Remember when I felt the thrill of victory for cleaning out my purse?

Well, I um…backslid a bit.

I spy a cough drop wrapper, spilled coins, a page from a cat calendar I used the back of for a list...

But, no worries, now that I am aware of the issue, I will get it under control. In fact, this past weekend I was once again struck by the organizing bug. You see…my dresser somehow became the repository of stuff in transit. One of my very bad habits (in organization terms) is that I tend to park stuff in places while I decide what to do with it. And once the object leaves my hand to land in its “transitional space”..it never goes anywhere else.

Even worse, I had not one, but two ancient (stretching back to adolescence) and ugly jewelry boxes. One was even missing a leg (or foot…). Back when I moved in, a friend gave me a really nice “jewelry armoire” that I transferred everything into….except the stuff I didn’t like. The stuff I wasn’t sure about keeping. The random stuff. And even worse, I started parking stuff in the boxes on my dresser.

So, last Saturday, I decided to see what I could do about “unparking” stuff from my dresser top. I started with jewelry box number 1.

behold all my treasures...

Yep…those are receipts, frequent buyer cards, my old Duran Duran pins (and others I showed off in my “Put a Pin in It” post)…jewelry fragments and orphans (well, not so much orphans as earrings that had lost siblings that I thought one day I could do something with). I started sorting. Then mr. strivingcynic, who’s much better at this organizing thing found me at my sorting. He encouraged me to move the “keep” stuff into a small tin for later sorting…and to put the “get rid of stuff” in another pile. Sensing how easily my concentration could be broken, he started bringing boxes, baskets, and other parked stuff over for my review.

The result.

empty (except for the lint)

what was once full...now empty!

The two boxes are now gone. I can actually see the surface of my dresser and the photos of my family that I have placed there. Every time I go into our room I’m surprised at how clean my dresser is. Not only that, but I found almost ten books I was willing to part with and I decluttered the surface of an end table. I have a sense of understanding of that organizational advice that clutter drains your energy, or at least pulls it from how you’d rather be spending your time (even if you’re not cleaning it, if you have to look in fifteen places to find something, it’s taking your time). I can see glimmers of how being organized can improve my life.

Just hope I don’t backslide….

Are you good at implementing change? Please share your “how I got organized” or “how I stopped using my purse as a wastebasket” stories!