TINY CHANGES

The Point of Order

Next to losing weight and exercising, the area of life where people seem to need the most help in developing better habits is in the area of organization. People know they are disorganized; they just don’t know what to do about it.

On any given day, a person will spend way too much time fixing the messes that his disorganization has caused and too little time doing the planning and organizing that could prevent these messes from happening. But since we were children, all of us have been conditioned to do things the same way other people do them, so we don’t have a good point of reference for creating more order in our lives.

This is why I suggest that people start small and try to bring order to just one tiny aspect of their lives. After that, they can do more to organize their lives and they can do it with the added inspiration that comes from seeing the results of their first efforts at organization. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.

Several women in my family have told me that they can’t decide what to wear in the mornings when they are getting ready for work. So they procrastinate and lose a lot of time by having no order to their mornings or their closets. But imagine what would happen if one of these women were to start hanging up her clothes immediately after getting home from work and start ironing the clothes that needed to be ironed so those clothes would be ready to wear the next time she wanted to wear them.

One tiny change can alter the whole landscape of your life. So perhaps you need some better habits of organization. And perhaps you need a little help from Make That, Break That so you can learn how to create new habits.