What Is Your Compelling Purpose for Organizing?

Recently, Melissa, one of my clients, told me, “I don’t like being disorganized. I waste a lot of time looking for things. I hate the way my apartment looks. I miss appointments because I forget to write things down. I’m looking for an exciting, responsible job, and I know I need to change. But when I have free time, I don’t like to spend any of it cleaning, or putting things away. I want to visit friends, go to the movies, have some fun.”

Melissa has summed up a core dilemma around getting organized. She wants to get organized, but she doesn’t want to spend any time doing it. She wants the results, but isn’t ready to change herself to get them. So far, she has managed to escape most of the pain of her disorganization. Melissa is known by her colleagues to be a little scattered, but she is delightful, and her forgetfulness is easily forgiven. She hasn’t lost a promotion or a life partner because of her disorganization. Without a good, strong reason to change, Melissa won’t. She doesn’t think that it is worth the effort, and, right now, she doesn’t pay a high-enough price. What Melissa has not yet recognized is that a few well-chosen organizing habits can actually save her time and energy, reduce her stress, and help her find and flourish in the job of her dreams.

By contrast, Ruth, a single mother and a high school teacher, is well aware of the price that she pays for being disorganized, both at home with her children and at work with her colleagues. Ruth’s life has become painful to her. Her habit of overbooking herself and running late has led to a chronic feeling of being squeezed. Her indecisiveness has led to taking on more than she can handle. She feels pressure almost all of the time. She can see clearly that organizing would bring her more of what she wants in life. She is ready to change so that she can do more of what is really important to her with less of that frenzied feeling.

Most disorganized people have no interest in being organized for its own sake. Why get organized if you don’t enjoy the process or value the result? You probably don’t want to get organized just to be tidy or punctual (even the words might evoke distaste). When you create order not for the sake of order alone, but to manifest something that is deeply important to you, you get the fuel for change.

A strong, meaningful purpose for organizing will be the motivation and pivot point around which your organizing will take place. When you forget why you ever started getting organized, when you want to give up, you’ll draw on your purpose and that will give you direction and energy. Organizing is hard work—it entails a change of mind, heart, and action. Like other worthy endeavors that demand a lot from you, it requires determination, commitment, and grit. If you set out to build a business, be a good athlete, or learn another language, you would prepare yourself with a clear intent. You have to do the same thing for getting organized.

Finding things when you want them, feeling less stress, living in a pleasant place, keeping agreements, experiencing fewer family fights, keeping your desk clear: as good as these reasons are, they won’t sustain you when the going gets rough. You can probe your good reasons for getting organized to reveal your purpose. For each good reason, you ask a question: Why do I want that? Why do I want to find things more easily? So that I can have a greater sense of readiness for action, for example. Why do I want to feel less stress? So that I can experience greater health, energy, and well-being, so that I can enjoy my life. Why do I want to keep agreements? So that people see me as reliable and trustworthy.

As you build on your reasons to develop a strong purpose, you start to see that organizing can help you bring more desirable qualities into your life:

The confidence of finding things when you need them

The reliability of showing up when you say you will

The beauty of living in a place that is aesthetically pleasing

The creativity of working in a supportive atmosphere

The responsibility of meeting deadlines

The integrity of knowing that your word is good

The calm of knowing that you can count on yourself

Take a moment to write down a few qualities that describe what you are longing for. Ask yourself what qualities you want to express in your life. Would you like to be serene under pressure? Would you like more self-confidence? Would you like more open-heartedness? Your list might include: self-esteem, security, relaxation, peace of mind, more energy, freedom, creativity, access to knowledge, reliability, serenity, clarity, focus, beauty, perspective, or spaciousness.

Another way to discover your purpose for organizing is to think of something that you would really like to do or to be in life and you can’t do it because you are disorganized. For instance, if you truly want to take leadership in your community, develop a strong, intimate relationship, create a loving family, or be known as a trustworthy healer—but you can’t do those things because you are unreliable, chaotic, chronically late, messy, or break your promises—then you have a strong purpose for getting organized. Purpose is about who and how you want to be. Your purpose for organizing will support your life purpose. Your life purpose is often about something beyond yourself, or bigger than yourself; it is about your contribution. While you don’t need to know your life purpose to get value from this book, you may discover it in the process of clearing up your mess.

Ask yourself why you want to get organized. What is your disorganization preventing you from having or experiencing in your life? Think for a moment about why you picked up this book: what do you hope to gain from getting organized?

At first, Ruth answered the question about her purpose with her good reasons: “I want to get organized so that I can find things. My mess is my stumbling block, I just spend too much time looking for my keys.” And, later, she began to realize: “As I get organized, I can start to be more of the person that I want to be, loving, strong, a good teacher and very present for my family. I can do more of what I care about doing.”

It took Melissa a little longer to find a compelling purpose. After considering her lack of professional focus, she said, “I want to get organized so that I can stop feeling so confused. I don’t really know what is most important to me.” And as she explored this question more fully, she said, “I am ready to experience more dignity and listen to my inner guidance for my purpose in life. I think I am ready to take on more leadership in my community, but when I am running around so much, I don’t trust myself to follow through on things.”

The following sentence-completion exercise will give you more ideas about your purpose for organizing. You can say these out loud or write them down. Try completing each sentence in five different ways.

When I am more organized, I will experience more . . .

I will have more . . .

My disorganization keeps me from . . .

Now complete the following sentences and see what information you glean about what you might gain from organizing. Some of these sentence stems will resonate with you, others won’t be important.

If I could find things easily, I would . . .

If I stopped rushing, I would feel . . .

If I worked through my backlog, I could . . .

If I lived in a beautiful space, it would mean . . .

If I really felt at home, I would . . .

If I really cleared my desk, I would be free to . . .

If I handled money well, I could . . .

All too often organizing seems trivial and unimportant, but it can support your deeper purpose in life. Understanding this connection is vital; otherwise, you’ll get organized sporadically with little impact, or it will become another “should” and you probably won’t do it at all.

Some Purposes for Organizing

It’s a new idea for many people that getting organized can serve a greater purpose in their lives. Those of us who are disorganized are that way in part because we don’t value organization. It seems so trivial and mundane that it is hard to see how important it is. Here you find out how you could value getting organized, even though the actual activity might not be so pleasing to you. The key is to think of the big picture of how being organized could help you grow, live with greater impact, or allow you to achieve the life you want.

Organizing Can Help You Grow into Your Next Role

For many people, being disorganized is their biggest stumbling block to growing into their next role. They can’t take their next natural step in life because they just can’t get it together. Martin said, “I know I am the best social worker in my department. My supervisor would love to promote me, but she can’t, because I just can’t get through the paperwork. This is holding me back.” Martin was committed to making a contribution in his agency. He was great with clients and a terrific mentor for the new professionals who were just out of graduate school. He was unable to create a system for staying on top of the reporting requirements, however. He was smart and capable but couldn’t file the needed reports. He was ready to figure out how to organize himself to take care of this one issue, so that he could take on more responsibility.

It’s hard to see that as terrific and talented as you are, something mundane like returning e-mails and phone calls in a timely way could be preventing you from growing professionally. Or perhaps you miss deadlines and people can’t count on you. Learning organizing skills could help you move ahead.

Organizing Can Be a Spiritual Practice

For most of us, the good life includes friends, family, meaningful work, contact with nature, and good fun. Cleaning up after ourselves is not considered part of great living. We see cleaning up as an extra. If we could get someone else to do it for us, we would feel better. When we start to value our whole selves, however, we can see that through organizing, we can enter our whole lives, not just the “good parts.” It is all good. Cleaning up and creating order are part of becoming present. Moment by moment, we can enter into our lives more fully.

Great spiritual teachers point to the potential for holiness in everything: “God is in the details.” Rabbi Nachman of Breslov taught that we can find higher consciousness by addressing ourselves to the small things of everyday life with intentionality. He says that God is in everything, we have only to become aware of that, and through our attention, we can release the sparks of holiness in what seems like the ordinary secular world.

In the Zen tradition, there is the story of the young student who goes to his master and says, “Tell me how to reach enlightenment.”

The master says, “Did you eat your porridge?” The student says yes.

“Well, then,” says the master, “clean your bowl.”

Over and over again, we get up, shower, eat, work, and play with the children. Over and over again, we have a bowl to clean at the end of our activities. What a blessing to clean up after ourselves. What a benefit to discover that we leave traces and can deal with them responsibly. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote, “Washing the dishes and cooking are themselves the path to Buddhahood. . . . Only a person who has grasped the art of cooking, washing dishes, sweeping, and chopping wood, someone who is able to laugh at the world’s weapons of money, fame, and power, can hope to transcend the mountain as a hero.”

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, said, “The attitude of sacredness towards your environment will bring drala [magic]. You may live in a dirt hut with no floor and only one window, but if you regard that space as sacred, if you care for it with your heart and mind, then it will be a palace.” You want to feel as if you live in a palace, not a dumping ground. From this perspective, mindful organizing could be as valuable a spiritual practice as meditation.

Organizing Can Increase Your Sense of Social Responsibility

It is so easy to get caught up in the race for success, the juggling act of family, work, play, and just staying one step ahead of everything. In the busyness, we can lose track of what we are doing. We forget to ask what is truly important to us, to our community, our society. Many of us don’t have one extra minute to devote to considering the needs of people who have less than we do or to reaching out to our neighbors. Perhaps at one point in your life you decided to be a community leader, yet, now, you are just bogged down in the details. As you get organized, your values become clearer and you become more willing to make hard choices. You experience the preciousness of time and life more keenly.

The Indian teacher J. Krishnamurti, in The Flame of Attention, discussed the importance of creating order in one’s life:

To find out what right action is we must understand the content of our consciousness. If one’s consciousness is confused, uncertain, pressurized, driven from one corner to another, from one state to another, then one becomes more and more confused, uncertain and insecure; from that confusion one cannot act. . . . It is of primary importance to bring about order in ourselves; from inward order there will be outward order.

Organizing can be very closely linked to clarifying one’s consciousness. This is not to say that all organized people have an easier time determining right action. It is to say that creating inner and outer order can significantly enhance our clarity as we explore our relationship to community and society.

Organizing Can Help You Be More Environmentally Aware

In his popular novel Ishmael, Daniel Quinn suggests that there are two types of peoples, Leavers and Takers. The Leavers leave their environment intact, and they travel without a trace. The Takers leave a mess behind them. There is no doubt that Americans are the biggest Takers of all, leading the planet in environmental waste and destruction. But in our individual lives, we can live more like Leavers. We can live with less harm. We can leave fewer traces. We can become aware of our impact. As we raise our consciousness in our daily lives, we can move toward more gentleness and graciousness in our own immediate environment. We’ll start to consume less, because we find life more satisfying.

As you move your belongings around, you start to sense the amount of space they take up. As you see how you are squeezing yourself out of your space, you might ask, “Where can I throw these things away?” As we grow in environmental awareness, we begin to understand that there is no “away.” We might get the stuff out of our house, but, then, where next? So, perhaps we can bring fewer things into the house in the first place.

Environmental activist Dana Meadows, who was a coauthor of Limits to Growth and a professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College, wrote about moving her many belongings from her farm in Vermont.

I brought those books into the house, every one made of ground-up trees. I read them, yes, and loved them, but I have easy access to three good libraries. I didn’t need to house a library of my own. I piled up those books because I am impatient; I want to look up a quote or a fact instantly. Because I fend off worries by escaping, and books are my escape mechanism. . . . The books are an expensive, troublesome, heavy, space-occupying fortress against having to confront my inner bugaboos. I guess that’s also true of . . . the closets full of rarely worn clothes. Stuff taken from the earth to bolster fantasy or foist off fear, stuff our non-affluent household paid a fortune for, stuff I’ve housed for decades, stuff that occupied the space of real life.

Picture all that stuff wrested from the mines and forests and soils of the earth, and finally, unceremoniously, dumped. . . . The price we’re paying for our stuff—in money and time and space and resources—is tremendous.

Most of us have too much stuff. But we can start practicing our environmental awareness right at home, by learning to consume less, recycling creatively, and treating our own “micro-environment” with the care that we want to bring to our larger environment.

Your Purpose May Evolve

As Mary began getting organized, all she wanted was to get home at a reasonable hour while staying current in her profession. She saw that her inability to make quick decisions about her reading and professional connections was eating into precious family time. Getting organized meant taking a stand for her family and home time. Later, she came to see that she suffered deeply from the constant pushing, and she needed to stop trying to do everything. She wanted breathing room for her innermost self.

Initially, Charles wanted to be more reliable and break fewer agreements so that his practice would have more integrity. The work habits that enabled him to be successful in college and during the early years of his practice were now driving him crazy. His last-minute heroics had gotten out of hand. He wanted to learn how to plan and follow through on each project so he could provide superb timely service to his clients. Then he started to realize that “service” had much deeper meaning for him, and that when he was truly serving his clients, he began to feel a much deeper sense of fulfillment in his work.

Your Beliefs Will Trump Your Purpose Every Time

No matter how good and strong your purpose is, if you hold contradictory beliefs, they will stop you in your tracks. For example, early on, my purpose was to get organized so that I could welcome people into my life and into my home. As I kept trying and failing to get organized, however, I discovered that I had some strong reservations about order. “Clutter is warm; neatness is cold,” I thought. “Messiness is friendly and available; order is standoffish and formal. And lateness, though occasionally rude, is basically relaxed and flexible, while punctuality is oppressive.” I was going to have to revise these strongly held beliefs if I was going to make progress.

I was also sure that messiness was a source of creativity. Not just my creativity, everyone’s creativity. This was such a deep assumption that I thought it was just something true about life. Fact: Messy people are creative, creative people are messy. I was so sure that messiness and creativity were inextricably linked that I had never seen a creative neat person. I just screened them out.

Slowly, I began to notice that one of the most creative, artistic people I knew, a very successful painter, was impeccably neat. Then, I observed that a friend who writes children’s stories has created a wonderful, serene, organized space for herself. Once I opened my mind to the possibility that orderliness and creativity could go together, I was soon flooded with examples of highly organized people who were extremely creative. I began to see that clutter has nothing to do with creativity, per se. You can be messy and creative, or orderly and creative. That surprised me. I started to separate notions that had been glued together in my mind. It also gave me more choices. Until then, I was scared to give up my mess, because I thought I would have to give up my creativity as well. I have since found that actually I am far more creative as a more organized person.

Reflect on your own beliefs. You might find it hard to get seriously engaged in organizing because you, too, believe that in some ways, orderliness will be detrimental to you. Organization and disorganization represent poles of a continuum. Once you have more choice in the matter, you can find a place on the continuum that works for you. Rachel shared with me her belief that “truly spiritual people don’t care what their personal space looks like, it is only their inner life that is important.” That was her deeply held conviction. In her view, organizing her life was going to take away from her spiritual development. There was one thing she did decide to do, however. Since she was a professional career counselor, she wanted to learn how to create a workable filing system for her client notes. She achieved that result and that was enough organizing for her. So, you can determine how organized you want to be. Complete order may not work for you, but stumbling over daily life probably isn’t feasible for you either. Because beliefs are so important, we’ll have another look at them in chapter 4.

Add Up What It’s Costing You

You’ll become more aware of your purpose for organizing when you acknowledge that your current way of life is costing you a lot. Adding up the costs of your disorganization will help you clarify why you want to get organized. People pay dearly for their disorganization with time, energy, self-esteem, success, relationships, and more. For years, you may have said something like: “I’d like to get organized, but I don’t have the time.” But when you look more seriously at your life, you see how painful it is to be disorganized. When you see how much it hurts, you can find the time.

Being disorganized can cost a lot. Yet, often you don’t experience how great the expense is because the costs are spread out over time. Perhaps you lost a promotion or a good assignment because you missed an important deadline, or perhaps you lost a friendship because you’ve canceled dinner together one too many times. Unless you really look at the costs in their totality, they don’t add up to a commitment for change, because we experience them separately over time. We have gotten used to the pain. Hard as this may be, we need to deliberately cut through our denial, so we can create the changes we want.

Perhaps you are like Sarah, who is a very sociable woman. She deeply valued simplicity and friendship, yet she buried herself under old newspapers and unopened mail. She couldn’t invite people over because there was no place to sit. For years, she scheduled visits with her friends in local coffee shops while saying to herself, “Next week, I’ll go through the newspapers and the piles.” One day, she realized that she had been saying that for fifteen years. This caused her such anguish that she became ready to face the pain of cleaning up.

As you add up the pain that you cause yourself, don’t minimize the pain that you are causing other people. This is the point at which most of us go into denial. We say, “I am trying and I didn’t mean to. They have to take into account that this is the way I am.” Yet, there are some contradictions that we have to face. We can’t be both reliable and unreliable at the same time. If you pay attention, you might notice that you are feeling pain yourself about letting people down. Allow yourself to feel your anguish, instead of brushing it off. Pain can be a teacher. You let the embarrassment of running late again crack through the armor of your rationalizations, excuses, or hopelessness. Something in you says, “Enough!” Your pain can wake you up. When you develop the courage to stay with the pain, and you let go of your ten thousand excuses for why you can’t change, you start to grow. It is then you can find the time to do the organizing that will make your life, and others’ lives, more livable.

What are the costs of disorganization? Being disorganized can cost money. Lots of money. Think about all those lost, uncashed checks. Perhaps you don’t return the catalog items you ordered because you lost the packing slip. Or the times when you finally just pay for the book club books that you wanted to return. Remember a time that you tried to return something you didn’t need, and the store clerk wanted the receipt and you didn’t have it? Perhaps there was an invoice that you never sent out. Or perhaps you paid your taxes late, and now you are paying the penalty. Think about all the times you paid the late fee on your credit card. Or perhaps you lost a chance for a good promotion. That’s expensive. It starts to add up.

Being disorganized can cost time. Think about the time you spend looking for things, or the time needed for rework when you acted hastily and did a poor job the first time. Ponder the extra time spent doing errands that you might have grouped together. Add up the number of times you’ve had to return to the market because your shopping list wasn’t complete. Relive the mistakes that you’ve made because you were hurrying and running late. Remember the extra time it took to make things right.

Another cost of disorganization is losing track of what you want in life. Many people are confused about their priorities. Trudy, a professor of mathematics, took a hard look into what her disorganization was costing her. She realized, “I’m so confused and disorganized that I might not do in my life what I most want to. There’s a book that I want to write, and I think I’ll never get to it. And now I am almost too tired to care.” She wanted a way to stop, reorganize herself, and find relief from the burnout and stress of just too much. She wanted to scale way back so she could have the space to do what she deeply cared about.

Some people realize the stress of disorganization is costing them their health. Alex, a salesman, suffered from heart disease. His doctor warned him that he had to reduce the stress in his life. He, like others, tended to run late. He liked timing things to the second. “Never waste a minute,” he liked to say. He often got to the train just as it was pulling into the track. But this habit meant that he often put a great deal of pressure on his heart as he ran from his car to the platform. And, then, all day long, he ran late, because he had so much to do. He began to notice the strain on his body after his doctor’s warning. He got scared that his disorganization might cost him his life.

Being disorganized can cost relationships, too. When you lose phone numbers and don’t return phone calls, it upsets people. There is a cost to canceling gatherings with good friends or colleagues because you double-booked yourself. There is a cost to the promises you make and don’t keep. There is a cost to forgetting birthdays and anniversaries of people you love. If you do that regularly, they think you don’t care. Sometimes, you lose your good reputation and the high regard of others because you let them down.

You may start to see that your family is paying part of the price of your disorganization. David’s wife, Michal, told him that she could not live with such chaos any longer. He said, “The chaos never bothered me. I like it. It gives me the feeling of high risk—like I am in an action movie. It astonished me that Michal told me that she was moving out. She told me for years that she couldn’t live with this, but it never mattered to me. We love each other.” David finally accepted that his marriage could not bear the burden of his disorder any longer.

Margaret realized that her son was paying the price. “I realized major change was ahead when my son couldn’t organize his homework. His role models were me and my husband, both of us successful but very disorganized. How could I say, ‘Clean up your room’ or ‘Organize your homework’ when the house was always such a mess? I realized I couldn’t help him until I took my own problem seriously. I wanted to model something very different for him. My husband is slowly getting into the idea.”

Our souls can also suffer from our disorganization. Cheryl said, “I’m a landscape designer and gardener. I create living art and I love it. Yet, the way I live doesn’t reflect that at all. I just moved, and now I have a house and a barn that are chockablock full. I love art, beauty, design, color, and form, and I have created a whirlwind mess around me. I’m surrounded by the sludge of all this stuff. I suffer because when I look around me in my own home and office, I see ugliness. My reason for existence gets pushed into the back.” The ugliness is offensive to her, but, so far, she has been unable to change it.

My turning point came when I became aware that I kept “cleaning up,” and yet it had no impact. I realized that I could set aside every Sunday for the rest of my life to get organized, and I would still be a mess. I was Sisyphus, and every Sunday morning, I tried to push the boulder of my mess up the hill, and every Sunday night, it rolled back down. My disorganization was costing me my Sundays, my peace of mind, self-esteem, and sense of community. I could not have people over without creating more havoc. I started to move down the path of organizing when I got scared that I would live the rest of my life this way.

Are you willing to add up all the costs? The value of adding up all the costs at once is that you face the whole price you are paying for your disorganization. Hard? Yes. But worth it. Because when you add it all up, you are probably paying a lot for a way of living that you can change.

This exercise will help you make the changes you want to make. Anthony Robbins, a specialist in personal change, says that one essential ingredient of creating change is to associate enormous pain with the way you are living now, and enormous pleasure with the way you want to live. So, here’s the exercise. There are two parts to it.

Write everything that your disorganization is costing you. What is it costing you in terms of money? Family life and friendships? Time? Health? What is it costing you in your spiritual life? Your emotional life? Your life goals? Your soul’s journey? What is it costing you in reputation? What is it costing you at work? How much leisure do you forgo because you are disorganized? What do you dislike about your current behavior? How does it make you feel?
Write down every cost that you can think of.
Now look at the price that you are paying and let yourself feel the pain of it. That is hard but essential to motivate you to make the changes that you want to make. Don’t rush through this. Let yourself really face your suffering.
Next, write down everything that you will gain when you create the new, more organized behaviors that you want. What will you gain in terms of money? Time? Space? Love? Friendship? Spiritual life? Emotional life? Pleasure? How will it be with your family and friends? Describe in detail how good it will feel when you can locate what you need without a problem, deliver good work and pay your bills on time, do your taxes easily and routinely—or when you can walk into your home or office and it is pleasant and energizing (use the words that you want).
Now, stop and let the potential pleasure sink in. You can have this. It is possible.

Exploring the costs and benefits will help you get in touch with and strengthen your purpose for organizing. The potential pleasure will help pull you toward what you want, and the realization of the pain will help guide you away from what you don’t want.

Make a Commitment

Now, ask yourself how much you really want to get organized. If you really want this, it is essential to make a commitment to yourself. When you make a commitment, you declare to yourself, and others, when you are ready, that you are going to stay the course. As Robin, a client, told me, “One night I came home around five-thirty and the house was a mess, I was a mess, everyone was upset, and I saw how I contributed to the madness. When I saw the mess I was making, I vowed to change my ways. It has taken time, but I have completely changed the way I live. I felt that vow living within me. I have been undeterred.” It doesn’t mean that she didn’t have plenty of hard moments, but when she did, she recommitted to her purpose and to organizing.

Establishing your purpose for organizing is about deepening your sense of who you are and taking a stand for what you feel is important. As you set your purpose, take some time to look into your heart. Can you make a commitment to this purpose? Is this truly important to you? When you think about it, does your purpose give you energy? You will find that, as you learn about yourself and make a promise to pursue this path, you will feel stronger, better, and more capable, even before you see changes.