Organization

When the new Wal-Mart opened up in town, the great big enormous one that I avoid like the plague because I hate it, my little sister’s friend Erin Molly was in love with it. She could not get over how beautifully it was organized. And I laughed at her, because yes, it was organized, but it was still – you know – EVIL. I felt like organization was all very well, but there were certain trade-ins you just don’t want to make in your life. For instance, the old Wal-Mart was very close to my house and very convenient to get to, and the new Wal-Mart was way less convenient and located on a crowded busy road. And to me, swapping convenient for organized is not a good trade.

I bring this up as an example of my hypocrisy because I just clicked like nine folders to get to the file I wanted. I am compulsive about organizing my computer files. Computer files can be like such a nice beautiful filing system, with subfiles, which is hard to do in a physical filing system. You can put things in a folder, and then in a more specific folder inside the first folder, and then inside a more specific folder again, and then inside that folder, inside a folder that is STILL MORE SPECIFIC EVEN THAN THAT. As far as I am concerned, the more folders I have to open up to get to the file I want, the more virtuously organized I am.

When I was still in school, I had a folder that said "Class Stuff", which insouciant title might suggest to the casual observer a general laissez-faire philosophy when it came to organizing my school files. NOT SO MY FRIEND.

Inside "Class Stuff", I had it organized by semester ("Fall 2006", "Spring 2007" and so forth), and inside each semester I had it organized by class. Then inside each class folder, I had a folder for class information, like the syllabus, project descriptions, and that stuff. I had a folder labeled Assignments, and then subfolders for each major project in the class; I used to make these on the very first day of class, and it made me feel pleasantly well-prepared for what was going to come. For each paper I was going to write, I made a folder where I put my notes, and a folder where I put the PDF files of articles I was going to reference, and then a folder for drafts of the paper. That meant that if I wanted to get to the current draft of my paper, I had to open up six folders. Six, and I will count them for you - "Class Stuff", "Fall 2006", "Milton", "Assignments", "Term Paper", "Drafts".

Yeah. Efficiency is my middle name.