My goal for this year is to be less organized

So far, I'm doing pretty well

This is what I said to my students the other day as I was unpacking my bag at the front of the classroom, sorting through the notes and syllabi for my different classes, and trying to remember what the hell we were doing in class that day. They laughed, as they often do, indulging their professor’s weirdness. One of them was brave enough to ask, “Wait, are you serious? Your goal is to be less organized?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I am serious.”

The goal came to me during the holiday break as I was getting my syllabi ready. I’m teaching a course—race and ethnic relations—that isn’t totally new to me, but which I haven’t taught in a long time. It’s a class that’s difficult to organize because there is so much to say about race and ethnicity. I struggle over what to include and what to leave out. I want to talk about EVERYTHING, but, alas, we cannot.

Not for the first time, I decided to leave the second half of the reading schedule blank. I got us as far as winter break and then we fall off the map, with the intention that we’ll fill in the rest based on what students find interesting. This strategy has varying levels of success. Students often aren’t exactly sure what they’re interested in. Hopefully this semester we’ll figure that out together.

There is a part of me that has to resist the urge to over-plan and over-organize when it comes to my teaching (and perhaps, life in general). Sometimes I flirt with the idea of planning out and preparing everything over the break. Not just the syllabus, but the plan for what will happen in each class on every day. I will do all of our readings in a frenzied flurry. In my head, this would mean that for the rest of the semester, the only work I would have to do is grading. Everything else would be neatly laid out before me.

Of course, this is not true. The best-laid plans…we know how that goes. The truth is that a plan for one group of students might not work at all for a different group. I teach introduction to sociology over and over again, twice a year, but the class is never the same. The beauty of teaching smaller groups of students is that I can make adjustments. With a talkative class, there’s less need for lecture. With a quiet class, I have to spend more time figuring out how to get them engaged.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

What I’ve found over time is that all that planning doesn’t really reduce the amount of work I have to do during the semester. I can read everything ahead of time, but by the time we get to it on the syllabus, I’ve mostly forgotten it and have to read it again. Somewhere in the term, I get sick or the weather turns bad or something goes wrong with the heating/cooling system in our building making it inhospitable to human beings. For those reasons and more, classes get cancelled and all those carefully laid plans go out the door.

This is part of what I meant when the thought popped into my head, “I want to be less organized.” Partly what I meant was that I simply want to acknowledge more to myself and my students that I’m not in control. I wanted to release the tight grip I try to keep on the unfolding of the semester. I wanted to leave room for a little more chaos in my life. I wanted to have a little more faith that even with the twists and turns, things will be okay.

Being les organized is one of those things I’m very much feeling my way toward. It felt immediately right, even though I had no idea why or what I even really meant. I am a person who likes to be organized because it feels, on the surface, like it’s a good strategy for coping with anxiety. Increasingly, I’ve realized that this may not be the case. I hold organization up as a shield against the unpredictability of life, but it doesn’t stop the unpredictable from happening. It didn’t stop me from having to have a tooth removed in the middle of last semester. It didn’t stop me from last year having to begin the semester in a totally different classroom and then switch after the first week. Organization doesn’t stop life from happening. Nothing has the power to do that.

I also kept a firm organizational grip on my classes because I know that a lack of organization makes some of the students anxious. They want to know what is going to happen and when and how much of their grade it will be worth. In laying out my syllabus, I still made sure to be as clear as possible about what their assignments were and when they’d be due. It’s hard to convince students of this, but I’d also never let my disorganization hurt their grade.

In thinking about my journey into disorganization, though, I’m wondering if my own iron grip on organization is really the best thing for my students. Maybe it would be better to model what it looks like to let go. Maybe it would be better if we could find a place for spontaneity. For stepping off the beaten path. For going where our passion leads us. Maybe, just once, we could collectively set our to-do lists on fire.

I don’t know. I’m still not sure where this whole journey toward less organization will take me. It feels right. It’s paired with a renewed meditation practice (I’d become a bit sporadic in my meditating over the past year or so). It looks like small things, like asking the students for help in figuring out how we could all get access to a shared account to stream a documentary. It’s admitting that I don’t have everything figured out in the moment, but that’s okay. It feels a little like surrender, in the best possible way.

1. Does the idea of setting fire to your to-do list make you cringe? Panic a little bit?

2. Do you think being organized is a good strategy for dealing with anxiety?

3. What does letting go a little bit look like to you?