Hasta La Ideas

No one is perfect, and eventually your organizing system will fall apart. How you respond when this happens, however, will determine how much anxiety, stress, and clutter paralysis you will feel.

Keep Things in Perspective:

• Failure only happens if you never recover. If your system falls to pieces but you eventually get things back in order, you simply learned a lesson. You only fail when you give up entirely and abandon all uncluttering and organizing efforts for the rest of your life. You’re not failing; you’re learning.
• Being organized takes practice. You wouldn’t play a musical instrument or a sport like a professional if you hadn’t put in hundreds of thousands of hours practicing, so don’t expect professional organizing results without years of practice.
• Who cares?! Unless your health or welfare are at risk, being disorganized is not the worst thing in the world. Watch 30 minutes of the national news to help put things in perspective.
• Embrace the mess. Since you will eventually get off your bum and get back to an organized existence, take a day (or seven) and enjoy the chaos. At least temporarily, let go of the stress.

Find Motivation:

• Determine why you want to be organized. As I’ve written in the past, if you don’t know why you want to be organized and clutter free, you’re going to struggle with every attempt you make to be an unclutterer.
• Ask for help. Call a friend and ask him/her to help you get your project started again. If you don’t want your friends to see your place a mess, call in a professional organizer.
• Plan a party. Nothing gets me moving faster than knowing there will be people coming into my house. Plus, the reward is that when your space is orderly, you get to celebrate with a party!
• Acknowledge that you’re procrastinating. I don’t know why this works, but simply admitting to yourself that you’re avoiding a task can help get you motivated to change. Check out “Eight strategies to stop procrastinating” for tips on what to do next.
• Plan your project. As you would a project at work, plan your entire uncluttering and organizing project to help you get back on track. Pull out your calendar, determine the scope of your project, create action items, and block off time each day to reach your goal. Being specific (and realistic) about what you will want to accomplish helps to alleviate the overwhelming Cloud of Doom and realize you can get things back to normal.

Get Started:

• No excuses. Follow your project plan and just do it. There isn’t an easy way. You will have to do the work. However, the end result is definitely worth it.

Maintain:

• Create household routines. In my home, we have “Doland Duties.” If you don’t have a chart of daily routines and responsibilities, now is the time to establish one or evaluate your old one.
• Use a meal plan. The easiest way to eat healthy and keep from stressing out about what is for dinner is to create a weekly meal plan.
• Declutter. The less you own, the less you have to clean, organize, store, and maintain.
• Enjoy the calm. Take some time to reflect on how different you feel when things are uncluttered and organized instead of chaotic and disorganized. Remembering this feeling, and enjoying the remarkable life you desire, are great motivators to keeping you on course in the future.

When Tetris came onto the video game scene back in the 1980s, it was an instant and addictive hit. To the tune of an electric Russian dance theme, players fit falling polyominoes into one another to clear the board and achieve the most points. Hundreds of millions of people have played and, most likely, enjoyed the game.

Tetris and life have many things in common — there is a constant flow of incoming objects into your space (be it junk mail or consumables), you have to find space and organize those things that come into your space, eventually you get rid of what you have to make room for new objects, and if you don’t do these things you will lose the game (or, rather, become overwhelmed with stuff).

There are many games that have similar organizing and uncluttering themes. In Katamari Damacy players clean up clutter to create stars and planets. With Nintendogs players even have to pick up their pets’ mess when they take their dogs on virtual walks. Actually, most puzzle-type games have some anti-chaos component.

Video games are just one type of entertainment where organizing and uncluttering are themes. Each day in the newspaper, readers can organize numbers with Sudoku and words with Jumble. And, board games like Blokus require organizing skills to win.

If organizing and uncluttering are fun as games and something we do to avoid chores, why are these same activities considered chores in our homes and offices? Why don’t we look forward to putting things away? Why is cleaning up after a dinner party never as much fun as setting up? Have you found ways to make organizing and uncluttering more like a game or other form of entertainment?

A friend recently sent me the following confession in an e-mail:

I just cleaned out my storage unit that I have had for 7 years. (I think I opened it when I moved from the townhouse to my apartment.) What a bunch of crap! I saved a couple boxes of books I’d been missing, and some high school stuff I pulled out — medals, trophies and plaques.

So, I did the calculations on what this storage unit cost me. 7 years = 84 months times approximately $120 a month = over $10,000!!!!! I am flabbergasted I spent so much on storing what was basically crap. It’s just so easy when it’s $120 a month. Think of what I could have done with $10,000! That’s a costly uncluttering lesson!

I think that self storage is a good idea when used temporarily, such as for a few months when settling someone’s estate or if you’ve sold your house and are staying in a hotel while you’re waiting to settle on a new house. Once the word years is involved, though, it’s no longer temporary and uncluttering is in order.

Had she tossed out all of what was in her self storage unit seven years ago, my friend could have repurchased the box of books and even commissioned someone to remake her medals, trophies and plaques, and still had more than $9,000 left in her bank account. (I doubt my friend would have had someone remake her medals, though, I’m just saying she could have and it still would have been far less expensive.)

If you have a self-storage unit, consider taking the time to clear it out and save yourself a good amount of money. If the idea of cleaning out the space overwhelms you, hire a professional organizer to help you. The fee you’ll pay to the professional organizer will be less than what you would pay to continue storing your stuff.

More facts about self-storage:

1. The state of self-storage in the U.S.
2. Organization facts from Mother Jones

Being married, owning a large home with a white picket fence, and having 2.1 kids has been the standard American Dream for the past 50 years. We’re all supposed to want to work from 9 until 5, relax on the weekends and watch a big game, and load the family into the station wagon each summer for a week of vacation.

This dream is a great one, but it’s not for everyone. I’m married, and that is the only similarity I have to what societal conventions say we’re supposed to desire for ourselves. The Census’ monthly families and living arrangements data reports that it’s not the life the majority of U.S. citizens are leading, either. And, to be honest, it’s also not the life I want for my family and myself. (The house I grew up in has a white picket fence, and it has to be painted every other year. Most certainly, I want nothing to do with a white picket fence.)

When was the last time you sat down and asked yourself what you really want from life? What makes you happy? What matters — really matters — to you? Maybe it is home ownership and 2.1 children that you want? Or, maybe instead of the suburban life, you would rather travel the world on your own and work only when you need a little cash?

What do you actually enjoy doing? What inspires you?

You don’t need to focus only on the big issues; sometimes it’s the small things that can greatly impact your happiness. For example: A couple months ago, I was eating a piece of chicken at a dinner party. The chicken was free range, organic, killed that day, roasted, moist, and well-seasoned. Everyone at the party was praising the cook for the wonderful entree, and I knew the chicken I was eating was the best I’d ever had. In that moment, I realized I don’t like chicken. I had tasted the best, and I didn’t enjoy it. I haven’t eaten chicken since. I’m in my 30s and I’m just now admiting that I’ve been eating a food I don’t like simply out of habit.

What are you doing on autopilot? What are you doing only because it’s a traditional behavior?

Before you ever unclutter a single item from your home, you need to stop and ask yourself “why?” What matters most to you? What does your remarkable life look like? What do you want to make room for in your life? What is your motivation to change?

If you don’t know why you’re moving in a new direction, if you can’t envision a remarkable life for yourself, you will struggle with every attempt you make to get rid of clutter. Don’t worry about what your neighbors and friends are doing — you’re smart enough to make choices for yourself.

Today’s guest post is by Scott Belsky, founder of Behance, oversees The 99% think tank, and is the author of the new book Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision & Reality. Thank you, Scott, for joining us today. — Erin

Perhaps you have an idea for a new business, a restaurant you want to open, or a novel you want to write? Or perhaps you have an idea for how to solve a problem at work? Regardless, the sobering reality is that most ideas never happen. While some ideas are killed for good reason, most ideas are abandoned half-baked as a result of obstacles during execution.

I’ve spent the better part of five years studying the struggle to push ideas to fruition. Along the way, I learned that some people and teams are consistently able to defy the odds and make their ideas happen, time and time again. Authors like James Patterson and Chris Anderson; Companies like Google, IDEO, and Disney; and other serial entrepreneurs, restauranteurs, and the list goes on…

While there are a myriad of methods and tips I observed, the force of ORGANIZATION emerged as the most important. I came to believe that organization is, in fact, the greatest competitive advantage in the creative world.

The practicalities of how you organize projects and manage your energy are critical to making ideas happen. Here are a few my observations – and some of the methods I observed:

Reactionary Workflow

We live in a connected world of endless e-mails, texts, tweets, messages on social networks, phone calls, instant messages … the list goes on. Rather than be proactive with our energy, we have become reactive — living at the mercy of the last incoming thing. As a result, we spend all of our energy trying to keep up rather than propelling our ideas forward. Eventually, all of the small inconsequential activity wears us down and we’re liable to jump ship. To avoid reactionary workflow, some people schedule “windows of non-stimulation” in their day. For a 2-3 hour period of time, they minimize their email and all other sources of incoming communication. With this time, they focus on a list of goals – not their regular tasks, but long-term items that require research and deep thought. There are other tricks for how you aggregate messages and reduce “hop time” (the time spent transitioning between sources of communication). But the bottom line is that reactionary workflow is a threat to ingenuity. To combat it, we must focus less on ideas themselves and more on how we manage our energy and ultimately push ideas to completion.

Reduce Bulky Projects To Just Three Primary Elements

Every project in life can ultimately be reduced to just three primary elements: Action Steps, Backburner Items, and References. Action Steps are succinct tasks that start with verbs. They should be kept separate from your notes and sketches. Backburner Items are ideas that come up during a brainstorm or on the run that are not actionable but may someday be. Backburner Items should be collected in a central location and should be revisit periodically through some sort of ritual. One leader I met prints out his list of Backburner Items (kept on a running Word document) on the first Sunday of every month. He grabs the list (and a beer) and then sits down and reviews the entire list. Some items get crossed out as irrelevant, some remain on the list, and some are transformed into Action Steps. The third element of every project is References – the articles, notes, and other stuff that collects around you. It turns out that References are overrated. Rather than spend tons of time organizing your notes, consider keeping a chronological file where all your notes are simply filed chronologically (not by project name or other means). In the age of digital calendars, you can search for any meeting and quickly find the notes taken on that date.

Use Design-Centric Systems To Stay Organized

The color, texture, size, and style of the materials used to capture your tasks (and your notes) are important. People who have successfully developed personal systems for productivity over the years claim that their designs make their projects more appealing (and thus more likely to be managed well). When it comes to productivity, attraction breeds loyalty.

Measure Meetings With Action Steps

Meetings are extremely expensive if you consider the cost of time and interruption. Beware of “Posting Meetings” or meeting just because it’s Monday. Such meetings are often planned for the morning — when you’re most productive — and often end without any Action Steps captured. A meeting that ends without any Action Steps should have been a voice-mail or an e-mail. When you do meet with clients or colleagues, end each meeting with a quick review of captured Action Steps. The exercise takes less than 30 seconds per person. Each person should share what they captured. Doing so will almost always reveal a few Action Steps that were either missed, duplicated, or misunderstood. Stating your Action Steps aloud also breeds a sense of accountability.

Insecurity Work

In the era of Google Analytics and Twitter, we spend too much time obsessing over real-time data. Just a decade ago, we had to wait for weekly and monthly reports for information that is now always available at our finger tips. Whether it is checking your site’s traffic, customer sentiment, or your bank account, these small repetitive actions don’t help you make ideas happen. They just help you feel safe. “Insecurity Work” is stuff that you do that (1) has no intended outcome, (2) does not move the ball forward in any way, and (3) is quick enough that you can do it multiple times a day without realizing — but, nonetheless, puts us at ease. The first step for reducing Insecurity Work is self-awareness. During the research for my new book, I was astonished by the spectrum of self-imposed guidelines and very effective rituals that people use to reduce insecurity work. Insecurity work is yet another workplace phenomenon that can reduce productivity and obstruct great execution.

My book, out this month, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision and Reality chronicles the methods of the creative leaders that have pushed their ideas to fruition (and make our lives interesting as a result). My hope is that the book will prompt more discussion on the mechanics for pushing ideas to fruition.