Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
You Can Do Anything For 10 Minutes
Last week, we talked about building a 10-minute maintenance habit. The idea is to focus on whatever organizational hurdle is hardest for you—whether it’s keeping clothes from piling up on your dresser or preventing papers from spreading into multiple areas.
“Spend 10 minutes a night on paper?” one client said, “but that is so hard!”
But it’s the thing that’s hardest that gets out of control. Avoidance is not an organizing strategy. Your mission is to face your fear, your weakness, your anxiety, until it no longer causes you fear or anxiety.
Most of the time when I’m with a client, the “stickiest” piles are an accumulation. They represent days—or more often weeks or months—of deferred attention. You aren’t sure where to put that sweater, you only wore it for an hour, and maybe you’ll wear it again tomorrow, so just leave it on this chair. When tomorrow arrives, the sweater gets buried under the blazer that you started to wear, and then decided didn’t look good, so you put it on the chair because you might give to your sister…
However the piles get there, you need to bring all of your executive function to bear in trying to eliminate them. Have an internal dialogue: Why is this here? Can I hang once-worn items on the back of the door? Or should I just always put everything back if it isn’t going into the laundry bag? Shall I put the blazer away and make a note in my calendar to go through the entire closet, because there’s probably at least a shopping bag’s worth of stuff I should give my sister?
You are probably thinking, “I’m tired, I don’t have time to play 20-questions with myself over a sweater.” Trust me, the 20 questions you ask today lead to tomorrow’s smoothly functioning systems. You don’t have to ask yourself all those questions every time; if you do 10-minute maintenance every day, it goes quicker. Pretty quickly, you’ll realize that you are asking yourself the same few questions over and over. Those questions will show you where you have holes in your system, and once you identify them, you’ll be on the road to figuring out a solution. But if you wait until the pile is four-feet high, you’ll have to start from scratch.
Math, running, yoga, organization: Everything you dread gets easier with practice. So don’t think of 10-minute maintenance as a horrible burden, think of it as a practice. And then practice. Don’t let yourself off the hook. It may seem like a big challenge, but only for 10 minutes. You can handle anything for 10 minutes, right?