By Scott Cremeans
Staying organized in life is very important. It is beneficial to keep all of your doodads and doohickeys diligently divided so that you can reach them in an instant. The smart choice is to keep your selection of widgets neatly stacked for your convenience. It is essential to keep your entire calendar of events prominently posted for your perfunctory perusal.
As a person with multiple sclerosis, I like to stay obsessively organized. However, things have changed since before I began using technology to aid my memory and systematization.
Before the utilization of tech, I was old school, and the inside of my house showed it. Everything was coated in a layer of yellow post-it notes reminding me of everything like I was a retired senile scientist. These notes reminded me of the most mundane tasks because at that time depression made sitting on the couch my only priority. These inked notes reminded me of everything including brushing my teeth, meal times and when to check the mail along with many other just as ridiculous reminders. My bills were all piled neatly in three separate stacks. These piles showed what was paid and what was yet to be paid as well as what was still outstanding.
There is now so much technology to help you stay organized that excuses have gone with the dodo bird. Two point six million apps exist in the Android Play Store, and two million apps reside in the Apple app store reminding us that there is an app for that. These apps can assist you in things such as budgeting, household chore reminders or even when to throw that old app out the window. Gone is the day of tying a string around your finger to remind you of that task that you inevitably forget anyway. The process of writing that to do list on a piece of paper that you soon lose track of is a thing of the past.
Smartphones, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, computers, tablets and even smart watches all make staying unorganized impossible. We MSers need to find what works best to keep our MS lives formulated and coordinated. Multiple sclerosis causes plenty of mind messes like shoddy short term memory. So we must be aware of our weaknesses and find assistive tools to help us to be the best us that we can be.
With organization comes empowerment.
*Scott Cremeans lives in Central Ohio. He is a US Marine who was diagnosed with RRMS in 2001 at the age of 27. Scott has successfully managed his MS symptoms on his own with his faith, friends, and humor. You can read more about his MS journey by visiting his blog www.myramblings.blog where he muses about life in the slow lane with his literary wit.
