Big Picture -- Little Picture
I can often group my clients into two categories: those who focus primarily on the big picture, and those who focus primarily on the details. Both types of thinkers have their strengths, but they also both have their challenges when it comes to organizing.
The big-picture thinkers have no patience for all the little doodads that tend to amass. I commonly find a few boxes in a client's house, never unpacked from a move, filled with miscellanous doodads. These are the boxes my large-picture clients want to avoid at all costs. They tell me we'll do those later, or, if they aren't prone to collecting, they might just dump the whole box in the garbage. To them it's too time-consuming to separate out office supplies from bathroom supplies from audio tapes. Making the little stuff go away is a short term strategy that sometimes leads one astray from their overall goal of household systems that keep the clutter from amassing in the first place. An organized home needs systems for both the big and the little stuff, and sifting through a box of miscellany is one great way to test out and expand upon your existing systems. My challenge for these large-picture thinkers -- especially those who find themselves at mid-age with MANY of those miscellany boxes and drawers springing up throughout the house -- is to cultivate the patience to go through the boxes and drawers, piece by piece, and make decisions about each little object. The decisions you make now will result in the development of your organizing systems. (See the section on Zoning before going ahead with this!)
Large picture thinkers also oftentimes think in "big" categories, rather than dividing things by usage. For example, I would divide a child's art materials by use -- markers together, glue and adhesives together, etc. A large-picture thinker has no problem with throwing it all together in one big tub, since that is how their brain processes the materials. This way of thinking is great when it comes to furniture layout -- they often get it pretty quickly -- but when it comes to the little stuff, the system outgrows itself almost immediately. One big problem that results is that the little stuff sifts to the bottom of the drawer or container, and everything just becomes a jumbled mess. Then when the container is full, they might start another one, filled with many overlapping categories as the first, but now housed separately. My role here as an organizer is to help break down these large categories into much smaller units.
The little-picture thinkers easily get mired in all the details. They hire me to help them see the forest through the trees, and also to keep them on track. If they are paper collectors, they will have a hard time resisting printing out every interesting article on the internet. Imagine being able to see the molecules of every object in your home. It would be overwhelming. Similarly, the extremely detail-oriented person can be overwhelmed by minutiae. They may have a gorgeous drawer system where the staples are separated from the paperclips and so on, but much of the house remains disorganized because their time was spent on creating the perfect systems.
The big-picture thinkers have no patience for all the little doodads that tend to amass. I commonly find a few boxes in a client's house, never unpacked from a move, filled with miscellanous doodads. These are the boxes my large-picture clients want to avoid at all costs. They tell me we'll do those later, or, if they aren't prone to collecting, they might just dump the whole box in the garbage. To them it's too time-consuming to separate out office supplies from bathroom supplies from audio tapes. Making the little stuff go away is a short term strategy that sometimes leads one astray from their overall goal of household systems that keep the clutter from amassing in the first place. An organized home needs systems for both the big and the little stuff, and sifting through a box of miscellany is one great way to test out and expand upon your existing systems. My challenge for these large-picture thinkers -- especially those who find themselves at mid-age with MANY of those miscellany boxes and drawers springing up throughout the house -- is to cultivate the patience to go through the boxes and drawers, piece by piece, and make decisions about each little object. The decisions you make now will result in the development of your organizing systems. (See the section on Zoning before going ahead with this!)
Large picture thinkers also oftentimes think in "big" categories, rather than dividing things by usage. For example, I would divide a child's art materials by use -- markers together, glue and adhesives together, etc. A large-picture thinker has no problem with throwing it all together in one big tub, since that is how their brain processes the materials. This way of thinking is great when it comes to furniture layout -- they often get it pretty quickly -- but when it comes to the little stuff, the system outgrows itself almost immediately. One big problem that results is that the little stuff sifts to the bottom of the drawer or container, and everything just becomes a jumbled mess. Then when the container is full, they might start another one, filled with many overlapping categories as the first, but now housed separately. My role here as an organizer is to help break down these large categories into much smaller units.
The little-picture thinkers easily get mired in all the details. They hire me to help them see the forest through the trees, and also to keep them on track. If they are paper collectors, they will have a hard time resisting printing out every interesting article on the internet. Imagine being able to see the molecules of every object in your home. It would be overwhelming. Similarly, the extremely detail-oriented person can be overwhelmed by minutiae. They may have a gorgeous drawer system where the staples are separated from the paperclips and so on, but much of the house remains disorganized because their time was spent on creating the perfect systems.
posted by A Simpler Life at 9:13 PM
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