organise

how to organise?????????????


Years ago my family and I moved from a cramped two-bedroom apartment into a spacious house. Instead of having to squeeze my home office in half a room, I finally had a nice 10' x 12' room all to myself. Since I was accustomed to working in less than half this area, I knew I'd have plenty of room to work with, so I wanted to intelligently organize it in a way that would allow me to work efficiently on a variety of projects without creating a cluttered mess. While browsing a local bookstore before the move, on a whim I bought a book called Organizing From the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern. It contained many great organizing tips and adroitly explained where people normally go wrong when trying to get organized. I'd like to share with you what I learned from reading this book and organizing my home office from scratch.

Julie's book starts off with a strong statement that at first I didn't believe. She says that if you're one of those people who are surrounded by clutter and just can't seem to get organized, then you simply never learned how to get organized. If you maintain a messy environment, it just means you lack the skills of organizing, which anyone can learn. Having read several other books on organizing since then, I feel that Julie is partly right. Organizing can be broken down into a step-by-step process that anyone can follow.

What Creates Clutter?
Julie points out several technical flaws that can prevent one from becoming organized, but my perception is that at a basic level, there is really just one flaw: a failure to systematize common decisions. Whenever I leave things lying out, it's because I'm not ready to decide what to do with them yet. So the process of organizing really comes down to having a system for automating decisions about where everything goes. Disorganized people have few or no systems, so they must make every decision on a case by case basis. Eventually this becomes overwhelming, and clutter begins to pile up. Organized people will make far fewer decisions in the long run. It takes far more time to be disorganized than it does to be organized because disorganized people lose so much time to inefficiency