Key Takeaway: Orderliness and being organized is important as opposed to chaos and disorder. God Himself is a God of order, and from a practical viewpoint, it makes things simpler and smoother for us and others.
You may notice there seems to be an underlying theme to some of my posts, such as those on having separate footwear at home, time management, and even the one last week on the dangers of over-cleaning. Even the personal blog posts on my spring cleaning in my room two years ago, and the one on household chores. Indeed, there is a theme to them.
It’s the value of being organized.
I’d like to think I am an organized person. Definitely, I could still be more organized than I am right now, but happily I can say I’ve gone a long way from before. My best friends are both extremely meticulous, so they were able to hasten bringing out the organize monster in me. I actually love organizing, and my first jobs delved quite deeply into using any homegrown organizing skills I fostered on my own. I’m so meticulous in my files that even the household documents whose copies I have, I created a simple system inspired by my BCYF career.
Why organize? Well, right up to the Bible itself, orderliness over chaos is the Lord’s will. Creation itself is a turning of chaos into order. As such, God is the God of order, not of chaos. So, as His stewards and children, we are called to be orderly as well, and not disorganized or messy.
There’s also a practical reason why one should be organized. It makes things more efficient and simplifies our lives. It makes us easier to recall where things are, as we know where we put them, and it makes it easy for others as well. It makes things work more smoothly, therefore, because we don’t have to spend so much time just looking for something in a sea of clutter. Need something? *Pak*, there it is. In and out in an instant… or two.
And it’s not limited to organizing your physical things or affairs at home or at work. We need to organize ourselves too, the way we live, the way we run our lives – our mental things and affairs. This is why scheduling is so important, especially when you have a lot of food on your plate. Good time management allows you to do more things and do them all in quality. It allows you to work more efficiently and by extension more effectively. It also creates a good impression on people you meet, especially on people like would-be partners or stakeholders in whatever you’re doing. Who would care to have a meeting with you if they knew you wouldn’t be orderly enough to arrive on time, or that you may actually have had scheduled something else concurrent to it? (It happened to me before.)
What is also equally important to remember, however, is that there is no one way to organize. The one thing you should have in mind when organizing is that you do it in a way that it works for you. If you over-organize, or focus too much on how it looks and fits rather than how easy it makes things for your life, then you’re defeating the purpose of organizing. It’s meant to bring orderliness to your life, not additional stress. Remember, we Make The Most by striving for excellence, not perfection.
Professional organizer Marilyn Bohn makes this point very clear in her book Go Organize! It’s a guidebook on organizing your home in a way that it makes things effective and efficient: proper management. To each their own: we each have our own styles and reasons for organizing things a certain way. The important thing is that they are not all over the place, and that they are placed or stored in such a way that it would be easy for you to retrieve them when needed.
In the same manner, don’t organize your life to fit others’ expectations and needs – unless it will oppress them in any way (such as demanding all your employees work at night since you’re a night owl, for instance). Meet your expectations and needs as it is you who runs your life. If you need to take a nap after lunch lest you cannot work properly, then do so, if you have the freedom to. If you can only do your workouts in the morning and can’t join your friend in the gym in the evenings due to other commitments involving others, then work out in the morning. Do it your way – but be responsible and conscious about it.
Again, just remember the bottom line: we organize to emulate God’s love of orderliness, and to keep things simple and smooth.
Happy Friday!
Aloy Chua 