Organised student

I am sure I am not alone here in my love of stationary. I used to have a Staples close by to where I live but since moving house it has closed down. Now my love of stationary is far from sated but I just haven’t found another shop that I loved as much. For any of you in the UK that share my love of stationary please drop me a comment and let me know your favourite shops. I am always on the lookout for new places to visit and spend my pennies.

So being January and the beginning of a new year I bought myself a new organiser. The one from last year was bursting at the seams and I was in desperate need of a new one. So I went through everything last night and took official documents and a few insurance bits and the mortgage stuff from the 2019 folder and added it to the 2020 folder, shown below. I love this one, it is so colourful and expands as you put more paperwork in it but stays small while there isn’t much in there.

I never used to be this organised, at one point in my youth I had a lot of financial problems because I left home at 16 and I didn’t have anyone that showed me how to budget and look after my finances. I have learned a lot just through experience and I think the fact that I have struggled with debt really stops me from going back to that scary place again. My first hubby was the opposite of me and kept every little bit of paper and he is the one that introduced me to this too. Its not till he passed away that I really felt the full benefit of this and now I have continued it on. When we were together he took care of all the finances and organised all the paperwork so I never had to. Now that he has gone I feel like little parts of him still live on in things like this. He had OCD and whenever my oldest monkey gets stressed about things being a certain way, it always makes me think of how he is living on through her too.

“Start as you mean to go on” as the saying goes. It feels good to have all my paperwork from last year filed away in the loft now and the new folder for 2020 all ready to go. Usually it goes downhill from here though and in my kitchen there is a what we call “corner of doom”. Its where all the mail goes after its been opened, its where broken things go to get fixed, its where all junk goes before I find a place for it and so on….you get the picture right?

So you see not all of my life is organised but I guess I have my moments. I love it when people tell me how organised I am. I then proceed to laugh at them and tell them to hold that thought until they see my house. I am not the tidiest of people, again I have my moments where I have a huge blitz and all the clutter gets binned but generally yeah I am quite a messy person. My mum loves to tell me its just “lived in” and she loves it despite her house being so tidy all the time. She tells me all the time she knows its because she doesn’t have kids messing up her house or filling her time so she gets it, which I love. Not everyone does though. I always say that people dont choose to be friends with you based on how tidy or messy your house is. At least it’s not dirty its just a mess.

The other stationary items I bought were the a4 display folders. When I go on placement I want to have everything to hand in an accessible folder. So I have printed out my placement handbook (100 pages) and also my team profile and put it in the folder. I have a bunch of forms that will need printing out and adding to the folder. I feel good about being organised in this way because part of my assessment on placement is readiness for practice. I want to be able to show my practice educators and social workers that I am keen to do my best on placement and be the best I can be. I feel like it really gets me in the right frame of mind ready to take on my new opportunity with enthusiasm. I am not organised in many areas of my life but certain things do make a difference if I can find the time to get organised.

It really gets me energised doing these types of things and I need to continue doing it. I am going to town this weekend to get some big plastic boxes for the loft. I was up there putting the Christmas decorations away and it occurred to me that if we ever had a leak everything up there would be destroyed. I have a lot of things up there belonging to eldest monkeys daddy which I think will be important to her as she grows up. So my next project is to get everything into plastic boxes instead of cardboard boxes. I guess I am beginning my spring cleaning a little early this year.

Has anyone else started doing their spring clean yet? How are you all getting organised? Drop me a comment and let me know what you are doing to make life easier by being organised.

Thanks for reading