By: Jeri Burtchell

It’s easy to let fatigue be my catch-all excuse for why things are in disarray around here, but if you’ve known me for more than 16 years I’m not fooling you. Actually, I prefer my mother’s excuse for why I’m not very organized…

“You’re an artist, Jeri, and artists tend to be messy because their minds are busy creating.”

Sometimes, though, it seems my messy ways have only created more headaches and hurdles for myself — something I seem to have less patience for as time goes by.

I’ve decided to try a new tactic, though. It’s called “be kind to yourself.” So now, when I see self-made obstacles to stress-free living, I try to take off my blinders and correct one small thing at a time, making my living space – and my life – more “Jeri-centric”.

Case in point: Every time I need a pen I head for the three side-by-side pen cups on my desk. They are overflowing with pens I’ve collected on trips out of town and harvested from the copper-rich soil of pennies at the bottom of my purse, where together they perpetually weigh down my every move.

In what has become an exasperating ritual, I select a pen, begin to write, only to run out of ink three strokes into my thought. Frustrated, I put the pen back in the cup and select another. I’m often doomed to repeat this process four or five times before chancing upon a pen that can outlast my need for ink.

When my brother recently visited, he noticed this ritual, and asked me why I didn’t just toss the ones that don’t work. Such a simple, logical question and yet it had never occurred to me. Most likely because tossing the pen meant being near the trash can and required additional physical exertion. Yet in the grand scheme of things he was right.

Immediately I took all three cups to the kitchen counter where, one by one I assessed their capabilities by scribbling on a notepad. If it didn’t produce, it faced instant death by trash. In the end I had one pen cup full of pens that write, and had freed up two coffee cups.

I felt so good about that accomplishment, (and the way I am rewarded with ink every time I grab a pen to jot a note), that I’ve decided to see where I can make other small adjustments to be kind to myself. Here are a couple other ideas that I came up with. They might seem like “no-brainers” to a more organized person, but to me they were epiphanies that keep on giving, making me appreciate each day how thoughtful I was to make these small adjustments in my recent past.

● I went through all my spiral notebooks I keep around for work and ripped every page out that had anything written on it. Then I created project file folders, sorted all the notes for each project, and filed them. Now I no longer spend half an hour leafing through notebooks frantically trying to find minutes of a certain conversation.

● I went through a couple of piles of “chronologically filed” papers I’ve been meaning to go through and made three stacks: 1) Important/Save, 2) Needs Action and 3) No Longer Relevant/Trash. Things like the deed to the house and my passport went in the first stack, bills to pay went into stack two, and expired coupons, magazine subscription offers, or grocery lists from a month ago went into stack 3 (a.k.a. the trash can).

It’s amazing how easy it is to stay up on paying the bills now that I know where they are! And when it was time to take my son to get his Learner’s Permit at the DMV, I knew without a doubt where I could find all the necessary proof of ID for both of us.

My new hurdle is maintaining this level of order. But I’ve discovered that if I spend a little time at the end of the day making sure my work area is organized and the papers are filed it’s amazing how easy being kind to yourself can be.

Herding all the pens back into the cup corral at night and leaving myself a to-do list for the next day makes waking up the next morning a whole lot easier. It’s like I’m finally working with myself instead of plotting my own destruction.

So be kind to yourself and spend just a little time organizing a bill-paying station or home workspace with all of the things you might need. Cutting back on clutter-induced stress can have lasting benefits. Now if the bills would just pay themselves I’d be all set!

*Jeri Burtchell was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999. She has spoken from a patient perspective at conferences around the country, addressing social media and the role it plays in designing clinical trials. Jeri is a MS blogger, patient activist, and freelance writer for the MS News Beat of Healthline.com. She lives in northeast Florida with her youngest son and elderly mother. When not writing or speaking, she enjoys crafting and photography.