To 'Make Like The Organs'

I often start by asking students what the word “organize” means. At first they think I’m insulting them, because - duh, to organize means to.. And then they think about it for a second. I ask the class, “Raise your hand if you think you have a good definition of ‘organize.’” One or two bold students raise their hands before they’ve really landed on anything specific, like Jeopardy contestants just trying to get in before the buzzer. “It means to like.. Put your stuff where it goes.” Another student, “to clean up a mess, or put things away.” We’re getting closer. “But how do you know where something goes? Why don’t your rollerblades go on the living room floor? And when your mom asks you to put them away, why can’t you just say, ‘But that’s where they go now, Mom’?”

I then ask them what word they see within the word ‘organize.’ “Organ,” they tell me - and they’re right. “What’s an ‘organ’?” I ask, and one smart kid always says, “a musical instrument.”

Organization comes from the Greek ὄργανον (organon), which means “instrument” (I nod at the one student), but it also means “tool,” or “a means to an end.” This concept of something serving a specific purpose or function carried over into the biological sense of an organ as a functional part of a living body.

The verb organize, originally meaning “to provide with a structure that functions purposefully” broadened to include arranging or structuring things (not just biological organs) into a system or order that is purposive and functional, akin to how organs in a body work together toward a shared goal - like, in this example, making you be and stay alive.

I know it’s technical, but it’s so critical because now students can think about why they are organizing, different types of organization aimed at different purposes. What’s important is that learning to organize is actually not a simple thing at all - it’s neurologically incredibly complex, and it’s something that newborns and infants and constantly learning, observing, practicing. A simple example. I remind students that when they were in kindergarten they were probably told to group similar items together, like the following cutouts: 

I ask them how they are currently “organized,” and they tell me, rightly, “by shape.” I ask, “but how else could you choose to organize them?” and they rightly observe, “by color,” or “by size.”

Too true, I say. But why does it matter which parameter we decide to use as a guiding principle? Well - think about organizing anything in real life, like your drawer of kitchen utensils:

Would you want to organize these by color? By size? By what? And my students answer, “you’d want to put the knives in one place, the spoons in another, and the forks in another, and so on.” “Exactly. So what parameter would you be arranging them by if you did that?” “By what it does. By what function it has.”

Exactly. By what you plan to do with it. You have to know what the items are for. To organize is to impose a purposeful relationship on parts, just as organs in the body work interdependently to achieve a unified objective. Things can only be organized if they serve an actual purpose.

When we see something that’s disorganized, our brains perceive entropy, and our anxiety levels spike. But when we see something that is organized, we automatically perceive the purposive relationship, and how that relationship serves our own aims, and our own purposes. When we see something that’s organized, our anxiety subsides a bit, our neurons get a pleasant dopamine bath, and we exhale and relax just a bit. Watch - just compare how you feel when you look at this second image to the one above:

If you want to reduce your anxiety, a good starting point is to group similar items together. That’s 101. Group things by color, by shape, or by function. Do it in your bedroom. Put all the dirty clothes over there, and the clean clothes in here. Put the shoes together, gather the papers together, put the kitchen stuff in a group, and then bring it to the kitchen.

Now you have groups of things. Think about what function they serve. What are they there to help you do? Are they helping you toward that end, or hindering you? Another good idea is to simplify. Get rid of the trash. I go through this process with my students to help them organize their backpacks and binders. The first thing I do is have them take out all the papers they have jammed around and in every possible pocket and crevice you can imagine, and separate them into two stacks: 1) trash, and 2) not trash.

Even just this first step is usually a huge anxiety reducer. Getting rid of the junk just makes you walk around a little lighter. I then ask them what’s the next parameter by which they should organize their papers. “By class,” most of them say. And at that point, my work is pretty much done.