I am not an inherently orderly person. In point of fact, I am a cluttery packrat. I inherited it from my parents, who are even worse about it than I am (as anyone who's seen their house will attest). Compared to them, I'm positively a neatnik. I always used to think it was the height of comedy that my mother would yell at me to clean my room ... I always wondered why my room should be the only clean one in the house.

Unlike some folks, it's not that I like clutter; it's just that I dislike clutter less than I dislike cleaning up the place. But lately that's started to change, which I think is at least partly related to stress. The more stressed I get about work/health/killer asteroids/whatever, the more clutter irks me. And few things stress me the way summer does, so as you can imagine, the past few weeks have been something like a constant buzzing noise just behind my right ear.

Some of it is also related to the way things have been changing at work. With our big I.T. reorganization, and the process of adopting the agile programming model, I've become even more "all about to-do lists" than I was before. My workday is now more-or-less spelled out ahead of time by my task list in Outlook, and while that sounds pretty dreary, it actually helps keep me focused and keeps things from slipping through the cracks, which in the long run cranks up my morale because I don't get irate calls from other departments asking where the heck is that thing I promised them a week ago and promptly forgot about. Moving cubicles again has also been a factor, as the new one is nice and tidy (aside from a stack of stuff that needs filing, that I've been whittling away at a little each day), and I would like to keep it this way.

All this New Shipshapeness at work is gradually influencing me at home, too. Last night I spent most of the evening going through boxes of miniatures that needed organizing and putting away, I've been a lot more consistent with things like laundry, dishes, and household accounting, and so on. There's still a long way to go before my workspace (and especially my drawing table) is the epitome of "a place for everything and everything in its place," but I can definitely see improvement, and I'm likin' it. :)

-The Gneech