In the 1950s, my grandmother was a single working mother with young children. So my grandmother hired a housekeeper, a young woman of German heritage named Pauline, to handle the housework, the cooking, and the childcare.

My mother said it made her acutely self-conscious, as a child growing up in a small town in the fifties, to have a mother who drove off to work and to have a housekeeper waiting for her when she walked home from school. All her friends had their mothers waiting at home, and their fathers taking the only family car and driving off to work.

“It was a conformist decade,” she said. But she also told me about Pauline’s system.

Pauline made decisions, ahead of time, about what she was doing when. My mother said, “If you could tell Pauline what day of the week it was, she could tell you what was for dinner.”

Pauline separated her decision-making about her work, from the doing of the work. Monday was laundry day. On Thursdays she cooked meatloaf. On Fridays she cooked fish. Pauline did not wonder about what she was going to cook that week. She had already decided.

This sounds confining but it is actually extremely liberating.

If you’ve decided that Monday is laundry day, and then you carry out your decision — you do laundry on Monday — then you don’t have to think about laundry for six days of the week; and you’ll still have clean clothes. (Or maybe you, like me, can’t face a whole week’s worth of laundry; and decide instead to do a load a day.)

Getting Organized Means Deciding First, Doing Later

When people say they want to get organized, many times they have no idea exactly what that means. (I sure didn’t…)

Being organized means you make decisions BEFORE you act. This is true for time management, and it is true for managing the objects in your physical environment.

That’s the big secret.

Separate your decisions about your time, your energy, and your things, from your actions.

Being disorganized means that you are trying to make decisions about what you are doing, at the same time that you are actually trying to do the thing.

Think about it first. Record your decisions. Then act.

By deciding before doing:

• you already know where your things belong before you put them away; your things have designated places where they live

• you make and record your decisions about your activities, before you dive in and actually do them.

Without setting aside regular time for thinking, for decision-making, separate from the doing, I don’t think you can get organized.

“But I don’t have time to sit and PONDER this stuff!!!”

So often we who are not naturally organized think we don’t have time to “do nothing but” think. We believe that we cannot block off special time to figure out decisions about what we will do. It seems so unproductive, staring at a notebook or computer screen, writing down your thoughts about what you will do.

Why not just dive in and get stuff done?

Unfortunately when we try to do things at the same time that we are trying to decide how to do them, we are multi-tasking; we are context-shifting. Things quickly get stressful and confusing. It overloads our circuits.

When it comes to dealing with our things, trying to decide where an object lives at the same time you want to use it, might be like this: “Oh, yay, I finally found the vegetable peeler, where can I put it, lemme put it in this drawer for now, yeah, okay, it kinda fits…”

One week later: “Where, oh where is the vegetable peeler?”

When it comes to dealing with our projects, trying to work without making decisions about your time and tasks beforehand might go something like this: “Okay, team meeting coming up, oh nooooooo, it’s my week to facilitate, I was supposed to be there to welcome people five minutes ago, all right, all right, let me get Zoom going, what the — an update?? Now??”

Setting aside time to figure out what needs to happen and then make decisions ahead of time, takes time, for sure. Maybe a couple of hours over a week.

But dealing with the chaos that emerges from lack of decision-making takes much more time. It is far more unpredictable and stressful, too.

It takes longer to find things and reset your space if you haven’t previously decided where your things live.

It takes much longer to write something or study something or hold a meeting if you haven’t decided before you start the work, what specific outcome you want to have at the end of that work session (e.g. “For this writing session, I will research these three questions that came up in my draft,” “For today’s study session, I will use flashcards to practice my Spanish vocabulary,” “For this meeting, I will ask these follow-up questions; and I will make sure we have our agenda set for the state conference”)

Getting Organized: The Key Decisions to Make About Your Things

“Being organized means simply that where something is, matches what it means to you.” (Allen 2015, p 39)

To get organized with your things — physical objects — you have to make three kinds of decisions:

• Decide where your things live when you are not actively using them; and where they travel during their use cycle

• Decide how much is enough — I’ve written about that here

• Decide how you will remove excess things that you no longer use, or do not have room for — I’ve written about that here

The top priority decision above is to decide where your things live. The others (deciding how much is enough, and deciding how you will remove the excess) follow from deciding where your things will live.

So how does the location of something match what it means for you?

Let’s ponder the use cycle of that vegetable peeler.

Sometimes the vegetable peeler travels out of its drawer to go on an important celery-string peeling mission! (Yes, I peel my celery; I hate getting celery strings caught in my teeth.)

The trusty vegetable peeler tours the counter while you are cooking: that means it is helping me cook dinner.

Then it gets to dive into the sink: that means it is done with its job and needs to be cleaned to prepare for its next important mission. (Maybe we branch out to carrots next time!)

And when it is clean, it gets to go home to its designated space in a designated drawer. It is ready to peel something new. It is ready to start a new use cycle.

Where you place the vegetable peeler, tells you what you have to do with it. Its location matches what it means for you.

It has a designated home, which means: Ready — nay, eager — for its next veggie (or fruit!) peeling session.

It has a designated workplace, probably on a counter with a cutting board, which means: it is fulfilling its purpose, living its best utensil life, peeling things and helping you cook. Glorious!

It has a designated clean-up place, the sink, which means: it needs a bath after all that hard work.

Since you have made decisions about where your vegetable peeler lives, and where it goes through its use cycle, that means you have organized it.

KC Davis makes the useful distinction between your home being organized, and being tidy.

Let’s say I have a pile of dirty dishes on my counter. My kitchen may be messy that day; but it is organized, because every one of those dishes has an assigned place to live, and they have designated stations throughout the use cycle.

I can glance at the location of the dishes, and the location matches what it means for me. *

In the cupboard: this means they are clean and ready to go. On the table: this means we’re eating from them. In the sink: this means we’re cleaning them.

Conversely, someone could have a kitchen with clear counters — a tidy kitchen — but if you ask that person “Where is the vegetable peeler, where is the colander?” but their cupboards are jammed, and they are not quite sure where to find those things… it is not an organized kitchen.

The first decision that helps you get organized is figuring out where your things live, and what stations they travel to, through their use cycles.**

Getting Organized by Making Decisions About Your Time and Activities

Making decisions about your time is more complex than making decisions about your vegetable peeler. (Surprise!)

To manage my time I make these sets of decisions:

• Make sure my use of time aligns with my values — that’s the system I call a personal framework.

• Make sure I’m setting good boundaries for work time and personal time

• Make sure I’m doing something more interesting with my leisure time than my default activity (scrolling mindlessly through my phone)

And on a semi-annual, weekly, and daily basis, I make decisions ahead of time about how I plan to spend that week or that day.

I even make decisions beforehand for the hour a day I allot to my personal writing, here on this blog: Before I sit down to write, I write down a note to myself about what I want to accomplish, for that particular writing session.

What do I want to have at the end of my writing time? A list of ideas? Firm up some research? Edit the draft? I decide, and I write my decision down, before I begin the actual writing.

Staying Organized Is a Practice

The natural state of things is confusion and clutter. Inertia takes over.

When inertia takes over in physics, it means a thing stops moving.

But when inertia takes over with your things and your tasks, it means stuff starts piling up. It would be awesome if things and tasks just stopped moving, like a beach ball coming to rest… but no, they multiply! Objects and tasks breed when you’re not looking! Weird, but true.

The default — if you decide nothing, and do nothing — is that your things and your tasks will pile up.

Getting organized is the process of regularly, routinely, setting aside time to make decisions, and then carrying out those decisions. Deciding, then doing.

It’s a lot like exercise, unfortunately. If I don’t do what I laughingly call my yoga session, if I don’t take a daily walk, it’s not long before I am less flexible and more out of breath.

And the same with organizing myself: things deteriorate rapidly if I don’t keep up a few simple practices.

If I don’t make regular time to think about what I am doing with my week or my day, my mind gets cluttered. If I don’t assign places for objects to live and bring them back to their homes, my physical environment gets cluttered.

This is not a moral issue at all.

For me, it’s a quality of life issue. It’s a gift to myself to make time to make the decisions that keep my mind and environment more clear. Also, if you struggle with making decisions in general, organizing something is a great low-risk way to practice that skill. (”I will keep the vegetable peeler HERE.”)

To get organized means you make decisions about things first, and then act on them.

Separate your deciding from your doing.

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REFERENCES

Allen, D. and Fallows, J. (2015) Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Revised ed. Edition. New York City: Penguin Books.

Book: Davis, K.C. (2022) How to keep house while drowning: a gentle approach to cleaning and organizing. First Simon Element hardcover edition. New York, NY: Simon Element.

Personal Kanban - Using Kanban To Improve Personal Productivity (2016). Available at: https://www.digite.com/kanban/personal-kanban/ (Accessed: 24 June 2022).

Lithwick, D. (2012) ‘Chaos Theory’, Slate, 8 June. Available at: https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/06/chaos-theory.html (Accessed: 24 June 2022).

NOTES

*This is how kanban boards work, and why they are very cool. The location of the card matches the status of the work cycle. Where the task is on the board, matches what it means to you.

**So… in this world, some people are chaos muppets and some are order muppets. Many children are natural chaos muppets because they learn so much about the world through physical actions — wearing colanders on their heads, for example. Chaos muppets move things all over, and use things in novel ways. Objects get swirled up into a creative exploratory hurricane and then tumbled onto foreign shores. The vegetable peeler might be in a child’s bedroom, because somebody wanted to try to peel something that was not plant-based. Putting things in order AND disrupting things are both creative processes. I wish I had a great answer to navigating between order and chaos, taking care of things and loving our people, but here I just turn to a value judgment: people are more important than things. Yes, it is important to teach children to take care of things, and to respect others’ things; but … people before things.