Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
The Inefficient Art of Organization
I love elegance. I also love efficiency. I wish that the process of organizing was perfectly elegant and efficient. I wish I had a magic formula that would enable you to tackle your home, area by area, and then never have to do it again.
I’d also like a villa in Tuscany.
The reality is, there’s no magic formula (and no free villas). Too often, people think of organizing like renovating a house: If you do it well, it should last a long time. Really, you should think of it as yoga: Just because you did an amazing downward-facing dog today doesn’t mean that you don’t need to do it again next week, or ideally tomorrow.
I’ve been teaching a workshop on streamlining, and this week I found myself urging the participants to accept the inefficient and imperfect process of organizing. Because that’s what organizing is: a process. One of the things that they’re realizing is that this is just the start. Hopefully, they are kicking off a process that will morph into a series of lifelong habits—like not buying an article of clothing unless they are ready to get rid of one, and opening the mail every night. Right now, their job is to just try to do something towards their organizing goal each week.
Do what you can do today. If you can throw out a few papers on your desk, great! If you can put together a bag of clothes for the Goodwill, good for you! Don’t give up just because you can’t transform your piles of paper into an Instagram-worthy photo today. Just keep at it. When I’m facing an organizational challenge with a client, I often encourage them to think of it as a series of passes. The advantage is that none of the passes needs to be perfect or complete.
Here’s a secret: People who are well organized are constantly organizing. More paper arrives, life changes, kids are born or move out, systems evolve. Organizing isn’t always elegant or efficient, but then again, neither is life. If your goal is to be organized, then do something every day toward that goal, and you will make progress. And in the process, you may learn some things about yourself‑how your clutter came to be, why certain things are hard for you to let go—and these are valuable things to learn. Self-knowledge is a beautiful thing, and we can’t really change without it. Being human is messy and inefficient, but it still beats the hell out of being a robot.