18 January 2021

9 things you’ll recognise if you can’t help being disorganised

18 January 2021

There are lots of elegant euphemisms for disorganisation – ‘spontaneous’, ‘creative’, ‘sees the bigger picture’ – but at the end of the day you’re not a freethinking artist just because you can’t find your keys.

Some choose to be disorganised, but others have disorganisation thrust upon them, and find themselves constantly playing catch up however hard they try.

Here are a few things you’ll understand if you just can’t help being organisationally challenged…

1. You’re rarely on time

Every social group has one: the charmingly apologetic latecomer trotting out yarns about delayed trains and broken ticket machines without any real expectation of being believed. Reactions range from light amusement to moral outrage, and your wiser friends know to take your ETAs with a bucket of salt – even when you believe them yourself.

2. Your room is a mess

You would clean the floor, if you could see it. You can remember the last time a square foot of space emerged from beneath all the laundry and magazines from 2001, and you took photos to commemorate the moment. It might be a health hazard. You should probably conduct a purge.

3. You might be more artistic

The phrase ‘blue-sky thinking’ is useful for excusing rampant disorganisation. You’re not some robotic bureaucrat, limited by rules, regulations and rigidity; you’re a vibrant free thinker, who flourishes when ploughing their own furrow and challenging the status quo.

4. You can NEVER find a pen

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams imagines a planet entirely given over to ballpoint pens that have been lost on Earth. It probably had a lot of new visitors when we started homeworking, because we can never find the damn things anywhere.

5. Disorganisation can be expensive

Replacement phone chargers, a pathological inability to budget, and all the jobs you never got because you were late to the interview.

Pick the ones that apply to you, and calculate accordingly.

6. You often have to clean the fridge

The jury is still out on whether all fridges smell weird, or if it’s just the ones you leave half eaten food in. Out of sight out of mind, they say, but when an open can of tuna becomes impossible to ignore, sight won’t be the sense you have to worry about.

In good news, your fridge is often empty, because there’s no way you’re getting round to batch cooking, and you’re master of the phrase, ‘It’s too late to cook, let’s order in.’ Who could possibly have seen that coming?

7. It takes you ages to get ready

Not because of your advanced beauty routine; because it takes 10 minutes apiece finding wallet, phone and keys.

8. There are piles of paper you will NEVER sort through

There comes a point where the mind-melting monotony of sorting through a pile of paper outweighs the potential importance of anything the pile could contain. We reckon that point is around a foot and a half tall.

9. It’s actually quite hard work

Staying on top of everything is tough when you have the administrative abilities of a newt, and your achievements are far greater for being accomplished despite all the uncertainty and chaos. Organised people have it so easy. You should definitely get a pay rise.

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