Organization Overload

I've always considered myself to be well organized. And with that, I feel one also has to pay close attention to detail. Maybe I should have gone into interior design or architecture or something, but even since I was in middle school I've been very careful about planning and arranging things. When I would get bored with how my room was set up, I would measure all my furniture pieces, draw a very basic "blueprint" of my room--windows, outlets, vents, etc--and then sketch possibilities for the new arrangement until I found one I liked. I did this with our new house, as well. Once the cabinets were installed I began measuring them and mentally (and yes, there was a written list as well) filling them with items, being sure to keep items in their respective "groups"--baking, cooking, oils/vinegars, tableware, storage containers, etc. When we were debating what to put on one of our large, blank walls in the house, I diagrammed it on a piece of paper, being sure to indicate where the lamp and TV and other items overlapped with the wall space so that we could have a mini sketch board--and yes, everything was drawn to scale.


Why, you ask, am I bothering to share one of my little "habits"? Because I fear it's gotten out of control. Sometimes I find myself organizing things just for the sake of organizing them. No real tangible purpose, no real tangible application, and often, no real reason to go back and utilize the organization. But I do it anyway. Case in point. I have a list of books that I want to read. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Not my list. It's got over 500 books on it. It's organized alphabetically by the author's last name. I've got notes about genre next to the titles. There's a random number generator that picks for me the next book off my list (it's an Excel document). Do you know how many times I've actually used the random number generator to pick books off the list? Once. Mostly because I have such a stack of books that I buy second-hand that I feel like I need to read first since I already own them. And just when the pile starts to dwindle, Christmas or my birthday or a stroll past marked-down books happens and I'm right back where I started. 


But that's not even the worst of it. Lately, I've been really into reading cooking blogs. And I don't just start following a blog from the day I stumble upon it. If I find one I like I'll go back and read all the old posts. And then, when I find a recipe I like, I save the website. I recently discovered the flaw in this system though; at work I use a Mac (love!) but at home I have a PC, which means I can't access the saved web files off my flash drive at home. My solution? Create a Google Docs document to store all of the hyperlinks (organized by type of food, of course). But then I decided that wasn't good enough, because the hyperlinks don't always include the full name of the recipe, which makes it hard for me to just look down the list and see what sounds good. So I decided to type the full name of the recipe next to the link. Then I figured that while I was doing that I might as well type some of the main/perishable ingredients; you know, so that way next time we have grape tomatoes to use up I can just go to my Google Docs, type "grape tomatoes" and have it match me with all the recipes that use that ingredient. And it gets worse. I'm having so much fun doing this that I also want to type up the names of all the recipes that we already have in our recipe box and list the ingredients for those so that all of our recipes are included in my searches. Odds that I'll ever use this document enough to compensate for all the time I'm putting into it? Not very good. Likelihood that I care? Not at all.


Got anything that you need pointlessly organized? I'm your gal! The more portable the better! (which, for the record, portability is the only reason my basement is as messy as it is. In my head I know where everything is going and I've already starting buying the totes for storage, I'm just not home enough to bring my ideas to fruition!)