Every once in a while, it feels to me like there are two categories of people inhabiting this planet. On the one hand, there are certain individuals who easily self-organize, meaning that it comes natural to them to take a structured and systematic approach on how they handle their everyday tasks and obligations. On the other hand, there are those who consider it to be a daunting endeavor when they have to compel themselves to get more organized.
The second group of people can be divided into three subtypes: those who would like to be more organized, those who wouldn’t, and those who don’t know what they want after having made a number of frustrating experiences.
When asked the right questions, even the least organized person you’ll ever meet is likely to be willing to admit that there are certain advantages to being organized that virtually anyone can benefit from.
As a general rule, handling life in an unsystematic or even chaotic way doesn’t support people with reaching their goals. Therefore, a lack of self-organization is almost always somewhat of an impediment to personal growth and professional success.
You might well agree with me that wasting time searching for your keys before leaving the house is usually not a particularly mood-enhancing experience. Although, most people don’t even care to acknowledge how much their discounting of minor inconveniences that are part of everyday reality tends to add up. Just because a person believes that they are in control of their life doesn’t mean that they’re willing to take control of their time to any significant extent.
Strictly speaking, it’s not actually time that can be managed, but priorities that need to be taken command of. Therefore, consciously organizing the way we think about what’s important to us, certainly makes a difference that shouldn’t be underestimated. And, even when we’re doing what we believe we’re best at, following an organized approach usually has an upside that can hardly be denied.
It’s quite normal for people to feel some kind of resistance against doing what they believe they would need to do in order to get more organized. Still, the inner obstacles we meet can rarely be justified by the outer situation at hand. Much more often, the friction we feel is a response to conscious and unconscious memories, and therefore has to be seen as an emotional answer to our past.
The way I’ve come to see it, most unorganized people don’t actually have an issue with the concept of self-organization, even when they believe they do. Instead, it’s something that they associate with being organized that triggers those negatives emotions they try to avoid. Many people feel like self-organization entails boring and repetitive tasks that inhibit spontaneity and creativity. Also, picturing ourselves complying with certain obligations can easily bring up memories that are connected to previous experiences about how we had to do things that we were unwilling to do.
Remarkably few people actually know much about what they’d need to get done in order to raise their level of self-organization in a truly astute and expedient way. As a matter of fact, for anyone even remotely interested in becoming more organized, the number of perspectives and strategies to be considered could easily fill several books on the topic. Then again, most of these books wouldn’t be about self-organizational techniques and approaches, at least not in the narrower sense of the term. As it turns out, if you want to be more of an organized person than you already are, resolving inhibiting beliefs and inner conflicts will likely be a prerequisite for you to be able to make the kind of difference you’re looking for. Also, there’s no way around gaining more clarity about your objectives and getting familiar with any tools that can help you reach your goals. I could talk about this for hours. However, I better stop myself from digressing and get straight to the point. I’ve promised to present you with what I’ve dramatically, and also somewhat ironically, called the “biggest secret” to being naturally organized and I fully intend to deliver on that promise.
The “secret” is quite simple and can be summed up in a single sentence: there are no naturally organized people.
Admittedly, there are certain people who can truthfully say that being organized feels natural to them. However, they don’t feel that way because they were born like this. Instead, it’s because of the way in which they’ve responded to the socialization process they were exposed to over the course of their lives. Even the most organized person imaginable, in one way or another, had to learn to be organized. And in fact, most organized people we meet don’t even consider themselves to be “natural self-organizers”. They rather see themselves as pragmatic enough to do what serves them best. So, we can certainly conclude from this that becoming more organized, pragmatically speaking, is not about talent. It’s about focusing on using the right strategies, tools, and procedures in the most expedient way.
Let me give you a straightforward example for this. If you have a tendency to misplace your keys, don’t try to compel yourself to feel good about always putting them in the same place. Instead, make yourself deliberately feel wrong about putting them anywhere else. Each time you feel tempted to violate your intended behavior pattern, consciously remember what it feels like having to search for your keys when you’re in a hurry to leave the house. If necessary, do this more than once on each occasion, playing a little movie in your head that shows the unwanted outcome several times in a row. In other words, use your mind to establish a connection between the adverse behavior and the undesired outcome.
Then, either while you’re performing the intended behavior or right after you’ve concluded it, just for a few moments, focus on a distinctly positive thought or inner picture that somehow has to do with how you expect to benefit from fulfilling the task. Don’t try to convince yourself of anything. Don’t try tor force yourself to feel different than you do. Merely run the appropriate thoughts and pictures in your head in accordance with the instructions I’ve given, casually observing yourself while doing it.
When you consciously orchestrate your thinking in order to adopt this simple strategy, it won’t take long until it feels completely normal to you to always place the keys where you’re easily able to find them. Rather sooner than later, there will be no need for negative thoughts, let alone self-conquest, and you’re even likely to automatically associate positive feelings with performing the intended behavior. You’re going to want to put the keys where they belong. Also, applying this approach for a number of purposes in different contexts will increase the overall likelihood for you to have positive pictures and thoughts running in your head whenever you do what serves you best. Using negative associations to enforce positive behavior might seem to be a bit of an unusual approach to many. However, it’s a very effective one as long as you don’t hold on to these negative emotions and only use them as a tool. In little time, you’ll do a lot of things without having to make any conscious effort to speak of, simply because you automatically associate positive feelings with doing things in an organized way.
The main point I’m trying to make here is that anyone can learn to be organized if they are willing to implement the right strategies, and be strategic about implementing them. Some of these strategies will be about doing things differently, while others will refer to thinking about things in a different way. In fact, pretty much all of them will be about changing how we do or think about things, allowing for us to create the biggest change with the least amount of effort.
Of course, in order to make use of any strategies like these, you have to allow yourself to attach importance to the idea of becoming more organized. You need to be willing to focus on the difference that a higher degree of self-organization will make for you when it comes to reaching any goals in life. And, you need to resist the temptation to relapse into trying to impose new behavior onto yourself using willpower alone. The goal is by no means about pushing against and breaking down inner resistance, but about creating and reinforcing different pathways in your brain. Ultimately, you need to want to change in order for learning to take place in your life. You need to be willing to do things in unfamiliar ways in order for change to happen easily and sustainably.
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