Best Results Organizing

To be honest, I was expecting it to be about issues like the 20th-century American practice of redlining, where banks discriminate against certain neighborhoods or areas populated mainly by people of color and/or low-income residents, denying credit or insurance. In actuality, this book is a fascinating, eye-opening, and wide-reaching look at global history and socioeconomic movements related to street addresses. 

And, as often happens when I’m reading books that involve history and culture, I found that it all relates to organizing! You’ll have to stick with me here as I geek out and show how it all connects.

The Meaning of an Address

Have you ever thought about what an address is, and what having one (or not having one) could mean for you? In the 21st century, without an address, you can’t apply for a job, even though employers would almost certainly contact you by email, phone, or text. Without a fixed address, you can’t register to vote. And because health and auto insurance rates are determined by the county in which you live, and sometimes the specific address at which you dwell, your address can be your destiny.

A Brief History of Addresses

The book tells fascinating historical tales. For example, it traces the increasing understanding of how cholera epidemics spread, and shows how John Snow (the Victorian era physician-turned-cholora detective — not the differently spelled Jon Snow of The Game of Thrones) used maps of London to trace the origin and spread of the disease.

Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine life without street addresses, but before the 1700s, while there were street names, numbered street addresses were almost non-existent. Then, they suddenly came into being — independently — in various locations in Europe and the Americas.

One major example involves Maria Theresa, the Empress of the Habsburg Empire. (Don’t worry if you don’t remember her from Social Studies, but she was the mother of Marie Antoinette.) Because she was losing the 7 Years War, Empress MT (as I’m sure her friends called her) needed soldiers, but feudalism was still going strong, and the landlords didn’t want to send their serfs.

So, Maria Theresa sent military officers and civil servants to paint house numbers on all doors, and created a census of able-bodied men. (Sadly, her representatives used cheap ink, which blurred in the winter rain and snow, just like badly hand-labeled file folders splashed with coffee.) While Maria Theresa’s efforts mainly failed, it shows how numbering addresses along a street makes it easier for a government to identify, tax, and conscript individuals.

So, something that seems obvious to have, like a numbered street address, and beneficial to have (whether for pizza delivery or mail call or an ambulance coming to your aid) was not necessarily inevitable, and not always positive in nature.

In the 21st century, addresses and maps are no less essential to finding the origin of diseases as well as the location of those who are lost or injured, only now organizations like Missing Maps can offer assistance.

Missing Maps uses remote volunteers to manually trace satellite imagery into OpenStreetMaps. Then, community volunteers add in local detail and identifying information about neighborhoods, street names, and evacuation centers.

Armed with this mapped information, humanitarian organizations can plan “risk reduction” strategies, disaster response activities, and find people during emergencies. Just because there are no addresses doesn’t mean they can’t be created outside of a local or national government plan.

Mask also covers how the lack of street and home addresses in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India keeps people from getting Aadhaar cards, biometric identity cards. Without these cards, citizens cannot get access to health services, food subsidies, education, or any of a variety of social services.

Some of the causes date to colonialism, while others are modern, but all lead to continued inequity. And this is certainly not just an issue in India. Here at home, lack of street addresses in rural West Virginia have delayed emergency services and missing addresses on Native American reservations in Utah have short-circuited voting rights.

Addresses — and the lack thereof — are a big deal not only with regard to how we organize ourselves, but how we are organized by others.

Technological Solutions When No Addresses Exist

Organizations like Addressing the Unaddressed are working hard to help create unique geo-based postal addresses for each of the 1.4 million residents of the Kolkata slums, and are using Google’s Plus Codes to do so.

Another fascinating option for creating pseudo-addresses is something called What3Words.

Sometimes, we have to give locations that don’t lend themselves to addresses. In the book, Mask tells the story of a rural health clinic in South Africa where ambulances are in short supply, and patients may live in unmapped locations where they’d be unable to specify to ambulances (or even taxi drivers) specifically where they were located. In a less agonizing example, there are music festivals or temporary outdoor events where specific locations (tents, Port-o-Potties, stages) lack real ways to identify and direct people to them.

What3Words has divided the entire world into 3 meter by 3 meter squares, and each square has been assigned three words, which you can look up on the company’s free map in a browser or the What3Words app. So, the area of the front door of Maple West Elementary School (which I attended back when dinosaurs roamed the earth) has been assigned the “address” of prowess.hollow.lavished.

My car is currently parked at orators.broccoli.gulls. The middle of White House Rose Garden is army.likes.jukebox. And the clock tower in Orvieto, Italy, my favorite town I visited on my 2018 trip, is at yards.potions.cosmetic.

Experts in linguistics work to make sure that a word in one language won’t be confused with a homonym and that naughty words (in any language) don’t make the cut. And care is taken to make sure that words aren’t too long or confusing. Apparently the longest words are used for locations in the middle of the oceans, deserts, or in the Arctic.

The Rest of the Book

The Address Book also covers complexities of science, history, and culture.

• neurobiology, and the relationship between memory, “place neurons,” and the hippocampus, working to develop multi-sensory maps and explaining how the ancient Romans found their way in a complex city without any maps
• the pottymouth origins of London street names and how “niceties” modernized not only the names but the cultural significance of streets and neighborhoods
• how Philadelphia led the world in implementing numbered streets
• the ugliness in the revision of street names under the Nazis and later, Stalinization, in Europe, Confederate street names in the United States, and post-Apartheid street names in South Africa.
• how street names and numbered addresses can be faked for those who have the money ($11,000, via cashier’s check or money order) to buy classier-sounding vanity addresses in New York City!  

ADDRESSES, NAMING CONVENTIONS, AND ORGANIZING

As I traveled through time and across continents reading The Address Book, I was repeatedly considering that how we are organized and labeled in the world determines whether a government can locate us (for good or ill), how emergency services come to our assistance, how prospective employers can find us, and more.

This further prompted me to consider the way in which homelessness — addresslessness — can perpetuate lack of ability to seek out social services, get education, or obtain a job. As a professional organizer, I immediately saw the connection between how we label who lives where in our cities, towns, and countrysides and how we label what lives where in our filing cabinets and our computers and our minds.

The advantage is that we can change the address to which we assign our possessions much more easily than we can convince 911 services that our vanity address, which doesn’t exist on GPS, is where we are actually located.

Organizing clients are often surprised to learn that the names applied to locations in their homes or spaces can be modified to make their lives easier. 

Room Addresses 

You can change what you call a room to redefine what happens there. “The nursery” becomes “Johnny’s room” and after Johnny’s long out of college, it’s “the craft room.” But we don’t have to wait for major household transitions to change the names/addresses of our spaces.

Clients lacking an official playroom for their children found toys got strewn everywhere and their little ones were unhappy without a designated space that was their own. The parents were uncomfortable with their tiny humans playing unsupervised in upstairs bedrooms, but were tired of stepping on LEGOs in the kitchen.

Looking around, I found that they had an enormous formal dining room — one that they never used, and one that lacked a dining table, dining chairs, or a china cabinet. They’d moved in before acquiring that kind of “grownup” furniture and with life and kids keeping them busy (and without a lifestyle that included formal dinner parties), the room was just an empty space.

When I suggested they use the room as a playroom for at least a few years so that the kids could play in close proximity to the kitchen, family room, and home office, all on the first floor, the clients were puzzled. “But it’s a dining room,” the husband remarked with uncertainty. “It says so on the blueprints.” The wife laughed. “It would be great to have the kids down here, but are we allowed to do that?” They were! You are!

After we chatted a bit, I made a copy of the printed floor plan we’d been looking at earlier in the day, and printed a “Playroom” label on my label maker, and covered the words “Dining Room” with it. By the time I’d come for our next session, a comfy rug had gone down on the cold wooden floor of the former dining room, brightly colored toy bins and book shelves had be relocated to the space, and both the tiny humans and the full-sized ones were delighted. 

Elsewhere, I’ve found that an “address” can mean destiny. At the risk of making too direct an analogy, a person without an address can’t get social services; papers without an address (a labeled folder or digital location) can’t get accessed, processed, or used.

A client family all referred to a particular room in the house as “the scary room” and nobody ever went in; the door was opened just enough to throw things in.

When we purged the room and reorganized it, I encouraged them to all use a new name to inspire keeping the room from getting scary again. Temporarily, they called it the “sunny” room, because it was now a lovely, sunny space. It inspired the family to use it as a more social space for the teens and their guests, and the name stuck.

Space/Zone Addresses 

When I became a professional organizer, I started reading books by Judith Kolberg, the founder of the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization (now the Institute of Challenging Disorganization), a fellow member of my chapter and now, I’m proud to say, a friend. Two of her books, Conquering Chronic Disorganization and What Every Professional Oragnizer Needs to Know about Chronic Disorganization, really hit home.

Her concept of “wholistic organizing” considers the way clients, particularly those with chronic disorganization, see the world and their spaces differently. She introduced the idea of themes, “a way of holding a whole together while you take it apart.” As her example, she shed light on how she and her client, a doctor, renamed spaces in a way that made sense to him.

An expert on the human body, the doctor was able to re-envision his office systems much more clearly when Judith helped him break things down into The Brain (his leather office chair, where his research, reading materials and resources lived), The Heart (a separate section of papers related to the doctor’s volunteer work at a children’s shelter), The Leg Bag (holding items that needed to be taken when he went on errands), and so on.

Re-addressing a zone or space can help your brain make sense of what belongs there, allowing you to remove (and relocate) things that don’t belong and remember to put objects away with related items.

File Addresses 

Because I am a Paper Doll, I have a lot of experience helping clients deal with files and paper clutter. In most cases, files should be labeled according to a series of rules that help you access them when you need them. I’ve covered that in many classic posts:

Family Filing—As easy as (eating) pie
Financial Filing—Scrapbooking snapshots of your money’s life
Mom, why is there a receipt stuffed in the turkey?
I Fought the Law…and the Paperwork Won!
Patient: “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” Doctor: “Then don’t do that!”
Paper Dolls Live In Paper Households
I Hope Nobody Ever Writes a Nasty Tell-All Called “Paper Doll Dearest!”
Paper Doll Gives You the Business (Files) — Part 1
Paper Doll Gives You The Business (Files) — Part 2: Reference Papers
Paper Doll Explains How To Avoid Paper Management Mistakes — Part 1
How To Avoid Paper Management Mistakes–Part 2: Fat Vs. Skinny Jeans 

But just because there are rules doesn’t mean all rules work for everyone. Years ago, I had a client who was going through a divorce and had to deal with a lot of legal paperwork related to depositions, custody arrangements, and the like. Unfortunately, the divorce was acrimonious and the client’s children were distraught each time they heard about or anything related to the situation.

My client wanted to keep the papers handy, but found that just having a “Divorce” folder on her desk led to distress when her younger daughter walked by her desk. I suggested that we rename the folder “Dallas Project” after we’d shared a joke about the country song “I’m Going Through the Big D and Don’t Mean Dallas.” My client knew exactly what was in the file, but to her children, it appeared to be just another work project. 

I’m sure I was guided to make this suggestion by Judith Kolberg’s advice about “muttering.” Her books explained that sometimes clients had a fear of filing, of putting things away and not being able to find them again, and I’ve definitely seen this over the years. By watching how clients muttered concepts to themselves about specific papers, it would be easy to see and hear how clients thought of their documents, and labels (basically, addresses — where these papers would live) would be unusual, but clear.

Thus, a folder I might call “Tax Prep 2023,” a client might think of as “The Tax Man” (and humming The Beatles’ The Tax Man while filing might make the concept more concrete). Some of Judith’s funny examples for action and reference files were:

• Friendly Correspondence
• Hostile Correspondence
• Stuff I Can Never Find When I Need It
• Did I Get Paid For These Yet?
• I Have Got to Call These People

My point, and I do have one, is that what we call something — whether it’s a paper or digital file, a zone in our office, a room in our home, or otherwise — helps determine where it will go and how easily (and how likely) we will access it and use it.

Don’t be afraid to be creative and “bend” the rules once you know them; if you can confidently find your possessions or direct someone to them, consider it a success.