This week, we have another post in the new “How do you…” series. As always, I’m wide open to suggestions!
How do you stay organized?
Uh-oh. I was afraid of this one.
Is this where I admit that I live in a constant state of organized chaos?
Okay, I lied…about the organized part. Basically I live in chaos. My life is chaos, okay? Happy now?
All right, so I do have some ability to keep track of my belongings, and since blind people spend a good deal of our precious time finding and identifying objects, I thought it made sense to address this topic today, squirmy as it makes me.
The key to relative success seems to involve a whole lot of consistency. If I, as a blind person, don’t put things back where I found them, I will never find them again (or, when I do find them, it’ll be because I tripped over them). Since I’d rather not spend my life rescuing items from the danger zone that is my floor, I use a combination of labels, technology, and complex organizational systems to ensure everything is easy to keep track of.
Labels are very useful, especially when I can use handy gadgets like the Pen Friend. The pen comes with special adhesive tags that you can attach to objects. You touch the tip of the pen to the label, hold down a “record” button, and speak your desired message aloud. Then, each time you touch the pen to that specific label, it will play back your message. I use this to categorize my vast tea collection, for example.
My memory isn’t what it was—a combination of medication and migraines has seen to that—but I still rely on it for simpler organization. I memorize which items of clothing make great outfits, and line up foods in my cupboards a certain way so I can prevent culinary disasters (like that time I almost used frozen berries instead of frozen peas).
Technology is more of a last resort: if my other systems have failed, or if I’m unable to identify something I’ve just purchased, there are mobile apps I can use to take photos of objects and have them identified for me. The process can necessitate a whole lot of fiddling, especially since one of my many weaknesses is taking awful photos, but it works well in a pinch.
Perhaps now my sighted friends will understand why it’s imperative that blind people’s belongings be left alone. If you reorganize or move our possessions without our permission or knowledge, you could inadvertently disrupt a complex system that will be difficult to straighten out. Besides the fact that leaving objects where you find them is an element of basic courtesy, failing to do so can throw us off for days while we struggle to put things right. Please, be careful and respectful when handling our things. We appreciate it very much.
Where's Your Dog? 
I think it is that even sighted people can have trouble staying organized but each to their own. Yes it’s true we do have a hard time reorganizing our stuff if someone puts it in a different order. I take a particular antirejection drug as have had a kidney transplant and because the 1mg and 0.5mg tablets feel the same, my mother has a round circle on the lid of one container for the 1mg and a half circle on the lid of another container with the 0.5mg tablets. Inicially one tablet box would have a rubber band around it and the other box had nothing on it at all. The other thing I do have is the ID Mate Quest talking barcode scanner for identifying lables but it doesn’t always work with some labels. I guess we are sometimes so set in our ways as to where we like things to be put that throwing us out of routine is sometimes a major issue when it really shouldn’t be.