Who Needs to Get Organized?

I can’t help it. It’s the perfect day to link to this comic — my brain never functions well on a groggy gray day like this. And I’ve been tallying my tax info over the weekend, which involves adding up every tedious little business expense like: “$1.67 — coffee.” Which could make anyone’s brain take a hike.

Finally, after years of doing this, it occurred to me yesterday to put recurring expenses in a Google Doc, and to create categories for things whose amounts will change for next year, but whose essential existence will not. So that I’m not forever racking my brain, random documents, and my email, wondering, did I forget anything this year?

(Do you Google Doc? It is awesome. You can share documents, and each person can update them in real time. So in this case, I share docs with my always more organized spouse and even designate to him some personal assistant tasks. After he specifically implored me to.)

If you’re wondering why it took me so long to grasp something so obvious, I have two answers. One is that I’m just prone to disorganization in general. It runs in my family. (Ours is the saga of keys that go missing when you’re running late, of gift cards lost for months because of misplaced mail, etc.)

The second is more interesting: I have an automatic guilt/dread reflex to a lot of my spending, including professional expenses. While most people I know wouldn’t count tax record gathering as a great time, I realized one of the reasons I wasn’t keen on recording this expense stuff in the first place is that I didn’t want to face it. I didn’t want to know what I was actually spending.

Yadda yadda, angst. Please, right? Right.

The magical thing is that simply creating some categories for next year, based on this year, actually gives those expenses a legitimate little home to hang out in. They can be arranged, analyzed. Doted upon like prized pets. They’re no longer wayward stragglers constantly knocking against my psyche like the ghost of Christmas Past.

It was that simple.

(For now.)