Organization - A Necessity in Your Twenties

People always talk about organizing their lives, but so rarely do they actually follow through.  For whatever reason, I've been more conscientious about it in the last few years. 

For the first time since I opened my email account, I have only 4 unread messages at any given time.  I have less than 50 messages in my inbox at any given time.  I know where everything is (at least generally) in my apartment.  The only exception is the office, which I leave to Christian's care because he uses the space much more than I do.  Although, to his credit, he has become much more conscientious of paperwork, junk, and keeping things relatively tidy.

People might wonder how I got so lucky to have a husband who cleans up after himself.  Honestly, it wasn't always this way.  Just like I haven't always had a relatively clean inbox, Christian hasn't always organized his things.  It just happened.  He bugged me to keep my voice-mail and email clean, and I bugged him to organize his things.  We still have a long way to go to in order to have our living space look the way I want it to be, but part of that is just the unsettled nature of being young and married in your twenties. Twenty-somethings don't settle.  They wander around through that fateful decade accumulating random things - both objects like furniture and paintings, as well as experiences and geographies as they figure out where they are going to eventually build their proverbial nests.  If you're lucky like Christian and I, you ended up with a great set of furniture, but you live in a place that has much less space than you have furniture.  So no matter how organized you are, you have more things than you need.

The natural inclination is to dump.  I would agree with that, in theory, except for the fact that good furniture is expensive especially when  you're starting out.  A living room that could be replaced for $3000 makes the cost of storage seem like a pittance (which doesn't account for the other rooms' costs).  For now at least, I will put up with the slight clutter of having too many large pieces of furniture in a small space.  It's made so much more bearable by our burgeoning organization skills.  Thank GOD!