OK, I’ll admit that I love all things organized. Neat rows set my heart aflutter, and I can’t help arranging things nicely. But is there such a thing as too organized? Definitely.
How can you be too organized? Surely more of a good thing is even better? But I say no. My goal, for my clients and in my own life, is to be organized ENOUGH. That means I’m keeping in mind the big goal: I want everything to function smoothly and effectively. That’s the whole point of the systems I put in place.
Too organized often means too many categories. Do you need a file for each household utility when one folder for “Household Bills” will do? Do you need to organize Legos by the sets they came in, when your kids prefer to dump them all together and build new creative stuff anyway? If you’re organizing electronically and you keep your documents nicely searchable, the amount of categorizing you need goes way down. There’s an art form to having just the right number of categories and groups, but not so many that it gets unwieldy and annoying.
In a similar way, don’t over-organize your stuff. What feels good to you is personal. Maybe it drives you crazy to open a drawer and see a mess. On the other hand, maybe you find folding underwear to be a soul-sucking activity and a waste of time. In that case, why do it? If you keep your undies contained to one properly-sized drawer, you don’t need to fold it if that doesn’t work for you. This is why there never was and never will be a single “right” way to organize. Sometimes the hard part is actually figuring out what level of organized is right for you. We can all get stuck in an arbitrary idea of how things “should” be, without really taking the time to consider what works for us as individuals, in this particular place and at this particular time.
So let’s strive to be just organized enough, and not a bit more.
How can you be too organized? Surely more of a good thing is even better? But I say no. My goal, for my clients and in my own life, is to be organized ENOUGH. That means I’m keeping in mind the big goal: I want everything to function smoothly and effectively. That’s the whole point of the systems I put in place.
Too organized often means too many categories. Do you need a file for each household utility when one folder for “Household Bills” will do? Do you need to organize Legos by the sets they came in, when your kids prefer to dump them all together and build new creative stuff anyway? If you’re organizing electronically and you keep your documents nicely searchable, the amount of categorizing you need goes way down. There’s an art form to having just the right number of categories and groups, but not so many that it gets unwieldy and annoying.
In a similar way, don’t over-organize your stuff. What feels good to you is personal. Maybe it drives you crazy to open a drawer and see a mess. On the other hand, maybe you find folding underwear to be a soul-sucking activity and a waste of time. In that case, why do it? If you keep your undies contained to one properly-sized drawer, you don’t need to fold it if that doesn’t work for you. This is why there never was and never will be a single “right” way to organize. Sometimes the hard part is actually figuring out what level of organized is right for you. We can all get stuck in an arbitrary idea of how things “should” be, without really taking the time to consider what works for us as individuals, in this particular place and at this particular time.
So let’s strive to be just organized enough, and not a bit more.
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