and a level of calm that I do not usually have when looking for tape. The drawer is not being tested when you open it slowly and admire the containers. The drawer is being tested when something is half attached to a wall, one screw has already fallen somewhere, the thing you are holding is heavier than expected, and someone else is asking whether you are nearly done.

That is when you find out whether the system works.

And yes, the answer is supposed to be that you put things back properly. Fine. I know. Everyone knows. That advice is not wrong, exactly, but it skips over the bit where use does not always end in a clean little moment called “putting away.” Sometimes the job mutates while you are doing it. Sometimes you take out one screwdriver and discover you need another. Sometimes the wall plug is wrong. Sometimes the thing you thought would take two minutes turns into twenty minutes of finding out that the previous person who fixed it was either desperate or a fool. Then the phone rings, or something on the stove needs attention, or you have to go and get a torch, which leads to the separate problem of where the torch is supposed to live.

The torch is a good example, actually. Where should a torch live? Near the bed? Near the front door? With the batteries? In the kitchen? In the car? The answer depends on what has gone wrong. If the power goes out, it should be where you can reach it in the dark. If something rolls under a cabinet, it should be in the kitchen. If the car has a problem, it should be in the car. If the batteries are flat, then wherever the torch is, it is mostly decorative anyway, so perhaps the batteries and torch should live together, except then you have moved the torch away from one of the places you might need it.

This is what I mean by almost belonging. The thing has several sensible homes, and each sensible home is only sensible under one version of the future.

The same thing happens with small tools. The little screwdriver belongs with tools, unless it is the screwdriver for opening battery compartments, in which case it probably belongs near the batteries, unless the batteries are in the drawer with the tape, unless the thing with the battery compartment is a toy or remote or kitchen scale, in which case really the screwdriver should be near the thing it opens. But then you would need several little screwdrivers, and of course you do end up with several, because every cheap tool kit includes one, and every flat-pack object seems to arrive with an Allen key that you cannot throw away because some bolt somewhere may one day demand it.

This is why the phrase “a place for everything” bothers me when people say it too confidently. It is not that the phrase is wrong. It is that it makes belonging sound simpler than it is. A thing does not belong somewhere because the universe has assigned it a shelf. It belongs somewhere because a person will need it later, under some condition, and that person will have to guess where an earlier version of themselves decided to put it.

That earlier version of yourself is the problem. He is always too optimistic.

He thinks he will remember. He thinks this new arrangement is obvious. He thinks “with the tools” and “with the household bits” and “in the drawer near the door” are stable categories. They are not. They are moods pretending to be categories. They make sense at the moment you create them, especially if you have just emptied a drawer and are sitting on the floor surrounded by batteries, hooks, tape, screws, a measuring tape, expired glue, and three pens, none of which you trust.

The strange thing is that while you are sorting it all, it really does feel as if the problem is being solved. You make piles. The piles look meaningful. You throw away some actual rubbish, which helps. You find duplicates, which is embarrassing but also useful. You find something you were looking for weeks ago and no longer need. You find one object that you cannot identify at all, but which looks too specific to be rubbish. That is always a bad object. It has the shape of importance without the courtesy of explanation.

So you keep it.

Then you put everything back in a new arrangement. For a few days, it works. Maybe even a week. Then some ordinary thing happens. Someone needs tape. You take out the tape, use it, and leave it beside the thing you were fixing because you are not done yet. Later it gets moved to the bench. Then to the drawer, but not the same drawer. Or you put the batteries in the tool drawer because you were holding both batteries and a screwdriver. Or the measuring tape gets left in another room because the thing being measured was in that room, and apparently distance is enough to change belonging.

Nobody is being especially careless here. That is the point. The system fails under normal use, not exceptional use.

A kitchen can sometimes avoid this because it is organised around repeated action. Not always. Some kitchens are disasters in cupboards. But a good kitchen works because the objects live near the movement that needs them. The tea is near the kettle. The cups are near the tea. The knives are near the chopping board. You do not have to think too much because the room has learned the action.

Other parts of the house do not have such clear actions. The drawer near the front door is used for leaving, entering, fixing, finding, postponing, and hiding things from the table when someone is coming over. That is too many jobs for one drawer, but most houses have at least one like that. It becomes the place for keys, coins, tape, receipts, old batteries, one pen, two dead pens, the thing that came off the other thing, and the small envelope you cannot throw away because it might contain something official.

The garage is worse. The garage is where objects go when the house cannot decide whether they are useful, sentimental, expensive, dangerous, or rubbish. Paint tins. Old cables. Spare screws. Tools. Boxes from things that might need to be returned but are well past any possible return period. Parts from furniture. The extra shelf peg. The odd bracket. The e-waste pile that exists because taking it to e-waste is definitely going to happen, but apparently not today.

And the difficulty is that some of it really will be useful. That is what keeps the whole nonsense alive. Once in a while, the stupid drawer saves you. You need a strange screw, and there it is. You need an old cable, and somehow the cable box has it. You need one of those little adhesive pads from a packet you nearly threw out, and the drawer produces it like it has been waiting for this moment. After that, every other questionable object in the drawer gains another six months of life by association.

So no, I do not think the answer is simply to throw everything out. That is just the opposite kind of foolishness. The answer is probably to organise around use rather than category, and around annoyed future use rather than calm present sorting. Where will I look for this when I need it? What will I be doing? What will I already be holding? Will I remember this category when I am tired, or does it only make sense right now because I am standing over the drawer like a tiny bureaucrat of household objects?

That last question is probably the useful one, though I do not like what it implies about most of my storage decisions.

The picture-hanging strips are still beside the measuring tape. I have not moved them. I am not entirely convinced I should. The drawer is not wrong enough, and that is somehow worse than being wrong.