How to Organize Your Life

Have you ever wished that you could organize your life?

 

Think about what your life is like.

You’ve probably divided it into a lot of compartments.

Your job is in one compartment.

Your house is in another.

Your family is in another.

Your friends are in another.

The list goes on.

Maybe you have sub-compartments.

Your house

Take your house, for instance.

Maybe you keep a tidy house.

Everything has a place, and everything is kept in its place, or most of the time.

You probably have a junk room somewhere, too.

Everyone does.

It could be the attic or the basement, or the garage.

There are a lot of people whose cars haven’t seen the inside of their garage since they’ve been in the house.

 

Do you think of your kitchen as being in a separate compartment from your bedroom?

Do you think of each of the bedrooms as being separate from each other?

What about your closet?

When you think of your closet, do you imagine it to be a separate project?

 

These are just examples of how you might compartmentalize your life.

You don’t have to have these, and you may have divided it differently from the way I’ve described it.

The goal has simply been to get you thinking about how you see the different parts of your life.

You see, before you can think about getting a handle on things, you first have to see things as they are.

You have to recognize that you look at your life in a particular way, and that that will have an effect on the result.

Two categories of people

When it comes to organizing anything, there are two categories of people.

There are those who often say, “If I could just get organized!”

Is this something that you say?

Those who say this seem to be running from one thing to the next.

They struggle to stay on top of all that they have going on in their lives.

Quite often, they look like the famous plate spinners from many years ago who would spin a dinner plate on the top of a pole, then they’d start another one, and then another, and after awhile they’d have 15 of these things going at the same time.

Then they’d spend the remainder of their time keeping them all going.

It was entertaining to watch, and there was a certain skill involved, but who wants to spin plates?

More to the point, does your life feel like you’re spinning plates?

 

The second category of people recognize that “getting organized” is the wrong goal.

If you’re among the first group, then don’t be discouraged by that.

If anything, you ought to be encouraged because you now have permission to stop trying to attain the unattainable.

What’s the right goal?

You must be wondering, then, what the right goal is.

It’s this: To learn to adapt to your changing life.

Now you do this all the time in other areas.

You just haven’t thought about it like this.

 

Let’s say that you’re driving home from work when you come to a sign that says “Road Closed.l”

What do you do?

You find another way home.

What have you done?

You’ve just adapted to a change in your circumstances.

 

Here’s another example.

Suppose that there’s a particular restaurant that you always go to on special occasions.

It’s a place that’s out of the way and that not a lot of people know about.

You’ve never had to make reservations.

When you arrive on this particular night, you discover that the whole place has been reserved for a party that’s already in progress.

What do you do?

You may be disappointed, nevertheless, you make other arrangements.

Maybe you ask the owner about a different date or maybe you go to a new place that you’ve been wanting to try, but never had the opportunity.

Whatever you do, you adapt to the circumstances.

 

And how often have you gone to work, or sat down at your desk in your home office, or started working on something in your garage, when there has been an interruption that has demanded your attention right then?

It happens.

It’s called life.

 

And that’s why you never “get organized.”

What happens instead, is that you adapt.

You learn how to manage your life.

Why can’t I stay organized?

I know what you’re thinking.

You’ve just spent 10 hours straightening your closet.

Thing is, you did it three months ago.

This time around, it was the worst you could ever remember it.

How could it get like that?

Why can’t you stay organized?

2nd Law of Thermodynamics

You probably didn’t expect a scientific answer.

That’s okay.

It’s pretty simple to explain, and your experience bears out the truth of it.

The Second Law says that within a closed system, order tends to become chaos.

What that means is that when you finally get some part of your life organized that way you want it, that as soon as you take your hands off of it, it starts down the road towards utter chaos.

 

Everything is digital these days, but in times past some mechanical things had to be wound up.

You had to wind your watch.

There were toys that had to be wound up.

Even today, if you have a grandfather clock, you have to wind it.

If you don’t, then when it has unwound sufficiently, it will stop.

And stopping is akin to be as chaotic as possible.

So that’s why you can’t stay organized.

It’s why you can’t organize your life.

 

If we think about your closet again, you know for yourself that you don’t always put everything back in exactly the same place and in exactly the same way as you did when you “got organized.”

And each time you digress a little from the “organized” model, you contribute to the chaotic one.

Do you see how that happens?

Even if you’re careful, you won’t be able to do it.

Eventually, some things will end up in the laundry or taken to the dry cleaner.

Some things will need to be sewn or repaired.

And all the while those items are missing, what’s in your closet will fill in the leftover space.

You might even buy something else and inadvertently put it in the gap left by something that is being washed.

And then there are those days when you finish work and you’re too tired to care; so you just put it any old place.

Shoes get rearranged like that.

What can you do?

It’s impossible to tell you everything in a post, or even in a book.

Even if every method and technique could be included here, you’d feel overwhelmed after awhile just trying to read it.

So here’s a principle, instead.

If you read the posts in this blog on a regular basis, then you’ll be familiar with it.

It’s called the 80/20 Principle, or Pareto’s Law.

Pareto’s Law

Pareto was an Italian economist who lived at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

He observed that 20% of input yields 80% of output; and the remaining 80% of input yields just 20% of output.

The absolute best book I’ve ever read that explains it in detail was written by Richard Koch.

 

Let’s apply this principle to your closet.

See how well it describes you.

Pareto says that you will wear 20% of your clothes 80% of the time.

Is that right?

Men

If you’re a man, you probably wear 5% of your clothes 95% of the time.

Guys don’t usually care about that stuff quite so much.

Women

If you’re a woman, then you’ll still have favorite things that you wear.

You may change your outfit every day, but it’s unlikely that you’ll go more than a week or two before you wear the same clothes again.

Why?

Because you like those outfits.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Another perspective

Now we have to look at the other side.

80% of what’s in your closet is only worn for 20% of the year.

Twenty-percent of the year is a grand total of 73 days. About 10 weeks, or 2-1/2 months.

Think about that.

You wear more than three-quarters of the stuff in your closet for less than an entire season.

 

Question: Are there things in your closet that you wear less often than once per month?

How about twice per year?

I know a guy who has more than 400 ties.

He only wears a tie once each week.

If he wore a different one each week, it would take nearly eight years to wear them all.

And you can bet that he has favorites, too.

Some of those ties probably never see the light of day.

The Hack

You now know that you will never get organized.

Does that mean you just give up and live in a mess the rest of your life?

No.

You can get on top of this.

You can learn to manage your life.

In the case of your closet, have a clear out.

Identify the things that you don’t wear very often.

This is easy.

Start with things that don’t fit.

It doesn’t matter why they don’t fit.

If you’re not wearing them, then they don’t belong in your closet.

This includes what are known as “fat clothes” – those things you wore when you were heavier, and thin clothes – those things you wore ten years ago or more when you were at your ideal weight.

 

If you can’t remember the last time you wore something, then you probably don’t need it.

Sell everything on eBay or donate it to a homeless shelter.

You can apply exactly the same principle to everything in your kitchen, your garage, and your junk room.

Figure out what you use most often and keep it.

If you’re not sure

If you’re not sure, then apply the same principle.

Of the the remaining 80% that you don’t use that much, which 20% to you use the most?

If you keep applying that principle, you’ll soon reach a point where you know in your heart which things to keep and which things you’ll probably never use again.

That’s the hard part.

Getting rid of things you really don’t need.

Keeping things under control

The best way to keep things under control is to avoid buying more stuff.

Whatever you think of President Trump, he has the right idea.

He wants the regulators to discard two rules for every new one they create.

You don’t have to get rid of two things for every one you buy, but it’s worth getting rid of one thing.

To look at this another way, ask yourself this question: “If I buy this, what will it replace?”

Then when you get it, you’ll know what to sell or give away.

Make sure that you do so.

If you don’t, then there will come a time when all that space you just created will be full again.

You see, when you choose to wear or use one thing rather than another, it can mean that you’re putting that ahead of something else in terms of its importance.

The more important is among that 20% that you use or wear 80% of the time.

The less important is among that 80% that you use or wear only 20% of the time.

So, every time you shop, you need to think about this.

 

When you learn how to manage your life, then you’ll stop worrying about how to organize your life.