Get Organized

I used to think that I thrived in organized chaos. In any office job that I’ve held, I kept a tidy desk. Everything had its place, and everything was in order. But at home, I never saw the top of my desk. I told myself that that was okay because I ‘knew’ where everything was. While I don’t have an eidetic memory, I can easily recall in what box or drawer I’ve placed documents or books that I’m looking for. But now, to increase my productivity and efficiency, I know how important it is to get organized.

The Downfall of Being Disorganized

While I am working harder to keep my desk and workspace organized, it is a struggle. I regularly take a couple of hours to move my books off the floor, put all my papers into piles, and ensure that the only thing on my desk is my laptop and my current writing project. But it is never long—two or three days, tops—before clutter takes over the desk.

And as I’m trying to write with lots of stuff on my desk, I’m easily distracted. It has me thinking about all the things I need to do. Instead of writing, I’m now flipping through papers, checking things online related to other projects, or reorganizing everything again. Clutter distracts, and I’ve learned that it can easily, almost gleefully, slow your progress.

Get Organized

In Discipline is Destiny, Ryan Holiday tells us about Robert Moses, an unban planner and public official in New York. We learn that Moses was a spectacularly organized person responsible for the construction of many major public works across the city.¹ Organized, yes, because Moses kept a clean desk.

Moses’s example teaches us that we excel when everything is in its place, when there is no clutter to distract us. Holiday explains it eloquently when he writes: “Once the systems are in place, once the order is established, then and only then are we able to truly let loose to turn ourselves over to the whims and furies of creativity, to pushing ourselves physically, to audacious invention and investment.”²

Get organized. Set things up so that when you show up you can get to work.

Let me, then, leave you today with this last thought…

You are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And, best of all, you do not need anyone’s permission to be—unapologetically—who you are.

1. Holiday, R. (2022). Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, New York, Portfolio/Penguin, p. 38. [↩]
2. Holiday, p. 41. [↩]