Organization

The strength of any house lies in its foundation. The strength of any life lies in the living. -Both strengths require a solid start. Benjamin Franklin often is quoted as having declared, “For every minute spent organizing, an hour is saved.” Yet, our human urge is to procrastinate, organize the irrelevant rather than attack the important and then wish away our daily life, bemoaning the lack of time available to us.

In part, we misinterpret what organization entails and how significantly it impacts our lives. There are myriad ways to approach organizing and a precise definition may not be possible in your life. Rather than accepting someone else’s definition of organization, we would benefit immensely from defining its scope as it applies uniquely to our lives.

Garry, an acquaintance, had an original perspective on simplifying his tasks. Many mechanics can be obsessive about their tools, how to maintain them, and how to ensure that they always have a specific place in their workshop. Garry did, as well, but his concept of “specific place” was far from conventional. He would never put a tool back in the tool box. Instead, he would lay out all the tools that he needed for a project, like a surgeon has his scalpels and probes laid for him in the operating room. When Garry finished a project, every one of those tools remained at that specific work station. Then when he needed one of them, all he did was recall the last project on which he had used them. He rarely missed! Yet, his workshop appeared disorganized.

Disorganization and clutter are not the same. His place was cluttered, but so well organized in his mind that, in nearly twenty years, he had never lost a tool.

One of the strategies recommended for brainstorming an idea in business is to gather together bits and pieces, seemingly disconnected and possibly irrelevant to the task, and lay them out in a separate area. Bit by bit, the pieces are re-organized in the same way that a script writer creates a storyboard. It is organized disorder.

Paul was an active member of Mensa. However, his approach to tasks frequently seemed obsessive. He loved to have everything and everyone in his life neatly categorized and arranged. He claimed that it helped to calm the chaos that dominated his thoughts every moment. At one point, he organized every item in his girlfriend’s home, as a favor to her. He hand-built innumerable boxes of a wide range of sizes, to hold every loose item in the apartment. It was a glorious arrangement of neatness, tucked comfortably on the shelf of the hallway closet. But his partner was very uncomfortable with the arrangement. He had even built a tiny box to hold two paperclips! The neatness caused her stress. The boxes had to go. Neatness is not necessarily organization, either!

Business management practice recognizes the opportunity that exists, inherently, in disorganization. It is known as the SWOT analysis. When writing a business plan, the entrepreneur examines the strengths and weaknesses of his business concept, then analyses how those weaknesses can be turned into opportunity and how they also can create a threat. The owner thus develops an organizational template.

Havelock Ellis, English physician and philosopher, wrote that “However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.” It is how you approach and work through those risks that determine your success. In other words, how well you organize your response to and anticipation of life’s events will determine how much you will benefit from that proper organization.

Parents have a very unique view of the chaos of daily life and an intrinsic sense of how important it is to deal with unpredictability. Some psychologists suggest that the reason that women, in general, are more able to multi-task is because they have experience with children. It may appear to be a sexist idea, but numerous studies bear out the claim. Some parents describe their experience as riding the tiger by holding onto its tail. So long as one is able to exercise some degree of “steering,” the chaos of the ride is, at minimum, organized chaos. Raising children is, doubtless, like riding the tiger.

To survive parenting, one must be able to organize as quickly as the offspring are able to create disorganization. It is a tall order, to be sure. The most relaxed parents likely are the ones who know how to channel the disarray of childhood into acceptable times and places, while guiding the kids into an understanding of the need for order, when appropriate. There is a time to be structured and a time when allowing chaos to reign actually is a demonstration of organization.

Few of us live in isolation. We share our space and our community with others. We, therefore, are unable to control all aspects of our lives and must adapt our strategies for getting our lives organized by also contemplating the needs, preferences and reactions of those around us. How will they impact on us, and how do we impact on them?

A minimalist that I know has a spouse who is not a minimalist. When he attempted to live his life on his terms, his wife was unable to adjust and conflict ensued. Ultimately, they reached a compromise and my minimalist friend was able to adjust to a household with modest materialism in play, while his spouse was able to accommodate his simple living bent.

There are those around us that believe that organizing one’s life only is necessary if one is a hoarder and must declutter. While it is true that much of organizing strategies involve arranging to eschew clutter, organization is of much greater breadth than that. Some of the clutter that is involved in a disorganized life is not material, but mental, emotional and task-driven.

Of all the waste that we need to discard as we organize, the greatest waste that we have to deal with is the waste of time. That takes us, full circle, back to Ben Franklin’s quote about saving an hour. We may organize our physical surroundings, but it should be done with a purpose: how to save time and free up mental, physical and temporal space.

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