4 Things The Most Organized People Do Every Day

Discover the secrets of the most organized people and boost your productivity.

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In this article,

• We’re In Denial
• Decide What To Fail At In Advance
• Fixed Volume Productivity
• Serialize
• Celebrate What You Have Accomplished

In 1930, famed economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a century nobody would work more than 15 hours a week…

Yeah, I’m giggling too. He didn’t take into account that human desires just never level off. There’s always a shiny new thing to buy and always new Joneses to keep up with, so there’s always more to get done. To-do lists expand and emails keep coming.

Luckily, there are answers – and realistic ones that work. We’re going to get them thanks to an excellent new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by the indomitable word sorcerer Oliver Burkeman.

We’re In Denial

We rarely stop to consider things so rationally, though, because that would mean confronting the painful truth of our limitations. We would be forced to acknowledge that there are hard choices to be made: which balls to let drop, which people to disappoint, which cherished ambitions to abandon, which roles to fail at.

Decide What To Fail At In Advance

We usually start down the road to productivity by asking what is important. Problem is, you can easily have 25 hours a day of “important” stuff. So that doesn’t work. It’s vital to consider what things are important — which you’re going to ignore anyway.

Fixed Volume Productivity

Set predetermined time boundaries for work. Knowing you want to be done by 6PM lets you be realistic about how much time you really have and what can actually get done before close of business.

Serialize

Work-life balance is often unrealistic. So we’re going to aim for deliberate and conscious imbalance. The way to really get something done and done right is to focus on that to the exclusion of everything else until it’s finished… Of course, that sounds completely unrealistic.

Celebrate What You’ve Accomplished

You want to have “open” and “closed” lists in order to maintain your productivity. But you also want to have a “done” list. This is to maintain your sanity.

These are the things the most organized people do every day:

• We’re In Denial: Until you accept how much you can realistically get done, you’ll be grabbing the third rail with both hands.
• Decide What To Fail At In Advance: There will be trade-offs. The real value of any time management technique is if it helps you neglect the right things at the right time.
• Fixed Volume Productivity: Know how many hours you actually have and you can be realistic about how much you can actually get done. Any other process has more red flags than a matador.
• Serialize: Try to focus on one project at a time – but that project can change day to day or week to week. (Minute to minute is not a good idea.)
• Celebrate What You Have Accomplished: All of this gets a lot less painful when you start seeing results. Your swell of pride may be too great for the fabric of the universe to contain.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: If all of the above is giving you a truth seizure, breathe deeply and think of puppy yawns.

Sum Up

These strategies can be a hard pill to swallow. But I’m trying to make up for all the human rights violations of the time management industry.

Choosing something is what makes it special. Granting something time is the biggest compliment we can give to any activity – or any person for that matter. As Oliver says, choosing is not loss, it’s an affirmation. It says, “This is what matters to me.”

When we get buried in the hustle and bustle of running down to-do lists and lose track of what is meaningful, we don’t just forget who we are, we forget what we are.

We’re not “human doings.” We’re human beings. And that’s a much better way to live.