Planning ahead has never really been my thing. 

If you looked at my desk, you’d probably be able to tell: Papers stacked everywhere, tabs open across multiple screens and notes in random places. It almost seemed like a hurricane had rampaged through my desk.

But somehow, I’ve never lost anything. For example, I know exactly where a quote is in an old draft. I know which tab I need, even if there are way too many open. It might look like chaos, but it works.

For a while, I thought that meant I was doing something wrong. School always makes it seem like everything has to be neat — clean notes, clear plans and everything in the right place. That’s just never been me. Then I joined The Accolade, and at first, it made everything worse. 

Production nights usually looked crazy. I’d have one window open on Adobe fonts, another with InDesign open and one with interview notes I still hadn’t sorted through. My process looked even more all over the place than it already was.

But over time, I realized something. I didn’t need everything to be perfectly organized to make sense of it. I just needed to understand how things connected. 

My ideas never came in a straight line. Sometimes I had a good quote that sounded important even before I had any idea of the angle I wanted. Sometimes, I wrote a lede that didn’t make sense until way later. Sometimes, I designed the best layouts through an unorthodox mess. 

I stopped trying to force everything to be neat right away and just let it come together, and it always did.

I think that is the biggest thing I’ve learned these past few years. Not everything has to follow a guide or make sense immediately. Sometimes, you can figure stuff out while you’re still in the middle of it.

So yeah, my desk still looks messy. My tabs are still out of control. But I’ve realized that not everything has to look organized to actually work. It might look like chaos, but for me, it never really was.