Know When to Stop Organising

Not everything in your life needs to be perfectly organised, and I will confess that not all aspects of my life are. I know what you must be thinking, what a shocking confession coming from a professional organiser. Don’t get me wrong, I do live an organised life and believe life is better when it’s simplified, but I also know that my life doesn’t need to be perfectly organised. My role as a professional organiser is to help people get organised, and I love it.

But that’s just part of the story…

Being a professional organiser, I help people create space and time to focus on their goals and values. And ultimately live a more meaningful life. Sadly, however, spending all your time organising every aspect and detail of your life may be taking you away from working on your more significant projects. This is especially true when you spend time (and maybe money) on organising projects that offer little value and take your time away from working on your important goals.

As an organiser, I focus on organising projects that will improve my life and make my life run more smoothly. I avoid organising projects that are going to have minimal benefit in improving my overall quality of life. Let me clarify with an example.

Let’s say you are overwhelmed with emails in your inbox. It would make sense to invest time in establishing an organising system for managing your emails. Doing so would improve your productivity, help you achieve your goals, reduce stress, and improve your life quality. Overall, this organising project will add value to your life, and I would recommend doing it.

However, once you have established a new organising system for managing emails, you decide that all your old emails need to be reorganised to align with the new system. In most cases, this would be a significant and time-consuming job. In this situation, I wouldn’t recommend reorganising historical emails, as doing so will most likely not add much value. (How often do you read historical emails?) The time you spend reorganising historical emails could have been better spent on something more substantial.

Focus your attention on organising projects that will improve your life quality and move you closer to achieving your goals and creating a life you value. Avoid falling into the trap of organising for the sack of organising. Understand that not every aspect of your life needs to be perfectly organised before you can start working towards your meaningful pursuits. The organising work you do should set you up to achieve your goals, not prevent you from reaching them. Finally, please don’t wait for every aspect of your life to be perfectly organised before you start to work on the things that matter to you, as chances are you will never get started.