Peace of Mind Organizing

You can learn to be organized

28 June 2013

Some people are born organized. I know a lot of folks like that, since I hang around with professional organizers. Other people weren’t born organized, but they’ve learned to be organized.

I’m living proof that you can learn to be organized. Let me tell you a little story.

In May, I was contacted on Facebook by one of my high school teachers. He’d been the advisor to the school newspaper. My senior year I was the editor of the school newspaper. Being in touch with him made me pull out my yearbook (which at my high school we called an “annual”).

I turned to the page in the yearbook that featured the school newspaper staff. There we were, sitting around our typewriters. Next to a picture I was in, my teacher had written the following:

Janine, thank you for helping me make it through my first year as Journal advisor. I don’t think I helped you to be any more organized or any neater—but I tried!

That cracked me up when I read it. I don’t actually have any recollection of being particularly disorganized or messy in high school, but it was apparently my defining characteristic, as far as this teacher was concerned.

Through the years, I didn’t let my messiness get in the way of my success. I read and read about organizing techniques and managed to teach myself to be organized. (All along, I was organized in my mind…it was the physical manifestation that was out of kilter.)

When I got burned out as a freelance writer back in 2005, I decided it was time to teach others what I’d learned about getting organized. And now, I make a nice living doing that.

So I went from being an apparently disorganized and messy high school student to being a professional organizer who’s helped hundreds of people get organized. If I can get that organized, so can you.

Don’t think that just because you’re not organized now, you never can be. If you’re dealing with a lot of clutter, the first step is getting rid of the backlog. Once that’s done, it’s a matter of setting up systems that work for the way you think and then creating new habits and routines to help you stay organized.

If you set your mind to it, you can learn to be organized!

Tagged with: decluttering, get organized, organized, organizing systems, persistence

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