Get Organized: Where to Go From Here

By Leo Babauta

If all has gone well with your Get Organized habit this month, you’ve developed the habit of spending a little time every day maintaining your organization system, and have started to build a trusted system, and have started to get your things in order.

But it’s just a start — no one expects you to change everything all in one month. There may still be emails in your inbox to sort through, you might still have papers cluttering your desk, you might not have completely developed the habit of putting things where they belong right away.

That’s OK. We’ll get there eventually, and if Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither are life-long habits. We’ve gotten a good start, and a good idea of what a set of organized habits looks like.

What to do next?

Keep going! Here’s what you might consider:

Keep your 10 minutes of organizing habit going. Don’t just drop it now that the month’s ending. Keep on top of that, or the system falls apart.
Continue to sort. If you still have lots of emails, bills, papers and the like to sort through, don’t fret. Keep whittling it down, little by little. Make an appointment each week, or use some of your daily 10 minutes of organizing, to sort through things.
Focus on the habit of putting things where they belong. This is a key habit, but it takes awhile to build. Keep that going, put up reminders, be mindful when you finish an activity. If you forget for awhile (clutter and a bunch of tabs open in your browser are two indicators), then just bring yourself back and re-focus, and you’ll get it over time.
Take the Declutter Your Life module. The next module we’re doing focuses on clutter, which of course goes hand-in-hand with organization. You might have started already, but there’s likely more to do. Have fun decluttering with the rest of us!

I’m grateful you joined us this month, and hope your organization has led to a more peaceful day.