One Rock At a Time…The Big Organizing Secret

The Rule of the Rock

My husband calls it tottering.  I call it walking.  And that tottering walking is where the disorganized organizer got her beginning.  A walk and a rock.

I walk on our beautiful, pine-wooded ranch almost every day.  I love meandering around on our peaceful paths.  I vary which path I will walk.  Usually the path has a purpose, one for checking each well the cows water from, one to get to the main barnyard and my parent’s house, one to check and see if the elk are on the high field we can’t see from the house and one that I call a whimsy path that I just enjoy.

I love these walks.  They are relaxing and generally I don’t encounter too many problems…except the rocks.  Yeah, I know God put them there for a purpose, but with my balance problems and both legs having been broken, snapped or surgerized, these fist sized rocks can be the death of me…at the very least the death of me below the waist.  With my wimpy bones, a stumble can mean three months in a cast and wheelchair, an added 30 pounds of sitting-too-much flab and tens of thousands in medical bills.

One day I decided to move these rocks.  A monumental task to be sure, six hundred acres of paths scattered with fist sized leg breakers.  How to do it?  ONE ROCK AT A TIME!  It’s kind of like eating an elephant one bite at a time.  

So every time I walk, I pick up one rock and carry it a short distance to a pile of its buddies.  If I walk 30 times in a month and I pick up 30 rocks, I have picked up 360 rocks in a year. A lot of rocks, huh?  

But, WAIT!  What if I move 2 rocks every day?  Think about that one, uh huh.  

2 X 30 = 60   There’s more.   60 X 12 = 720 rocks

Wow, pretty impressive…and I’m not just talking about my math skills.

Was it difficult to move these 720 rocks?  No.  Did it burn a lot of energy and brain power?  No.  Did I get a lot accomplished with very little effort?  Heck, yeah.

So, let’s use a conveyance syndrome and apply that technique to the Hell Zone we call our homes, the cluttered pits we spend so many hours digging through to find what we need.  We can change our environment one rock at a time.  One rock at a time.  One rock at a time.

You may be asking yourself, “What is a conveyance syndrome?”  It really doesn’t matter, but it is a term I made up and I think it’s a pretty good one.  We are conveying one idea and making it work for another problem.  See, conveyance syndrome.  

Back to conveying.  We’re going to bump it up a notch. We really can’t get rid of years of clutter disposing of it one piece at a time.  But…what if each day we were to get rid of 30 items?  I’m talking 30.  Ten in three rooms…that’s 30.  Today I went into the bathroom to look for something under the sink.  Of course, that is one of my still cluttered areas…or was.  I took ten items that were gooey with soap or smelled of toothpaste that hadn’t seen daylight for eight years and threw them away.  Hmm, that side of the cabinet looks immensely improved.

Next, I wandered through the office on my way to take garbage out, grabbed a handful of last year’s piled mail I was going to read someday and sorted through that  handful.  I tore up and threw away more than ten items, probably twenty-some, but it took me a grand total of two minutes.  Then, I walked into the kitchen to grab the garbage bag and opened my freezer and found ten once delicious food items that had defrosted and refroze at least forty thousand times.  Into the trash they go.  This tops off my garbage bag.  I walk up to the road to discard said garbage bag and voila!  Thirty items gone in less than five minutes.  I worked a little exercise into that five minutes and I now have room in the freezer for something edible.  Damn, I’m good.

Okay, let me hit the left side of my brain.

30 items a day X 30 days in a month = 900 items tossed.  

Wow.

What if you in your infinite wisdom decided to do this twice a day?  Let’s go for a total of 10 minutes worked.  I think I can handle that.  How about you?

30 X 2 = 60.   60 X 30 = 1800.   1800 X 12 = 21,600

21,600, twenty one thousand six hundred pieces of clutter removed from your life.

That’s a lot.  Isn’t it?  How did you do it?  One rock at a time.  Just one rock at a time.

Tips for One Rock At a Time:

1. If you know you are headed out on a One Rock mission.  Grab a grocery sack and hang it on your wrist.  This works great for the little items you are eradicating.  Bigger items can be tossed into the big garbage sack or dragged to the door, rolled down a board and picked up by the crane fairy.  I’ve had a few of those.

2. Don’t get carried away.  If you start doing fifteen One Rock missions a day.  Pretty soon it isn’t fun anymore.  It just resembles work.  

3. Don’t think you have 21,600 “rocks” to get rid of?  Sure, right.  Hey, I live in your

house.  It’s like mine.  You’ll be surprised what you’ve held onto.

4. And finally, this doesn’t work if you add 61 things a day while you are throwing away 60.  You’ll never get ahead.  So, read the chapter on Starting Fresh and Staying That Way.  If you add more than you’ve taken away and we’re talking money, well, that’s a good thing.  If you add more than you take away and it is clutter…bad thing.  More money…good.  More clutter…bad. 

There you have it.  It’s not rocket science, it’s one ten minute rock-picking a day to start.  Weave in daily doses of everyday life and you have a less cluttered environment.  I know you can do it…you can build a mountain just one rock at a time.