irresponsible adhd cleaning/organisation advice
once you render something neat and tidy, it becomes easier to keep it neat and tidy
however, this only works if you find the right kind of neat and tidy. yes, this sounds like some sort of ‘if you only believe hard enough’ but hear me out (read me out? stick with me?)
neat and tidy here doesn’t mean ‘i put it away so no one will see it, because if the room is empty, then it is by necessity neat’
it means ‘this thing now lives somewhere where it makes sense for it to live, both in terms of getting it in order to use it and in putting it away after using it’
it’s not necessarily easy to figure out where things need to go in order for that to work, but that’s the neat thing about this system. you don’t need to walk up to the thing, and look at it, and consider where it should reasonably be stored. you just. leave the thing be where it is, until you need it next, at which point you might have to take it into another room or combine it with something else or any number of other things, and you might forget you were intending to use it at some point in this process, but you now have immediate data on how you use the thing. not on how it should be used, not on how other people use it, not on any sort of ideal or perfect use of it, but on what you do when you need to use this thing
and with that freshly in mind, you can look at it and decide where to leave it until you use it next. it might stay there, it might not, you might add other things to it, you might move it a bit because other things need to be in a similar location and you don’t have infinite storage space, but it’ll be closer to where you generally expect and/or need it to be
and then just... keep doing that until the thing has one (or a small number of) places where it belongs, and where it’s easy to keep it
for example, the thing where clean clothes just... accumulate around the dryer or in a heap on the bedroom floor, or really anywhere but your wardrobe
at some point, after ‘remove the wardrobe doors’ or ‘make folding clothes simpler’ didn’t work for me, and after having to look for socks for ages in the pile of clean clothes, i decided to try a different approach. i could see where the clothes accumulate, so i got a box, and set it next to that pile, and just separated out the socks. just that. not all of the socks, even. but when i had the pile of clothes, there were usually a few socks visible, so i took them and put them in the socksbox. and in the morning, when i needed socks, i didn’t have to go through the entire pile, i could just get them from the box instead
and since that seemed to work pretty well, i added another box for underpants, because they are also easily taken from the clean clothes pile and dumped into a box. and then, i added another box for t-shirts, because those are also quite frequent parts of the pile
and maybe a year later or so, a put a shelf next to where the clean clothes pile lives, so that i had more space, and because i ran out of boxes. and i still don’t fold my clean laundry most of the time, and when i’m having a bad brain day/week/month, the pile might still accumulate a bit, but even then it’s a lot easier to deal with, because it’s right there, and so is the proper storage, and i might not be able to deal with all of it, but i am usually able, when i walk past it, to pick up a sock or a pair of underpants or a pillowcase or whatever is on top of it, and shove that into the box or shelf where it lives, and the clean clothes might stay there for a while, until my brain is working more reasonably again, but it doesn’t spread too much, and i won’t have too much trouble finding socks or underwear, and all of that at least helps to keep me from spiraling too far
it doesn’t look neat and tidy according to any popular sort of interior design, but i know where my clean clothes generally are, the giant overwhelming mountain of things i need to tidy up but can’t has shrunken into a manageable hill, and i don’t lose five minutes every morning trying to find the other sock
it’s not necessarily pretty, but it does what it needs to do, and that’s all i need
