Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Organizing Is Not the Goal
Yesterday as we removed the final standing file from her desktop, revealing her awesome east-river view, my client said, “This is good. Now I can stop organizing and get to what I really want to do.”
Exactly! Can you believe yours truly, a professional organizer, wants you to stop organizing? It’s true. Organizing, you see, is not the goal. It is the means to achieving your goal. Whether that goal is serenity or paying bills paid on time, organizing can get you there.
I would hate it if we made the act of organization a label-spawning fixation to the point where we organize to organize. Often clients apologize for the way their desk or closet looks; but then qualify it with, “but it’s working”. Good! Leave it alone, or let me suggest one of my cosmetic fixes. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to work.
My hope is that no client of mine will ever pay a late fee because the bill was being used as a bookmark somewhere. That no client buys another pair of swim goggles because they couldn’t find the ones from last summer! That no client went late to a meeting as they hunted for the papers they couldn’t find. If the baskets and boxes in the closet don’t match, I’ll live. Honestly, if everyone’s home looked like a photo shoot for Organizational Digest, I’d get bored.
The goal of organization is not to have to think about or labor over the small stuff, so that you have time and energy for the big stuff: the nature of democracy, taking the kids to Asia, reading Proust.
I recently came across a Simone de Beauvoir quote that I had hanging on my wall in college:
… the future suddenly seemed as it if would be much more difficult than I had reckoned but it had also become more real and more certain; instead of undefined possibilities I saw opening out before me a clearly marked field of activity, with all its problems, its hard work…. I no longer asked myself: what shall I do? There was everything to be done….Nothing had been done, but everything was possible.
Often when I am with a client, we go through papers and talk each one through, and that process helps bring clarity about what needs to happen to various pieces of paper. Basically, I’m a bush-whacker: I get rid of the undergrowth so that the path is clear.
So, as we bushwhack our way out of the summer-time piles, let us remember our goals: to be clear, to be serene, to be organized enough to get to our real goal: life.