Guy Reams (00:00.931)
This is day 347. No one is organized. I heard someone say, I am not an organized person. That sentence followed me around for the rest of the day. I kept turning it over and over and landed on a simple thought. No one is actually organized, not in some fixed and permanent way. What we call organized is a skill that grows out of repeated contact with chaos. You face a particular kind of mess many times.
you experiment. You make a small rule. You try it again. Over time, you learn how to systemize that mess and to everyone else, it looks like you were organized. In truth, you are a person who learned how to deal with a specific kind of disorder. This is why our first attempts to get organized so often fail. We over design. We perfect the tool before we practice the habit. Most systems collapse because they ask too much of us on the days when life is loud.
The tool should fit the smallest repeatable behaviors that you will actually do when you are busy. If the habit is not doable on your worst day, it will not survive your average day. There's also the force that waits for all of us, entropy. Every system wants to slide towards disorder. That is not a character flaw, that is just physics. Entropy wins unless you pay the tax.
The only antidote I have ever found is a small regular maintenance dose, a quick list reset that takes five minutes to do. A brief sweep to clear your path, so to speak. A short review to refill the plan. The dose is small, but the rhythm of every day is everything. Most of us think about getting organized at the exact moment when chaos surges. When that happens, I switch into a different mode. First, I stop the bleed.
I pause any intake for a short period. say yes to fewer things and I practice saying no to as much as possible. The goal is simple. Stabilize what is in front of me. Next, I make the work visible. I take the swirl in my head and put it where I can see it. A simple board with three columns is enough. Backlog, doing and done. That one move of putting everything into those three categories gives me relief because I can now see reality.
Guy Reams (02:25.686)
rather than feel it. From there I run triage in three passes. On the first pass I simply sort stuff. No dramatic decisions, only where each item belongs. On the second pass I sequence them. What must happen first and what then what follows. On the third pass I then schedule time. I put blocks on my calendar so that time and task now agree with each other. Sort, sequence and schedule.
Three clean passes to get through the chaos. Getting organized takes time and it takes a steady effort. A theme you hear often is that you capture everything before you categorize. That is good guidance. But my flaw has always been too many capture buckets. I do better when I consolidate capture into one incoming method. It's hard to do and it takes discipline. But when everything enters the same way, I feel more in control. The next shift that helps me is a single source of truth.
When all my commitments live in one place, I now start to trust that place. When I trust it, I use it. And when I use it, it actually works. Limits also matter. Order loves limits and chaos hates them. My limit has become three. I only allow myself three work in progress items at any given time. I cannot handle more than that. It's just the reality. Every time I try, I watch my quality slip and my stress rise. So I stopped pretending.
If you feel overwhelmed, try limiting your active list to three things. It sounds small. That is the point. Small creates focus. Focus creates movement and movement restores belief in yourself. In the end, the only method that works is the one you actually follow. I give my method a little attention every day. I pay the entropy tax. I make tiny adjustments as I go and those small changes compound. The habit therefore becomes the system.
The system makes me look organized. What really happened is a simpler and more honest approach. I learned how to deal with my version of chaos one small repeatable behavior at a time.