Organizing Some Friday Five Answers

1. Would you consider yourself an organized person? Why or why not? No. Although I'm not nearly as disorganized as some people I've known (not that I'm naming any names!), I'm still more towards the disorganized end of the spectrum than otherwise. Some aspects of my life are far more organized than others, though. OK, here's an example that tells you pretty nearly everything you need to know about my organizational habits: I have a filing cabinet with labelled files for all kinds of things: bills, credit card statements, medical records, all the usual stuff. I also have huge piles of papers on my kitchen table, consisting of unsorted bills, credit card statements, medical records, and, well, all the usual stuff. Every few months, I will sort through the latter, organize it into the former, and start building up the piles all over again.

2. Do you keep some type of planner, organizer, calendar, etc. with you, and do you use it regularly? Nope. I bought a very cool Discworld appointment book/planner thingy, because, you know, it was Discworld, and it was cool! And then I realized I had absolutely nothing to use it for. I think it's somewhere on the kitchen table, among all the piles of bills and stuff. What can I say? My life just isn't that full.

3. Would you say that your desk is organized right now? Well, if I did, I'd be lying. My desk at work is mainly dominated by two large piles of papers. I think there was supposed to be some logic to what went in what pile, like one of them was important stuff I might need to look at often, and the other one was unimportant stuff I could safely ignore. But I don't think that's actually the case, and even if it was, I have no idea which one is supposed to be which.

4. Do you alphabetize CDs, books, and DVDs, or does it not matter? Yes. In fact, this is the one area of my life in which I am probably the most organized. My CDs are in order, first by (very broad) genre, then alphabetical by artist, then by title. The books are divided into non-fiction paperback, non-fiction hardback, fiction paperback, fiction hardback, poetry, humor, Star Trek books, and Doctor Who books. (The other media tie-in books aren't numerous enough to rate their own sections, and get filed under the appropriate category of fiction.) The fiction books are sorted alphabetically by author and title, and the non-fiction ones are loosely organized by subject. That's all just for the books I've read, though. The To-Be-Read Piles are only sorted by fiction/non-fiction status and cover type, not alphabetically or anything. Which is starting to make it very difficult to deal with, actually... Oh, and the DVDs go: first TV shows, then movies, organized by title within each category.

5. What's the hardest thing you've ever had to organize? That'd have to be the book collection. Keeping them sorted alphabetically is a pain, because every time I finish a book and add it to the appropriate section, I've got to move everything around. And there's really no good way to organize the non-fiction books. Deciding exactly what a book's subject is is a fuzzy enough judgment call. (I could use the Dewey Decimal System, or, better still, the Library of Congress system, but not all of the books have Dewey numbers and fewer still have LC ones.) And figuring out a way to keep books of similar height together is a good thing, especially when the height of your shelves varies. That's not much of a problem with the paperbacks or with the fiction hardbacks, whose heights don't vary all that much, but the non-fic is all over the place. I'm not 100% happy with the way I've got them all arranged now, but it's acceptable and at least I'm not having too much difficulty finding things.