Getting organised might take effort, but it’s better than never knowing where anything is. However, there’s a point when you spend more time organising than is necessary to get the job done. The Small Notebook reminds us to stop there before we hit those diminishing returns.
Picture: alison headley/Flickr
The blog says there is an organizational bell curve (pictured above). At one point, the amount of time and energy you spend on sorting something peaks in relation to how useful that organised system is for you. Often, we get caught up in an organising high and take further steps which aren’t as useful as the effort required for those steps. Take an example by Wishing Well Creations of sorting:
Simplify = you sort through all of the photos and throw away duplicates and/or blurry photos.
Organise = you sort your photos by decade, and put them into 5 different big boxes (1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s).
Do you really need those photos sorted by decade? In fact, in the example above, the writer says you might go even further and organise them by year. Similarly, as we’ve mentioned before, you’re better off learning email search tricks than obsessively labelling each message into different folders.
The point of simplification or organisation is to save you time, money or your sanity. While being organised is always better, both Small Notebook and Wishing Well Creations have a common gist: Ask yourself if you really need that level of organisation before you dive deeper and waste your energy.
So, yes, go ahead and organise your home, but not to a point where you don’t have time for the things that really matter.
Getting More Organised Is Not The Goal [The Small Notebook]
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