TSH Writes About...
Anxiety
Anxiety and Depression
Understanding the power these emotions have over you is the first step toward reducing the power they have over you. Trying to ignore them, burying them or numbing them are short term solutions that don’t go far and they are probably keeping you stuck. Understanding them can be the first steps toward managing them.
The goal is that the contents of your environments at work, home or wherever you spend your time and energy, hold the right amount of order and structure for you to live the kind of life that you want.. These emotions, and our unhelpful response to them, keep us from getting organized and staying that way.
Without a clear understanding of how everything became so disorganized and why it’s so hard to stay organized, the same patterns are bound to keep us stuck.
Disorganization and lack of productivity come from just doing as well as we can in the moment, but if just doing as well as you can is not cutting it anymore, you can begin to undo the patterns and do something other than “just as well as you can.”
Some of you might say, “But I just prefer to be spontaneous and enjoy life minute to minute. Too much planning and all that list making just feels so stifling and uptight.” Well, if unplanned time, spontaneous activity and little concern about your organization had given you a contented, creative life of abundance, it’s unlikely you would have picked up this book.
Now, this is not to say that an unplanned life cannot bring great satisfaction. Many highly accomplished people live among disorder, and they would not choose anything else. Their surroundings do not make them feel anxious. The discomfort caused by lost items or overlooked appointments is considered an acceptable cost for not being overly concerned with keeping track of things as far as they are concerned.
There are also people who do better in a cluttered, scattered environment. This is what I call someone who is atypically organized.
A client of mine, a very accomplished physician who hired me to organize his move from his older, subterranean office to a stunning modern plant and light filled space was atypically organized.
My first task was to set up the care areas and the spaces for the several caregivers who would take care of the patients.
Once the work was completed, his new care center was gleamingly efficient. No expense had been spared to create storage spaces for all the supplies needed, making sure that everything was easy to find and easy to maintain. Every treatment room was filled with soft lights, comfortable furniture and soothing colors.
But, my doctor client knew that he could not work on paperwork, research for his academic work, or projects related to his foundation and volunteer work unless all documents were printed out and stacked in piles around him. Seeing his materials around him was critical to getting anything completed. If he could not see it, it might as well not exist! He had to be able to hold paper in his hand and the paper had to be visible to him until the work was completed.
Knowing that he needed to see everything, and there were lots of projects that he needed to manage, we designed his office to hold a desk spanned three walls. He sat in the middle of his office and commanded over his work.
This was a client who knew his style, embraced it and accommodated it. It worked for him and he knew this was how he would live his most productive life.
Getting organized is not easy. It’s not fun. There is no good reason to do it unless staying disorganized for the rest of your life, and passing that mess on to your kids and family, is a future that is more bleak than doing the hard work of getting organized now. Need help getting started? Schedule a Complementary Serenity Call!
