111: Little Jolt of Joy – The Art of Organizing

Organizing Is an Art, Not a Science

I spend a lot of time watching interior design YouTube while I work, and it’s made me realize how malleable our brains are, ADHD or not. Watch the same popular style over and over, and you start genuinely wanting it for yourself. In my area, that tends to mean the elevated farmhouse look popularized by Shea McGee and Joanna Gaines.

A different kind of designer

I stumbled across a younger YouTuber out of DC, Caroline Winkler, working with real budget constraints as a renter, scouring Facebook Marketplace for deals, working with hand-me-downs. What struck me most was how unapologetically herself her approach is. She’s never trying to recreate a Shea McGee look or an Amber Interiors space. Her whole philosophy is designing spaces you genuinely love, not spaces you think someone else would approve of.

We’ve lost that same freedom around organizing

We readily accept that design is an art, not an exact science, there’s no formula, no single correct answer. But organizing has somehow landed in a different bucket, treated as though there’s one correct method, one right way to set up a closet or a storage room. I just wrapped up an episode in my ongoing series about bending or breaking organizing rules, and I keep coming back to the same conclusion: organizing is an art too. Yes, some baseline principles exist, grouping like items, giving things a home, but how you actually execute that is entirely yours to shape based on how you like to live, cozy and visible, or stark and polished, whatever genuinely suits you. When someone insists there’s one right way to organize a space, that’s really just them describing what worked for them and mistaking it for universal truth.

Try it in three dimensions, not just in your head

Another thing I love about Caroline’s approach is how in-the-moment it is, no elaborate mood board locking every decision into place before she starts. She just tries things. Something can look beautiful in a two-dimensional photo or a rendered 3D image and still feel wrong once you’re actually standing in the space with the real object in front of you. ADHD brains tend to be genuinely good at this kind of impulsive trial and rearrangement, willing to move something we just placed without treating it as a failure.

A “failure” is actually proof you tried

If you rearrange something and it doesn’t quite work, that’s not a setback, it’s information. You’ve learned something about how to tweak the system, and that’s worth celebrating, especially since getting started in the first place is often the hardest part for us. Our homes aren’t stagnant show houses where every object sits frozen in place forever. Things are allowed to move as you learn more about what actually works.

Your practical, actionable step

Pick one space you organized a while back and haven’t revisited. Try moving something, just to see if it works better somewhere else, and let yourself treat whatever happens, success or not, as useful information rather than a verdict on your ability.

Until next time, practice being unapologetically you, and continue to choose joy.