Work, work, work. Housekeeping requires constant labor. I feel like I am at it all the time, yet somehow my house is never clean. For all my efforts, I don’t see any progress.

I think it’s because I’m too thorough a cleaner.

For example, last month, I noticed a cache of yarn that I bought last years. It was overflowing from a drawer that wouldn’t close properly. Now some people would have tidied the drawer to make room, or moved the yarn to a different place, but not me. I believe that if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

I knit a sweater.

Somehow, while I was doing that, the mail piled up, the kitchen got filthy and newspapers were everywhere. All those hours of cleaning and I’d gotten even more behind. (On the plus side, at least I managed to clear out a drawer — a good thing, as I needed it to hold my new sweater.)

Then I spent a few hours opening the junk mail. (Well I couldn’t just throw it away sight unseen, could I? There might have been something important in there. And besides, I was almost out of personalized mailing labels.)

Next I tackled the newspapers. It took a bit longer than I expect to read them all, and I got a bit delayed by a particularly gnarly New York Times puzzle, but finally I got them recycled.

Of course by this time the kitchen was even more scary, so I decided to tackle the refrigerator.

It took three days, but I finally had cooked everything in there and cleaned out the vegetable bin. (What, you say you clean the refrigerator by just taking everything out, wiping the shelves, and putting it all back? Have you no standards?)

Well perhaps that’s the problem. My standards are just too high.

Now that fall is here and I’m faced with the prospect of spending more time indoors, I’ve started to notice a number of items large and small that need dealing with. Every cabinet, closet, shelf and drawer is shouting to be organized. The papers on my desk are demanding to be filed. The garage is a mess. Ouch, get off my lap. Eddie Haskell’s claws must be trimmed. And I don’t even want to think about the disaster that is my storage shed.

There’s so much to do, I realized I’ll have to abandon my usual painstaking methods and try a new approach to cleaning.

I read some self-help advice once about how to get organized that I thought I could apply. The main lesson was to work backwards mentally first, breaking the process down into simple, doable steps. That takes you back to step one where you should begin.

I decided to try this process on my food magazines. They pile up and the coffee table was looking a bit overburdened. A simple first step would be to move them to the top shelf of the bookcase in my guest room, with the other back issues.

Alas, the shelves there are rather messy. They really need to be cleaned and organized.

Obviously, step one was tidying the bookcase.

But actually, the bookcase is a bit complicated. The reason the magazines are all helter-skelter is that the top shelf is collapsing. It is currently being held up only by a fat tome called The Writer’s Market (something of a miracle in itself, since as a writer I can assure you that no such market exists).

OK, simple steps. I could hire a handyman to fix the shelf. That was step one.

Except that would require that I first remove all the books from the shelves, and while I was at it, sort them to donate to the library sale. And of course, before anything could go back on the shelves, they’d need repainting. Come to think of it, the entire room could use a coat of paint. I have a can of the paint in the shed. But the shed is crammed to the gills and will need to be cleaned out before I can find it (or even get past the door), so I guess the first step is to go clean the shed.

Aauugghh! The shed doesn’t just need cleaning, it needs insulation, painting, new shelves and about 10 trips to the dump. None of those steps is simple. The shed could not possibly be the place to start.

Wow, this organizing process was great! By thinking it through, I realized I was following the wrong path.

I decided to look for an alternate magazine solution.

And I spotted one: there in front of my nose was another perfectly good shelf, lower down, much easier to reach and in no danger of collapse.

Sure, it was full of CDs. But my CD player is broken. I could transfer all the CDs to my iPod and then store them away.

So clearly, that was the real step one.

Phew, I’m exhausted! I’ve spent the past four hours thoroughly cleaning that shelf by copying 100 CDs onto my iPod. It was hard, sweaty work, but worth it. Now that the CDs are in a box, I can put the magazines on the shelf. And voila! A foot of visible surface on my coffee table. Finally, housecleaning progress.

Really, this organizing stuff is a snap. I should write an advice column myself.

Except I’m afraid maybe I started at the wrong step after all.

I just looked around, and I can only think of one place to store the box of CDs.

In the shed.