“Within you resides a beast that has the potential to devour your energy, focus and productivity.  For lack of  a better term, let’s call it the Beast of Disorganization.  The Beast feeds on bad habits!  The Beast absolutely loves bad habits!  It cannot survive without them.  The Beast especially loves the fact that disorganized people don’t think of simply changing their habits, but seem to look everywhere else for solutions to their problems.  If you are not currently organized, there is a good chance you will never get organized or stay organized until you change some of your counterproductive, chaos-generating habits.”

This Beast of Disorganization paragraph comes from a book entitled:  Getting Organized by Chris Crouch.  And if you were to read his entire self-help book, we all would rethink our answer to the question contained in this week’s TRIPLE III TIME title:  “Me…Disorganized…No Way?!”

Today I believe most of us operate in a zone of “Disorganized Denial”.  Even those who feel and come across as totally together and organized…may be so structured that they don’t leave open spaces for creativity and innovation.  Think about some questions Chris includes in his book…do you:

• Operate in an extremely cluttered environment and can’t even maintain reasonable order in your workspace?
• Can’t effectively and efficiently process and follow up on your incoming paper, e-mails, voice mails, etc?
• Can’t seem to establish, determine, or stick to your priorities?
• Haven’t learned to use your time in a rational manner?
• Can’t seem to stay focused on…or follow up and get closure on…simple tasks and projects?
• Can’t handle many of the basic skills critical to your success?

We could continue to debate “Disorganized Denial” and your level of potential disorganization…but this TRIPLE III TIME message is more about offering some very basic suggestions to improve your overall life/work organized status.

Let’s try focusing on a few helpful factors:

1. Use the control YOU have over your ability to be at least somewhat organized.
2. Don’t allow yourself to be/get “crowded” in your mind or physical space.
3. Work on one thing at a time. Multi-tasking may work on occasion but not effectively as a life-style.
4. Don’t have “stacks-of-stuff” everywhere and argue you know where everything is.
5. Prioritize and stick to them.
6. Likewise as you prioritize make sure your priorities have a REAL purpose.
7. Remember the idea of keeping things simple makes a lot of sense.
8. Don’t let technology or social media contribute to potential disorganization.
9. Embrace the organizationing actions that lead to great project completion.
10. Finally, everyone has how to get better organized advice…but it’s YOUR job to take action.

A fun TOP 10…on an always important topic.  Give improved organization a chance…it can only help!