A new school year has begun. Your classes are much harder. Now, more than ever before, you need a special place where you can retreat after a hard day of dissecting frogs and struggling to stay awake in World History class. You call such a place your room; your parents call it a mess.

What you need to do is create a look that reflects your own style preferences while allowing your parents to walk over to your closet without suffering bodily injury. Organizing your room can accomplish this goal, but I don’t know anything about that, so here are my tips.

Pick up your clothes. Do this for several days in a row and you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes. Of course, eventually your arms will get tired and you’ll need to set the clothes down. The best place to put them is in your dresser drawers or the clothes hamper.

Barter for services. Usually girls are better at keeping their rooms livable than are boys. Tap into their skills with the time-honored tradition of swapping goods for services. An exchange might go something like this:

You: Hi, Lacey. You look nice today. Neat and clean. I’ll bet your room looks the same way.

Lacey: Uh, yeah, usually.

You: I’ll give you a bag of Shock Tarts, my old Quasi-Moto RC car, and a coupon redeemable at any Just For Guys jeans outlet if you’ll clean my room while I’m at the library tonight.

Lacey: I’ll think about it. In the meantime, may I call the mental health clinic for you?

Hopefully your bartering skills are better than those reflected in our example.

If you have an after-school job, you could hire a maid. But working a paper route the size of Guatemala might leave you pretty tired for Bible class.

However you choose to strike the balance between a parent-pleasing hideaway and the cyclone look, dive into it with gusto: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might” (Ecclesiastes 9:10).

So get moving, or you might have to move out.