Organizationally Challenged

I want to be neat and perfectly organized. I really do. Every Tuesday I spend the day with a woman who epitomizes organization to me. She has six children who are all home-schooled (well except the baby, who is almost one). Her house is beautifully decorated and always clean and neat. Everything is in its place. I want to be like her but somehow it's an elusive goal for me. We go to her house every Tuesday for a homeschool co-op.

I'm not giving up on my quest to be more organized. I want a neat and tidy house. I want a well-planned schedule. But I did notice with great interest a book I came across at Barnes and Noble's last week called: A Perfect Mess - The Hidden Benefits of Disorder: How crammed closets, cluttered offices and on the fly planning make the world a better place.

The New York Times mentions the book in an article entitled: Saying Yes to Mess. Here's an excerpt from the article:

But contrarian voices can be heard in the wilderness. An anti-anticlutter
movement is afoot, one that says yes to mess and urges you to embrace your
disorder. Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid
signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than
those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably
better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a
movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat
people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible
prigs, and have way too much time on their hands

Well, I wouldn't go so far as to call my organized friends prigs, and I'm not prepared to "embrace my disorder". But I'd gladly settle for a higher salary and accept the "more creative" moniker. Actually, I prefer order, but I'm sure I'd do a better job of keeping order at home if I didn't stress over it so much.