How overorganizing can help
I’m an avid believer in the saying that “too much of anything can be bad”. I probably just made that up, but it’s true nevertheless. I have found though in my own experience that over-organizing may be a suitable action plan for some people.
The organizational curve
I think the against arguments are fairly obvious. Organization works like economies of scale. Up to a point the more you do, the exponentially more you benefit. After a while you benefit more, but the gradient is not as steep as it was (economically speaking, the marginal worth of your extra organizational input is declining). After a critical point, more organization brings you less benefit. So the moral of the story is, that by organizing yourself a whole lot takes away precious time you could spend actually doing something.
External factors
What the above model doesn’t, and can’t generally take into account is the fact that there are loads of other inputs in the equation. Your mood, your feelings, the weather, the music you’re listening to, everything. Generally I found that over organization helps people who tend to be disorganized not because they don’t know how to be organized, its just that they loose interest and/or, don’t like to keep to-do lists refreshed and ready for action.
I’m typically one of these people. While I have awesome thoughts about management and organization, I rarely take my own advice because I find that I hate doing regular stuff. Well, I found my answer in doing something even more regular strangely enough. I am now doing gross over organization of my work.
For example, I do a lot of blog writing, both for myself and others. I also do articles, ebooks, the occasional rewrite and so on. From the beginning of May every single piece I release is filed away. It is formatted in word to a specific format, same scheme, same everything. They all contain links to the published version if any, and all files are categorized, titled, tagged with Vista’s interface. In addition I am also entering all the details into a database, which contains a load of info about each item.
Why this works
On the surface it may seem like I am a tardy person because of this, and on the surface, I have to say this is true. The driving force behind this though is that I feel I am organized only if every single detail of everything is organized, not just my to-do list. What I have created is the total and complete organization of my blog life, which takes up about 80% of my time, so at least this part is now under control. This “sitting on top of the mound” feeling helps me continue organizing and working happily.
In addition, I have a very up-to-date database of everything I have done, and it fills me with joy to see that I’ve written 20 published blog entries in 5 days. I can also see how much this will pay off in terms of hard currency, which is of course another impetus.
In the end I am organizing way too much. This extra effort tones down my short term productivity, but in the mid to long run, I am definitely doing better. I hesitate to suggest this to everyone, but if you’re struggling to stay on top, why not give it a try?
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