The closet in the bedroom of my apartment is the kind of closet that older buildings have — narrow, slightly deeper than it is wide, with one hanging rod across the back and a series of shelves above and to one side that the previous tenant had installed and that were, when I moved in, of variable usefulness. I have lived with the closet in roughly the state I inherited it for nearly five years. Last Sunday I decided to take a serious run at organizing it.
The result, I want to say upfront, was mixed. I succeeded substantially with the top shelf and with the hanging rod. The middle shelves remain a structural mess. The bottom of the closet is somewhat improved but is not transformed. I would describe the project, in honest terms, as a partial success that I have decided to count as a full success.
The plan I had on Sunday morning
The plan, going in, was to empty the entire closet onto the bedroom floor, to assess every object, to discard or donate anything I was not using, to acquire some kind of organizational containers, and to put everything back in a new and more efficient configuration. The plan was, in retrospect, ambitious for a single Sunday. I had budgeted, mentally, about three hours for the project. The realistic budget would have been closer to seven hours, and I would not have had the energy for seven hours anyway.
The plan started well. I emptied the closet. The contents took up most of the bedroom floor and a portion of the hallway. I sorted everything into rough categories. I identified, with surprising ease, three large bags of things that I had not used in over a year and could donate without regret. I separated out things to keep, things to discard, and things to think about later.
The trouble started when I tried to move from sorting to reorganizing. The sorting had produced about a dozen distinct categories of things to keep. The closet had three usable storage zones — the top shelf, the hanging rod, and the middle shelves. Distributing twelve categories across three zones required a kind of spatial reasoning that I am not naturally good at, and that I had not anticipated would be the bottleneck of the project.
What I succeeded at
The top shelf, I succeeded at. The top shelf in my closet had been, for years, the storage location for everything I did not have another place for. It contained, when I emptied it, a bicycle helmet I never use because I do not have a bicycle, three plastic bags of unrelated electronics cables, two photo albums, a wool blanket I forgot I owned, several plastic bins of papers I had been intending to sort for the entire time I have lived in this apartment, and a hat I had not worn in years.
I dealt with all of it. The bicycle helmet went to the donation bag. The electronics cables went into a single small basket. The photo albums got moved to a more accessible shelf in the living room. The wool blanket went to the end of the bed. The papers, after several hours of going through them, got mostly recycled with a small subset moved to a file folder on my desk. The hat went back, because it is a good hat and I am going to start wearing it again.
The top shelf now holds exactly three things — the basket of cables, a small toolkit, and a folded duvet cover. It is the most functional storage zone in the apartment. The success was real and it has held up for the three weeks since the project, which I have started to think of as the relevant test for whether an organizational improvement was actually an improvement.
What I half-succeeded at
The hanging rod I half-succeeded at. The clothes I actually wear are now hung in a roughly sensible order — dresses on the left, shirts in the middle, jackets on the right. I got rid of a small number of items I was no longer wearing. I did not get rid of as many items as I probably should have, because clothing decisions are emotional in ways that organizational tasks are not, and I had used up my capacity for emotional decisions on the top shelf.
The hanging rod is better than it was. It is not as good as it could be. I have left the project at "better than before" rather than at "as good as possible," which I think was the correct decision given the available resources of the day.
What I failed at
The middle shelves I straightforwardly failed at. The middle shelves are where the small categories live — folded sweaters, sweatpants, t-shirts I sleep in, the random small objects that do not have a home elsewhere. The middle shelves were a structural mess before I started and they are a structural mess after. I refolded everything once. I considered acquiring small dividers. I did not acquire small dividers. I closed the closet door at about four o'clock in the afternoon and called the project done.
The failure is not catastrophic. The middle shelves still function. I can find what I need most of the time. The folded items are slightly more folded than they were. The structural mess, however, is more or less unchanged at the level of organization. The closet, taken as a whole, is approximately fifty percent improved.
Why fifty percent improved is actually fine
I want to defend the fifty percent improvement against the version of organizational thinking that would treat it as a failure. The fifty percent improvement is real. The top shelf was a disaster and is now genuinely good. The hanging rod was disorganized and is now sensibly arranged. The donated bags are gone, the discarded items are gone, and the apartment is meaningfully lighter than it was a week ago.
The middle shelves remain imperfect. This is the part where the perfectionist version of organizational thinking would say I should have kept going, should have acquired the dividers, should have refolded everything to a higher standard, should have not closed the closet until the project was complete. I do not think this is the right argument. The right argument is that there is a strong threshold effect in organizational projects, where the first half of the work produces most of the value and the second half produces diminishing returns at increasing emotional cost.
The first half of this project — the top shelf, the donation bags, the rough order on the hanging rod — was the half where the value was. The second half — the middle shelves, the dividers, the perfecting of the rest — was the half where I would have spent another four hours making the closet only marginally better than I had already made it. The diminishing returns were not worth the cost.
What partial-success organizing has done for me
I have started applying this logic to other organizational situations and the results have been consistently good. The desk is partially organized. The kitchen drawer is partially organized. The bathroom cabinet is partially organized. None of them is perfect. All of them are substantially better than they were before I made a partial attempt. The partial attempts took, in aggregate, much less time and much less emotional energy than full attempts would have, and the apartment is, on the whole, much more functional than it would be if I had been holding out for perfection.
The closet door closes. The clothes I wear are findable. The top shelf is something I am quietly proud of. The middle shelves are something I have made peace with. This is, I think, what a successful Sunday looks like — not the elimination of all disorder but the conversion of unmanageable disorder into a tolerable equilibrium that I can live with for another five years if I need to. I probably will not need to. I will probably do another partial run at the closet sometime next year. The middle shelves can wait until then.
