Being organized is an investment — it takes a little bit of time, but it’s worth it in the long run.
As is the case with many teens, when I was a teen, my bedroom usually looked like a windstorm had just blown through. Clothing I had worn during the previous several days were everywhere.
When I got my first job after college, the dress code was a suit and tie every day. When I came home from work, I would take off the suit and throw it on a chair. By the end of the week, my suits had piled up and I would hang them up on the weekend — a small project that annoyed me.
One day, I realized if I would just hang up each suit when I got home from work, I would avoid the weekend suit-hanging project.
That was one of the early new habits from my transition to a much more organized person.
At work, I learned it was better to tackle small tasks as they arose rather than letting them accumulate.
When I became a manager, it would frustrate me when team members would say about small tasks that had accumulated into a project, “That’s going to take a long time. I am too busy to do that.” For those “projects,” I would ask them to commit to doing a small piece each day until they were done. For tasks that had not yet accumulated, I would urge them to tackle each small task as it arose instead of letting them become projects – an approach not dissimilar to breaking down new habits into small pieces, small enough to turn them into a habit, and then adopting another, and another, one at a time until you have achieved the larger goal. And, even if you don’t get all the way to the ultimate goal, you will have made a lot of progress.
All my best,
David