Silver Clipboard

The Trouble With Getting Organized

The trouble with getting organized is that it shines bright, unforgiving light on the problems you’ve hidden in the dark. It’s easier to shove bills in a drawer than to deal with them. To a certain extent, hiding problems is a sensible strategy: the less aware you are of problems, the less stress they cause. Hiding problems does mean, however, they will occasionally grow into monsters that attack at inopportune moments.

So, one day you decide you’re done fearing that which lurks in the dark. You want to cast off the constant, low level dread. You become an organized person. Your life benefits: bill are paid on time, work is done, trust grows in relationships. However, if you are a standard employee there are some problems.

1) You can no longer ‘forget’ work.

You now realize a sad truth of some office work: if neglected for long enough, it will go away on its own. Either someone else takes care of it or it didn’t really need to be done in the first place. People ‘forget’ unimportant or uninteresting jobs all the time. But, now that you are the organized person and keep track of everything, you are also responsible for everything. ‘Forgetting’ an unpleasant or difficult task is no longer an option because it’s in your system.

2) Project requirements change at the last moment

In schools, the closer the deadline for an assignment looms, the louder students complain about the impossibility of the task (complaints are usually inversely proportional to work done). The teacher, if he is a bad one, will change the assignment or push back the deadline. This rewards the disorganized and lazy and punishes the organized and productive. In offices, project requirements that change during the last weeks of a multi-month project have the same effect — undoing the work of those who started early.

3) Other people will give you more work.

My father says, ‘If you want something done, ask a busy person’. If you really need something done who do you ask: the guy in the corner with mountains of undone paperwork on his desk, idly surfing the ‘net or the busiest person in the office?

The downside of being organized is you become that busy, productive person… and now others in the office turn to you for their tasks. You need to practice saying ‘no’ or people will bury you under their delegated work.

I don’t advocate being lazy. I don’t recommend being disorganized. Living with the constant vague feeling that you’ve forgotten something important isn’t an optimal solution. But there are moments, when surveying my long to-do lists or when handed extra work by my boss when there are idle coworkers near, or when project requirements change at the 11th hour that I wonder, is it always worth it?

For more reading on the benefits of disorganization, the The Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman.

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Header photograph by absolutwade
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