Do We Really Need To Be All That Organized?

Being personally and professionally organized at home and work can help you manage the extra, unavoidable stress.

How Organized Are You?

When the title of this article popped into my head, it seemed to come from a part of me that believes that a positive activity, like organizing, could also feed compulsive behavior. Obsessive organizing can also nurture the unhealthy mentality of “keeping up with the Joneses.” I say that sincerely, as a rebellious type who also acknowledges that creative people are often messy people. Yet, reflecting on just one aspect of our modern lives, it seems like being organized is one of the most solid tools a person can have to meet the demands of a high-paced life and all the real or imagined expectations of our time.

When I was a small child in the 1960s, there were no telephone answering machines. You called someone, and they were either not home or choosing not to answer. The phone would ring and ring, and we’d hang up after 30 rings. If your call got a “busy” signal, you knew you had to try again later, as the person you were calling had no idea you were trying to reach them. What a concept!

This was also my mother’s era, where people used to write well-crafted letters to each other and then wait weeks or longer for a response. The old-fashioned letter was just a prelude to emailing, as it gave the writer a chance to express themselves without interruptions, unlike a face-to-face conversation. Fast-forward to the invention of email, and all of a sudden, I personally felt a need to respond IMMEDIATELY to this new form of communication, partly because the ability to send a message was so instantaneous. It took a while for it to register within me that receiving an email was just “digital” letter writing and that I could wait until the end of the day, or even into the wee hours of the night, to “sort through” my email.

Even to this day, I have Baby Boomer clients and retirees who take days or longer to respond to what I think is a fairly time-sensitive email. I’m a little envious of their laissez-faire attitude, which is to respond whenever they get around to it. Or, perhaps they have hundreds of emails to attend to, and I am just lower on the totem pole of their priorities. For many of us, emailing has fed our compulsive side. Then came tweeting and texting, even more instantaneous ways to communicate, often with disastrous results. I don’t need to elaborate how most of us have fired off a text or tweet that we regretted. And for some, it has literally been a career-ending or friendship-ending mistake.

With these speedy forms of communication and even the use of acronyms, LOL, time itself seems to be accelerating, putting more pressure on people to “perform” and stay on track with everyone else. Social media has taken us to a whole other stratosphere as well. Now we even have A.I. completing our sentences. Yet the pendulum has swung the other way, where people are taking vacations from their technology in order to regain their personal equilibrium and reduce stress.

I could elaborate further on how harmful things are getting with technology ruling our lives, but there is also that saying, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” If our lives are going to continue to be fast-paced, whether we sign the consent form or not, then being organized in your own life can at least give you practical ways to cope and function. Being organized, personally and professionally, at home and at work can help you manage the extra, unavoidable stress. Organization can even help you be more creative, thus better able to stand out and be noticed and appreciated in such an automated and impersonal world.

It’s no coincidence that I became a professional Feng Shui consultant because a portion of what I do is to guide and inspire people to have a more peaceful, productive existence through metaphysical means and very mundane approaches–like organizing. Use any and all tools at your disposal, and check out my other Tao of Organizing articles for topic-specific ways to excel.