Shavin: Organizing is the new black

It’s a new year and with that comes, for many people, a desire to do things, stop doing things, or do things differently. I simply want to get organized. This is the year I’m going to put all my pantry staples in jars instead of baggies and separate the coffin-sized Tupperware of photographs in my closet into smaller Tupperwares labeled “Family”; “Dogs”; “Friends”; “Who Are These People”; and “That Time I Wore That Thing and Mistakenly Thought It Looked Good.”

The pantry-organizing has already started. Black lentils, Jasmine rice and brown sugar are all beautifully displayed in repurposed, round-bellied olive jars. Plump little mung beans peek out from a petite, ornate jelly jar. I don’t know when or why I bought them or what they go in, but they’re safely contained now. Ditto the dried fava beans. Safely contained too is the nutritional yeast I was assured would revolutionize the way I approached vegan cooking and maybe even my life. What will actually happen is that I will never use it and never throw it away.

Because I have organizing on my mind, when my friend (the same friend responsible for the nutritional yeast in my pantry) offered to show me a program called Scrivener, a digital organizational system for writers that promises, rather cutely, to banish “page fright,” I was totally game. I turned down her offer of a glass of wine to sip while viewing the program, though I shouldn’t have. If there’s one thing I know by now it’s that I learn better when I try to do two things at once, and one of those things is drinking wine.

Scrivener, it turns out, really is the gold standard of organizational tools (second only to the repurposed jar). It lets you pull in your manuscript (previously scattered all over your desktop in files titled “Chapter 1,” “Chapter 1 Final,” “Chapter 1 Final Final” and “Chapter 1 Seriously I Mean It Final,” and view them on a virtual “corkboard.” You can then review, rename, eviscerate, move around and seamlessly reintegrate those chapters into the primary document, sans titles. For anyone who has ever tried to merge Word files only to lose weeks of their life in the attempt to fix the page numbers, this last is huge. The program does a bunch of other things too, but because I refused the wine, I don’t know what those things are.

Over the New Year’s weekend, I was interested to see that there was actually a discussion raging on the internet about the pros and cons of organizing. (Climate change causing Earth to slowly disintegrate? Smattering of interest. Organizing? Fanatical concern.)

There are many tools available to the would-be organizer. There’s the multidimensional, multifunctional binder that offers calendars broken down by week, day and month; an address book; a phone log; note pages with dividers; pouches for pens; a 6-inch ruler in case an emergency measuring situation should crop up in a meeting and the thing needing measuring is no bigger than a dollar bill; and slots for loose ends. This system was all the rage in the 1980s. A grad-school friend had one stuffed so full of pages and to-do lists that the binder yawned open at all times, threatening to disgorge its contents. Years later, my husband’s mother would tell us that whenever she stuffed a sponge into the ceramic frog-mouth sponge holder on her sink, she gagged. This is exactly what happened to me whenever I looked at my friend’s overstuffed organizer.

These days there is something newish in the world of organizing called “bullet journaling,” which is supposedly a streamlined approach to goal-setting. There are also online organizers, plain and simple paper wall calendars and, of course, the cellphone. Those who are pro organizing say these tools keep them focused and on point and swear that they are more productive as a result. Those who are against assisted organizing argue that the act of organizing can too easily become yet another chore to check off our to-do list and that instead of creating more time by helping us make good use of it, we’re spending our time plotting at the expense of living. Not structuring every moment leaves space for down time, and down time, they allege, isn’t a bad thing.

Which brings us back to nutritional yeast. You either like it or you don’t. You feel it will either revolutionize your life or it won’t. Or you don’t know, and so you hang halfway in between, afraid to take a stand completely against it while at the same time leery about incorporating it into your life on a regular basis. In the end, you are left wondering whether you’d be more productive if you just ate the yeast. Whether you’d be happier, more successful, less anxious.

Perhaps you’d become immortal.

Here’s what I know: It’s a messy world. It’s good to be mindful of your time. The days will keep coming regardless of how we work to order them. And unlike powdery nutritional yeast, they’re probably better embraced than constrained.

Dana Shavin is the author of a memoir, “The Body Tourist.” Her website is Danashavin.com. Email her at dana@danashavin.com.