A New Mindset for Getting Organized: An Interview with Marilyn Paul
by Kali Saposnick

from Leverage Points Issue 35

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No matter how hard she tried to get organized—despite applying tips from countless books and hiring personal organizers—organizational consultant Marilyn Paul could not make a dent in the clutter that surrounded her. A disorganized person for many years, Marilyn's chronic messiness adversely affected her work, relationships, home, and health. "I knew the source of my disorganized state was coming from me," Marilyn admitted, "but I didn't know how to access and change it." She finally decided to write a self-help manual—for herself. In the process, she realized that her systemic approach to getting organized could be a powerful tool for others as well. Her recently published book, It's Hard to Make a Difference When You Can't Find Your Keys: The Seven-Step Path to Becoming Truly Organized (Viking Compass, 2003), offers hope for people who know that getting organized is key to doing what they most want in life.

Deep-Rooted Beliefs
True change began when Paul decided to examine her deep-rooted belief that messiness and chaos were signs of creativity and that being organized indicated stuffiness and rigidity. She explains, "I thought being disorganized was a critical part of my creative identity and that by adding structure to my life, I would lose my creativity. No wonder I didn't want to get organized." When she mustered the curiosity to test this assumption, Marilyn quickly discovered its flaws. She discovered a plethora of creative yet "organized" people whom she admired, such as the extraordinary painter Barbara Cassel. "Once I saw how primitive my thinking was," she says, "I began to unpack other unexamined beliefs that were holding me back. Soon I realized that the most difficult challenge to becoming organized is changing our mindsets about organization."

Another belief Marilyn exposed was that she was too busy to handle little tasks in the moment. Repeatedly allowing folders and unopened mail to stack up instead of refiling or reviewing them immediately, she attributed this behavior to lack of time. But she soon discovered that restoring order often takes only a few seconds or a few minutes. "What we don't realize is that each of those few seconds accumulate to create large barriers if we don't address them in the moment," explains Marilyn. "It's a myth that we don't have time to organize things every day. Of course we can't always address something immediately, but most of the time we can. And filing, for example, in the present moment turns out to be easier than filing later when we are faced with a huge pile."

Creating New Habits
With a more open mindset, says Marilyn, you can make tremendous strides in creating new habits and building effective systems for getting organized. "The goal is not necessarily to become neater, more orderly, or more punctual. Rather, it's about becoming ready for what life has to offer. Often we are hampered by our disorganization, and we can't take advantage of today's opportunities." One way she suggests starting to become more organized is by asking yourself what being disorganized is costing you in terms of achievement, work, relationships, and self-esteem. Doing so can help motivate you to change. It is also worth visualizing what your life would be like as you became more organized.

People need a strong purpose for organizing because taking the initial steps can be hard work, and it's easy to stop an organizing project in the middle. Without a strong commitment, you may inadvertently reinforce a "vicious" cycle of messiness. For example, you might ambitiously begin to dig out your desk from under piles of paper, only to stop halfway feeling exhausted and discouraged and leaving even more chaos than before.

To create a "virtuous" cycle, first you must approach getting organized as a discipline, not an action; as a practice, not an event. Then you must recognize that there's going to be a time delay before you start reaping the benefits of being organized. It takes at least several months to change your mindset, clear out the backlog, build new systems, and practice new habits. External change manifests after you start implementing and refining the tools. For instance, if your goal is to find information more efficiently, you must change the behaviors that prevent you from doing so. In the past, as you prepared to give an overhead presentation, your collection of notes, cartoons, newspaper clippings, and quotes might have been scattered throughout your office, house, and car—forcing you to waste precious time finding them. Start by identifying thoughts and habits that might have led you to this predicament. You might create a new system in which you consistently put all your ideas in one or two locations, hard copies in a file folder and computer documents in a desktop folder. After implementing this system for several months, you'll notice how quickly you can find information when you need it. Then, two hours before a client presentation, rather than tearing your office apart looking for materials, you might find yourself reviewing your main points with calm focus, confident that you can make a clear, effective presentation.

The consequences of not creating virtuous cycles are usually detrimental, says Marilyn. "It's not that being disorganized prevented me from 'making a difference' overall, as my title suggests. But in any given moment if you're stuck looking for your keys, you're not doing anything else until you find them. Being disorganized will bite you at the times when you least want it to. Many professionals I know can't do what they consider important because they're disorganized. For example, one of my clients, a senior executive, wants to move ahead in her company. But until she can convince people she can reliably keep agreements, meet deadlines, and not lose track of important issues, she knows she's not going anywhere."

Getting Teams Organized
In general, says Paul, organized people are more reliable, easier to work with, and more effective at their jobs. This is true for teams as well. Yet in many organizations, the actions a team needs to take together to get themselves organized for a project are not highly valued. Too often at the beginning of a project, a group does not ask critical questions, such as, What is the purpose of the project? What are our roles and responsibilities? What will we do when our communications break down? How will we keep track of our timelines? Will we check in by e-mail, by phone, or face to face? How do we know when what we've done is enough?

"The answers to these questions form the basics of project management," says Paul, "and it usually only takes about two to three hours to do. Yet most teams skip these conversations; they think the task of laying this foundation is a waste of time, that answers are obvious and shared by everyone, and that the 'real work' is more important. Then, when they reach an impasse in the middle of the project—a deadline gets missed, the timeline is off, product specifications aren't as clear as the team initially thought, people are upset with each other—they can spend scores of hours trying to become effective again, a situation that could have been avoided if the 'real work' of getting organized had been done up front."

Marilyn believes that as teams of people take the time to create a structure for working together to achieve their vision, they will become more effective and improve overall performance. Getting organized, for both teams and individuals, can be a far more powerful way of achieving desired results than we ever thought possible.

Kali Saposnick is publications editor at Pegasus Communications.