My relationship with colour coding is over. It’s been a good 20-plus
years, but we’re finally ready to head our separate ways. No more
neon binders, no more coloured sticky tabs. From now on, it’s just
me, my desk and 10,000 pieces of miscellaneous paper.
Every year, I tell myself the same garbage lie about getting my shit
together and using a daily planner. I spend half a day wandering
around stationery stores, struggling to make decisions about
highlighters, then another half-day filling a diary up with very
important events, like my own birthday and Christmas. I arrange my
sticky notes, line up folders, and create a ‘process’ for organising
my life. Then, three days later, I inevitably abandon the lot.
If we’re going to be real, there are maybe five people in the world
who benefit from colour coding – the rest of us are just faking it.
Sticky-noting and labelling because, from the outside, it makes
us look like we’ve reached a new level of being On Top of It. Take
that, Mum – I might be living pay cheque to pay cheque, but check
it out, I totally just labelled my tupperware. For me, colour coding,
labelling and organising is little more than an extended exercise
in procrastination. Finding it impossible to write? Why leave the
house or see another human when I could spend the next fivehours rearranging my books by date and author? There seems to
be a pervasive understanding thatwe all work better in ‘organised’
spaces, but while I’m willing to believe we should all occasionally
vacuum, I’m not so convinced that we require well-arranged folders
and half-year to-do lists to adequately function.
I admire people who create alphabetical filing systems that
survive for longer than a week, but I also know those people are
fundamentally unrelatable superhuman freaks, and I no longer
aspire to be like them. Instead, I’m embracing the possibility that,
for some of us, any effort to organise our environment is fatally
flawed and entirely pointless. It’s a freeing realisation, and not just
because it means I can see other people’s well-organised homes
and use the word ‘whatever’. Once I stepped away from my unused
folder dividers and emptied my space of index card holders, I began
to appreciate my mess for what it is: an alternate kind of organising
system that operates entirely on the basis of my ability to remember
there’s “a water bill or something, somewhere in this shitstorm”.
Frankly, there’s something exciting about not knowing exactly what
you’ll find in any given pile. Searching for the gym’s timetable print-
out? Here, have this five-years-out-of-date copy of your CV instead.
It’s not that I think the messy and disorganised among us are
somehow better people. Some of my best friends own label makers!
But Iama little disturbed by the overwhelming prevalence of the
pro-colour coding, organised-to-the-nth-degree myth. As early as
primary school, we’re led to believe that tidiness and organisation
are markers of success, which is why I spent half my school years
freaking out about the state of my desk drawers, when I could have
been learning how to do long division (it never clicked). It’s taken
me well into my 20s to realise – with great surprise – that I don’t
actuallywork better when my coloured pencils are arranged in
order of height, with all the nibs sharpened and facing the same
way. Now that I’ve abandoned planners and folders and said yes to
unstable stacks of mismatched documents, my approach to work is
a little more relaxed. If nothing else, I can cross ‘organise your life’
off my very unofficial mess of a to-do-list.disorderly conduct
SAM PRENDERGAST FINDS COMFORT
IN CHAOS.
PhotoLukasz Wierzbowskirant