Best Results Organizing

Are you feeling stuck? When you flipped the calendar to the new month and realized how close we are to the end of summer, and even the end of the year, were you struck by a gnawing feeling that you’ve been mired in the same place for too long?

Are your New Year’s resolutions the same every year? Do you make the same wishes, have the same complaints, and feel like you’re Groundhog Day-ing it through life?

At the end of May, in Organize Your Summer So It Doesn’t Disappear So Quickly, we talked about how the lack of structure, novelty, and sensory clues for the passage of time (along with lack of self-care and an excess of technology) can make us sluggish. We may keep doing the same things, over and over. We may not notice that sometimes we are very efficiently doing the wrong things.

Perhaps it’s time to stop doing some things, start doing other things differently, and to take bold strides on other things altogether.

Although most people think of professional organizers in terms of their possessions, I usually talk about how I help people manager their stuff. Stuff is more complex than just possessions. Your stuff may be what’s piled up on your desk or precariously balanced on your kitchen counter or squished into your closet. 

Alternatively, the stuff causing you overwhelm may be the excess in your schedule rather than your space. The temporal, rather than the tangible, can also weigh you down.

However, it’s possible to be crowded out of your enjoyment of life by other than too much in your space and schedule. You could have so much going on in your brain that you can’t  accomplish what you want.

The stuff in your head could be ADHD. It might be anxiety or clinical depression. And it certainly could be fear. In fact, several years ago, in Paper Doll Talks With Smead About Fear & Disorganization, I shared how fear holds us back.

Too much, or at least too much of what doesn’t serve you, can keep you from moving forward, from taking leaps. Today, we’re going to look at how to get out of a rut and then consider taking bold leaps forward.

HOW TO GET OUT OF A RUT

Investigate Your Life 

Pull on your Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat, twirl your Hercule Poirot mustache, jump in your Nancy Drew blue roadster, and think about what’s feeling stuck in your life. Let’s start by identifying the symptoms of being in a rut.

Have you lost your enthusiasm? If you can’t pinpoint obvious reasons (lack of recuperative sleep, diagnosed depression, a bed that’s just too comfy) for not wanting to get out of bed, you may be in a rut.

When someone asks you what you want —  what to do, what (or where) to eat, or where to go, whether for the afternoon or for a holiday — do you mentally check out? Sometimes, when you’re in a rut, you can’t even imagine different ways of doing things.

You’re not broken. You’re probably in a rut.

The next step is to figure out why? Is it you, or is it what’s in your space, your schedule, or your head (that shouldn’t be) or what’s not there that should be? Understanding the root cause is essential.

It is too much of something? Is there clutter that’s keeping you from entertaining in your space or feeling relaxed enough in your home to pursue your activities? It may be obvious, as this is an organizing blog, but check your space for excess. Are you in a rut physically because you always have to move things off the counter to reach the microwave, or pull suitcases out of the closet to get to your clothes?

Do you have too many activities filling up your schedule? I don’t just mean work-related, though too many Zooms or in-person meetings can wear you down. Maybe your kids are signed up for so many after-school activities, which means you’re constantly schlepping them to-and-fro. Maybe you’ve been in the same clubs with the same people for what seems like forever.

Have you outgrown the life you’re leading? I’m not suggesting you need to take the 10:25 to Reno and leave your job and family behind. But there may be aspects of your life that no longer fit, like a too-small pair of jeans that makes you feel like you can’t really breathe.

It’s possible that you’ve grown out of the things you’ve collected. When my sister was in college, she had a few small elephant-themed items, and soon it became habitual for people to give her elephants in the form of earrings and knickknacks and stuffed animals. Somewhere after a few decades, I noticed that she wasn’t displaying the elephants. She was over the elephants.

And again, you may have things in your schedule that don’t serve the person you are, or the person you want to be. You calendar might not be overloaded, but the things in your calendar may no longer be giving you joy. Are you going to that book club because you’ve always gone or because you love the books and the people? (If you’re going just because you love the cheese plate, be assured that you really can buy that yummy cheese and eat it all yourself.) 

Cheese board photo by Andra C Taylor Jr on Unsplash

Track the Clues: Routine or Rut?

If, while playing detective, you find it hard to actually detect what’s wrong, you may need to get more granular. Pick a random week (or start with a day if a week seems overwhelming) and take note of what you do and how your week (or day) flows.

• Are there things you do the same way, over and over?
• Does each day’s schedule blend into the next?
• Do you have trouble differentiating between the average Monday and the average Thursday? (Does every day feel “average?”) 

You may be thinking, “But Paper Doll, I have a routine! Isn’t the best way to make sure everything gets done to have a routine?”

Yes!

But also no, not always.

Routines and ruts are related concepts, but they have distinct differences:

A routine is a planned and organized set of tasks or activities that you regularly follow. Your laundry routine makes sure that you don’t have to send your tiny humans to school in Wonder Woman bathing suits under their clothes. Your morning routine gives you the centering, mindful energy, nutrition, and caffeine to keep you from smacking your annoying co-workers with a keyboard.

You design your routines to help you manage your time, reduce stress, and increase efficiency.

Conversely, a rut is a stagnant pattern, one that makes you feel unmotivated or unfulfilled. When you’re in a rut, you may find yourself going through the motions without any sense of intentionality. You’re doing what you’ve always done, getting what you always got. (The longer you’re in a rut, perhaps the less you get back?)

A routine is a deliberate; you structure the sequence of actions and schedule them to create a order in your life. A routine empowers you. By contrast, the stagnant nature of a rut — because you are no longer deliberately evaluating the success and productivity of the routine but just mindlessly abiding by it — may leave you feeling unfulfilled at best, and trapped at worst.

Ruts may occur in our diets, our personal activities, our careers, or our relationships. While Woody Allen isn’t exactly a favored source of inspiration these days, the movie Annie Hall has an apt quote. 

While routines can be healthy and productive, ruts are usually associated with a lack of progress and satisfaction in life. We often consider “improvement” to be the key sign of progress, but in some cases, breadth, depth, or variety may also be evidence of progress.

Putting it all together, a routine helps you achieve a groove. But sometimes, treading that same ground, over and over, turns a groove into a rut.

The Magic of Intentionality

Once you see where your life is lacking progress, variety, or fulfillment, you can achieve more of what you want by intentionally making changes in various ways:

• Subtract — Look at what’s blocking your energy and take those obstacles away. If you’re not doing your workout because there’s junk piled up in your workout room, use all the resources we often talk about to sort, clear the clutter, move things to more logical homes, and/or donate, sell, or discard what no longer fits your life.

If there are activities that no longer float your boat, jump overboard. You might have to relinquish responsibilities and it could momentarily inconvenience others to have to find someone to handle the role you’ve done uncomplainingly for far too long. That’s OK.

Offer to help your replacement with the transition, but stand firm on letting go of tasks that don’t nourish you personally or professionally.

• Add — If you’re in a rut, just taking things away probably won’t solve all of your problems.

Having more empty space may mean you don’t have as much housework to do, or it could make you uncomfortable. If you finally eject all of your ex’s stuff from the house, the emptiness may make your space, and even your life, feel cold or lacking. Mindfully consider what you might enjoy having in your space.

Similarly, emptying your schedule of undesirable obligations may not be enough. Having all that extra time may initially make your life feel empty. You needn’t fill every moment all over again with different activities, but do open your mind to exploring what you may have not realized you were missing.

Start by adding self-care activities to slowly fill up a small number of those relinquished schedule slots. Remember to make time for sleep, mindfulness or meditation, exercise, nutrition, and uplifting social relationships. Feed your body and your mind to jump out of that rut.

Daydream and allow for possibilities you never previously considered. Just because you never considered yourself artistic or creative before doesn’t mean you might not explore a painting class or community theater. Maybe you’ll try to acquire new skills or knowledge relevant to your goals, but remember that personal fulfillment or enjoyment is a good enough reason to have new experiences.

Not everything is about productivity. Let joy be enough.

• Prioritize — Once you know the negative effects of the rut you were in and have considered how you want to replace (or enjoy the absence of) the tangible, temporal, and cognitive clutter you had before, figure out what’s most important to you.

Do you want to work on your body? Your spiritual well-being? Your professional development? Do you want to taking dance lessons or spend more time reading? 

Spend some time writing down everything that was missing from your life when you were in a rut, and what you want to experience instead. Then pick your top two priorities.

Why two? If you are working on just one priority, and achieve it, turning to the next on your list will make you feel like you are starting from scratch, which can be demotivating. Focusing on one priority, but having a backup that gets a little attention, means you always have an proactive alternative to consider when you need a pause. 

Why only two? Focusing on changing more than two areas of your life simultaneously usually leads to overwhelm. The goal is to lighten your life, not weigh you down.

• Break it down — Once you figure out what you want, figure out what gets you there.

Let’s say your rut was dietary. No matter how much you love tacos, having Taco Tuesday every week, with no change in the ingredients or dining companions or cooking responsibilities can be a bit much. Break your proposed life changes down into small steps and reconsider everything.

Maybe your spouse will cook more often; perhaps your family will experiment with group meal planning and grocery delivery, eliminating Thursday shopping trips (and the need for a babysitter).

• Reinvigorate your routines — Remember what we said about the difference between ruts and routines. It’s OK to have routines; just be intentional about them. 

Getting out of a rut doesn’t mean abandoning all structure from your life and schedule. It doesn’t mean never cleaning the bathroom; it does mean giving yourself permission to delegate the task your teenager (either as a life lesson or in return for car privileges) or hire a cleaner.

It doesn’t mean never taking your kids to their activities, but it does mean exploring the alternatives — trading off with your co-parent, with other kids’ parents, or (if your kids are old enough) arranging for a car service — so the time you spend going to your children’s activities are more often related to seeing or participating in those activities (as a supportive audience or coach) because you are now more fulfilled.

Use the time management skills you’ve learned from this blog and elsewhere to use the Eisenhower Matrix to put more of your attention on tasks with high importance and/or high urgency and reject or lessen the things with lesser value to your life.

• Replace the bad stuff with good stuff — This is a follow-up on the advice to add and subtract. If you were in a nutrition rut, you might eliminate the purchase of empty calorie foods. If your life has been filled with the equivalent of empty calories, eliminate the distractions of app notifications, clutter in your workspace, and interruptions from people and relationships that don’t fit your greater good.

• Stay flexible — If you’ve been in a rut for a long time, empty space (in your home, your schedule, or your mind) may feel scary. You could be tempted to create lots of new routines with just as little flexibility as before, and you’ll find yourself worn down again. Leave yourself open to adapt to new possibilities. Nobody gets out of a rut overnight. Have patience with yourself.

• Welcome support — Reach out to supportive friends or family for help brainstorming, noticing habits, or seeing new pathways. Professional organizers and productivity coaches can help you find new ways to make changes in your space, schedule, or thoughts. If you’ve been weighed down by more problematic thoughts or feelings, consider how a therapist can provide valuable perspective, guidance, and support. You’re not alone.

For more on excaping a rut:

You 2.0: How to Break Out of a Rut (Hidden Brain podcast)

How to Get Out of a Rut in 8 Steps (Master Class article)

How To Get Out of a Mental Rut, According To Psychologists (Well+Good article)

Getting Off the Treadmill: Six Ways to Break Out of a Rut (Science.com article)

Finally, and especially as we’re approaching the Jewish New Year at the end of this week, I encourage you to revisit Organizing A Fresh Start: Catalysts for Success for motivation and support.

HOW TO TAKE A BIG LEAP

The opposite of a rut can be a leap.

Sunset Leap by Kid Circus on Unsplash

Once we figure out what to stop doing, and start examining what we’re going to do differently, we give ourselves permission to think on a grander scale.

We have lots of reasons why we don’t take leaps, and they are similar to why we stay in ruts. Why make waves? Why risk new problems? We generally step back from taking leaps because of fear, and those fears may or may not be warranted, but they definitely keep us in limbo, wanting but never trying.

I’m a cautious person by nature. I suspect that’s true of many professional organizers. We’d rather prevent problems than have to fix them, even though our arsenal of skills helps us do both.

In college, I never took Italian because I feared doing damage to my GPA, and I was a decade out of graduate school before I realized that never once after I left academia did anyone, ever, ask about my GPA. Studying Italian these five years has brought joy to my life; my only regret is that my introduction came from the cartoon characters in Duolingo and not the the professors and fellow students at Cornell 35 years earlier.

There’s no wrong time to take a leap. There are certainly wrong ways. Selling your wares for magic beans isn’t smart; giving up your well-paying career to become a professional surfer when you’ve lived your entire life in Iowa probably won’t yield a secure life. But I’d like to share the advice on leap-taking I’ve gleaned from a few articles I’ve read lately.

Regrets, I’ve Had a Few

In Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda: The Haunting Regret of Failing Our Ideal Selves, the author looks at the published research of Cornell University professor Tom Gilovich and former grad student Shai Davidai in The Ideal Road Not Taken: The Self-Discrepancies Involved in People’s Most Enduring Regrets.

They identfied three elements of our sense of self, the:

• actual self — the attributes a person believes they possess.
• ideal self — the attributes people would ideally like to possess (including their “hopes, goals, aspirations or wishes”)
• ought self — what a person feels they should have been, based on duties, obligations and responsibilities. 

Through six experiments, Gilovich and Davidai looked at two areas of discrepancy — what they call ought-related regrets and ideal-related regrets.

When people look back at their lives, they cope fairly well with any discrepancy between what they thought they ought to have done, in terms of duties and responsibilities, and what they actually did. Basically, we forgive ourselves when we feel like we ought to have dieted and exercised, we ought to have been more attentive to our studies, or we ought to have been better at managing our money.

Conversely, when we fail to take actions that could allow us to become our ideal selves, those regrets remain unresolved; we don’t get over our failure to act to become whomever we might have been.

Most tellingly, Gilovich said, “In the short term, people regret their actions more than inactions, but in the long term, the inaction regrets stick around longer.” 

This brings to mind two of my favorite quotes:

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”  ~ George Eliot 

“The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have.”  ~  Anna Quindlen

Risky Business

Do You Rarely Take Risks? Maybe it’s Time You Do, talks about how mindful risk-taking can be extremely rewarding. As we age, we’re more likely to settle into our comfort zone, and that coziness of comfort zone can easily leave us mired in a rut.

The article shares the advice of clinical psychologist Carla Marie Manly, who warns that as we age, we tend to turn more toward fixed mindsets than growth mindsets, narrowing the new opportunities we give ourselves. Manly advises that we first work to be conscious of the fact that we’re prone to lock down, which enables us to be aware of our fear and then deal with the related discomfort. 

Manly argues in favor of acknowledging our discomfort but choosing risks that we find compelling. They don’t have to be big risks; the “riskiness” might be as small as ending up with a meal you don’t love as much what you usually order. But organizing your life to experience things that are new, different, and outside of your comfort zone increases the chance that you will increase the size of your comfort zone!

Respect Yourself. Don’t Reject Yourself.

One of the best things I’ve read lately related to taking leaps came from this article from Ness Labs entitled Turning Fear of Failure Into Increments of Curiosity.

So often, when we fail to take a leap, we do it out of fear of failure, particularly the fear of others judging us, especially if we fail.

The focus of this excellent piece is that we should approach bold strides as if we were scientists. The scientific method says, “Hey, let’s try this and see if it turns out the way we expect.” And if it doesn’t? Science says, “That’s cool, too! Because now we know!”

The article recommends making small moves and iterating again and again, creating bigger growth loops. It’s a short piece, and I recommend reading at least the end, where the author walks through the steps of an intentional life experiment for getting past the fears that keep us all from moving forward.

But my favorite part of the piece was near the beginning. The author, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, recalls being ill at ease about applying to a selective academic program abroad; she feared she would not be accepted. Le Cunff’s mother noted, “It’s not your decision to make.”

This was a “wow” for me. When we hesitate to take action out of fear that we will not win, or be accepted, or hired, or loved, we are taking the opportunity to reject or accept us out of the hands of the panel or the company or the person whose decision it should rightfully be.

The Big Leap — It’s Your Decision

Nobody can make the decision for you as to whether you will make bold strides, or when, or how.

The following short film examines a dilemma at the top of a ten-meter diving tower: to leap or to risk the embarrassment of climbing all the way back down. I think you’ll find it worth the price of admission. (Note: Almost all of the dialogue is in Swedish with English subtitles, but there are a few English profanities. Consider yourself forewarned.)

Fortune favors the bold, or so goes an ancient Latin proverb. Would you leap?