“Dr. K, can you help me figure out how to organize my room?”

That was the problem of the day for A, whom I saw this morning. The layout of her room had changed because her the built in storage had been upgraded. We began by exploring what principles A knew about organization. She couldn’t name any. So, the very beginning of things is where we started.

Given my interest in language, words, and linguistics, and my training as linguist, I often go to the semantics of things at the very beginning of things. Do you know where the word “organization” comes from? It comes from biology! Like so many complex concepts, we turned to nature when we wanted to describe something so fundamental and yet, at times, so elusive. In human beings, an egg gets fertilized, we get a single cell, called a zygote, that rapidly multiplies until we have a little clump of identical cells (or blastomeres) that form a blastocyst. As this clump continues to divide and multiply, something interesting happened. Depending on where they find themselves, some cells start to change and differentiate themselves into, that right, organs! The cells start to “organize” themselves. So, to organize something is to sort it into its parts and integrate the parts into a coherent and meaningful whole.

To organize A’s “new” room, here are the steps we took:

• Determine the schema for the room.

  • In this case, we asked, “What is this room for? What are the different “shelves” in this idea called “my room”?

  • A came up with:

    • Rest

    • Storage

    • Art

• Categorize the things to be stored:

  • A came up with:

    • Clothes

    • Books

    • Art materials

• Determine the physical boundaries of “my room”

  • A decided to:

    • Draw a scale diagram of the footprint of her room that also showed the placement of

      • door(s)

      • window(s)

      • built-in structures and electrical outlets

  • Measure and cut out foot prints of the furniture she currently has

    • Place these cutouts the scale drawing of her room to decided the best way to place thigns.

• How do you want to feel in this space?

  • A decided that to be welcoming and comfortable her room would need some décor. She will:

    • Hang her favorite art

    • Find a few plants she likes

In summary, to organize a space, one needs to understand a) the purpose of the space, b) the things that will be contained in the space, c) the physical boundaries of the space within which we need to work, d) the relationship we have with the space, the value it is connected to.

To conclude, we talked about how one needs to walk about in a pair of shoes to know whether they are comfortable. A decided she would live in her room for a few weeks once it is set up and think about how things feel, how she moves around the room and uses the space, before adjusting anything.

That’s definitely a wise mind way to set up a room!