Getting Organized? Finish the Job.

I see so many half finished organizing projects. Whether it’s a pile of bags for donation still sitting in a hallway, kitchen tools shoved back in drawers without a plan, or a stack of new containers sitting unused in the garage, it’s incredibly common for people to abandon the organizing process partway through.

Why do we do this?

Well, one of the most powerful motivators for the human brain is pain avoidance. There’s a behavioral economics terms for this, loss aversion, which means that we feel multiple times more pain from a loss than we do from an equivalent gain. You’ll be much more upset about losing $100 than you will be about gaining $100.

When you start an organizing project, it’s about stopping pain, whatever that pain means for you. For some people it’s overwhelm, for others it’s stress, and in extreme situations it can be danger. The motivation is real. I see this all the time in consultations: client have reached their limit and they want to fix the problem and alleviate the pain NOW.

But here’s the thing. As soon as you’re not feeling the pain quiiiiite as much, you lose the motivation to continue. And you end up dropping the project and moving on to something else that feels more pressing.

Yes, even clients of mine do this! Clients often decide to stop after we’ve decluttered but before we’ve planned out organizing systems, because just the decluttering, by itself, has relieved enough of the pain they’ve been feeling.

This is super frustrating for me. Not because a project is ending early and I’m missing out on work, although that’s certainly part of it. But mostly because I know that the project isn’t finished, and because it’s not finished, that pain is going to come back. Not right away, but it will, and it will come back much faster than the client expects.

The thing about organizing is that once you have a system that works for you, it’s so much easier to reset that system to baseline if things get a little off track. But if you don’t finish setting up the system, there’s no baseline to return to, and it’s as if you’re starting from scratch every single time you try to get organized.

So if you’ve struggled with getting organized in the past, my advice to you is this: finish the job. And if you need help, I’m here for you!

LMW