I have always thought that I was an organized person. However, after reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done, I realized that I am not nor have I ever been considered as an ‘organized person’. Unfortunately, one of the major tips of travelling is to stay organized when packing and planning. Planning and packing for a trip or any other even in life could cause much stress if you are not organized. Taking those first steps to increase your organization will wreak less havoc while planning for events, trips, as well as creating more authority to your own everyday life.
What are containers?
Containers as David Allen calls them, the author of Getting Things Done (Official Website located below), is something that “holds items until you have a few moments to decide what they are and what you’re going to do about them” (Page 31). Whether you’re a student, an adult with an everyday full time job, or a stay-at-home parent, everyone has containers without realizing. A container could be a briefcase, a purse, a dresser, etc.
What are my containers?
Sharing a room with your serious boyfriend makes it very hard to place everything into a specific location. Everyday, as soon as I come home from college, everything goes onto my bed. There are clothes on the bed from the night before/that early morning, blankets are everywhere and everything is a mess until the bed gets made (sometimes not at all). The mail is picked up from the kitchen table and placed onto the bedside table. The bedside table also contains my hairbrush, endless hair-ties, lotion, and other random unnecessary amenities as well as endless amounts of junk mail. The bedside table is considered as one of my shared containers with my boyfriend. Another container that I personally have is my dresser. The top of my dresser contains all of my “girly” needs like deodorant/perfume, makeup, medications, and the obsessive shower amenities that we all receive for Christmas.
Another one of my containers is my car. Every time I receive a check stub from work, or junk mail from one of my parents’ house, it gets shoved into the glove box until the point where there are papers coming out of the sides/top. However, when I need to take my father somewhere, everything in the back seat gets thrown into the trunk or the center console. I recently organized everything from the glove box into a folder made for check stubs and other important financial information. However, you can still enjoy pictures of the rest of my messy car.
As a student, I also have my backpack as a container which includes my daily planner, textbooks, notebooks, laptop, chargers, pens, a couple pencils, my purse, (that holds my cell phone, charger, and wallet), and an accordion folder holding other folders (one for every class).
Why is this important?
As a person with many containers, being organized is not one of my skills. The goal is to have the very minimum number of containers. Having a small number of containers is important because if something important is lost, there is only a very few places it could be. I know that I have been in situations when I lost something and said “It could be anywhere.” Having a small number of containers is great for going on vacation because there will be a less of a chance that anything will get lost! So what is the next step to achieving a smaller number of containers? Make a list of all of your containers. Then, make a list of everything that can be put together in one container. Re-organize and soon your massive amount of containers will be diminished. This trick will be extremely helpful when packing for any length vacations (your suitcase(s) and your carry-on(s) are your containers!!). While you’re working on that, I will be cleaning out my trunk!
Seas the Moment 