Alles in Ordnung bringen

Lately I have been on an organizational kick. It started with work, really. I realized that most of my German co-workers are really organized, and consistently able to get stuff done on or ahead of time. While I am definitely not someone you would call disorganized, working around people who have their personal and professional lives tracked in spreadsheets, neatly typed weekly plans and elaborate calendars makes me feel that I'm way out in two-standard-deviation-land in a bell-shaped distribution of organization.

When we first moved to Germany our whole lives changed, and getting through each day took so much energy. I could only manage the bare minimum in terms of staying on top of our personal accounts, insurance, etc. I often felt like my projects and management of students at work was "by the seat of my pants" instead of really being in control of what I did each day. But this year I have been able to expend a bit more energy on "the front end" to get organized at work, which has paid off in terms of research productivity.

Neatly organized files. Well, as neat as it gets with the metal shelving that came with our apartment.

I'd been putting off doing the same thing at home, though. Things finally hit a critical point when I realized I had no idea if we had ever paid our electrical bill since we moved into our new apartment in May 2012. All of our bills were stuck in to a few folders, not ordered in anyway, and I knew that I had to organize them to figure out what had actually been paid.

One of the reasons I've been putting off organizing our paperwork is because the German filing system is different. I had a filing cabinet at home in the US, and easily accessed everything in the hanging files. But German put their files into big binders, and papers are punched with 2 not 3 holes. I've been resistant to adopting this system, but in the end I had no choice, because we can't get American-style file folders here, and definitely not 3-hole punch binders.

So one Saturday morning while Joe was on a long bike ride I went around the corner to the "Papier Kittel", our local stationary store and post office, that is open on average 3 hours/day. I bought a big "Ordner" folder and went home to start filing. Then I realized that all our bank statements needed to be filed, but these are on a special paper about 1/3 the size (and yes, we are required to print the statements off at a special printer at the bank or they will mail them to us for a fee). So back I went for a special small "Bank Ordner". I went back one more time for file separators and the shop owner joked with me that there is a German expression equivalent to "Good things come in threes."

The end result is that I got all our files organized, and figured out we had paid our electric bill. But the whole process has been very empowering. For the first time I am really on top of our lives here, and we're actually planning out all our travel for the rest of the year. Germans plan everything so far in advance, and we've found that we need to do this as well to get good deals on flights/trains/hotels. This becomes quite important when you have 6 weeks of paid vacation (enviable to Americans, I know). Bring on the 2-week vacation on the Turkish Riviera: this weekend's reward for being organized and scoring an early bird special on a vacation package!