Organizing reduces stress and enhances productivity

Written by Tammy Morales

What was the first task when prehistoric people started to organize? Was it neatly stacking stone tools near the mouth of the cave? Was it folding the spare skins, so they wouldn’t wrinkle? Maybe it was gathering up leftover bones and sorting them into piles: tools…dog food…trash.

Whatever that first task, something started that has consumed us since, and has wormed its way deep into our psyches, causing most of us pangs of guilt when surveying a mess we’ve nurtured.

Since that first exercise in bone sorting, mankind has based an industry on organizing, supported by a culture of disorganization guilt, bolstered by every missing spoon and tardy student.

People make a living lecturing about it; the guilty pay to hear what they say. Web sites extol the benefits and virtues of organization; office supply stores thrive on it; schools preach it; government practices it to a bureaucratic extreme; academics study it in an organized way.

What is organization, really? Why is it important?

Dr. Joe Peraino, a Ph.D. at Baylor College of Medicine, examined the concept of organization. He arrived at the conclusion that organizing your possessions isn’t nearly as important as organizing your life, which is key to your emotional health and your life’s contentment.

He writes, “In general, I’ve found that people do not stay organized when 1) stress is not managed, 2) the people in our lives are not managed, or 3) our emotional or psychological problems are not corrected.”

Dr. Peraino identifies emotional well-being as the mandatory beginning for any meaningful, long-lasting organizing, but must we really be stress-free to eliminate a little bit of the clutter? Isn’t disarray causing some of the stress and what can we do about it?

Try this:

Decide where you want things to be. Think convenience; be logical.
Put them there.
After you use things, put them back in their assigned place.
Do this over and over, until it becomes habit.
Go to where you work.
Repeat.

If this profundity doesn’t satisfy your need for authoritative guidance, you can Google your way into organizing nirvana, where advice abounds and lists are legion.

There are guides for organizing your home life, your work life, your love life, your spiritual life, and your leisure pursuits. Webmasters will tell you how to organize your desk, your kitchen cabinets, your craft supplies, your garage, your purse, your glove compartment, your medicine cabinet, your tool box, your clothes and your shirt pocket. Others are expert on organizing everything from your child’s daily calendar to your pet’s bowel habits.

You can Google them all, print them, highlight key words, push pin them in convenient places and read them incessantly; but, gathering the information is only a good beginning.

The key isn’t in the lists; it’s how important being organized is to you. If you aspire only to a comfy couch and cable TV, then clutter will be invisible and organization only a vague concept.

If you want to be productive, to accomplish things, to get ahead at work, to have more quality time with your family, then getting organized is something you need to do.

Organizing isn’t synonymous with neat or clean. Neat and clean are worthy concepts, but obsessive people are often neat and clean. For those obsessive, making things perfect becomes an end unto itself, not a good sign for their emotional well being.

Excessively obsessive people aren’t productive, except in making sure all the pencils point in the same direction. If you’re in this category, you need a shrink, not a seminar.

Think of organizing as a process that allows you to be productive. If that means several piles of laundry in the floor, that’s o.k., if they’re shrinking as you wash load after load. If it means you carry your tools in a grocery sack, fine, as long as the work is well done and finished on time.

Having a disheveled office isn’t a crime against organizing, if can quickly find what you want; but, if you spend hours looking for things, then maybe you need to straighten up a little, because those lost hours add up to lots of unproductive time.

One of the biggest impediments to being organized, for many of us, is our stuff. We have too much of it and often don’t place limits on its accumulation. If you live in a studio apartment, limit the number of book clubs you join. Get rid of stuff you don’t need.

If you recognize the importance of getting organized, can get that way and stay that way, maybe you’ll then enjoy enough success to accumulate wealth, which will allow you to hire somebody to do your organizing, and you can go back to losing your socks, one at a time.

When not crawling under beds to retrieve socks, Tammy Morales enjoys life as a wife and mother in Calgary, Canada. Her view of the Rockies and a busy life provide inspiration for scrap booking, her passion. Tammy is publisher of ScrapbookersInnerCircle.com and coaches scrapbook skills, one of which is being organized.

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