(Dedicated to the late Andy Rooney 60 minutes).

When the title of this article came to mind, it seemed to come from a part of me who believes that positive activities like organizing can foster compulsive behavior. Relentless organizing can also foster an unhealthy “keep up with Jones” mentality. As a rebellious person, I admit that creative people are often troublesome people, so I say this wholeheartedly. However, looking back at just one aspect of our modern life, being organized is a way of life that one can have to meet the demands of a fast-paced life and all the expectations, real or imagined. It seems to be one of the surest tools. time.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, phones didn’t have answering machines. Either you called someone and the person wasn’t home or simply chose not to answer. The phone kept ringing and hung up after 30 rings. When you get a “busy” signal on your phone, you know that the person you’re calling didn’t know you were trying to get in touch and should try again later. What a concept!

This era was also my mother’s era, when people would write well-written letters to each other and wait weeks or longer for a reply. This old-fashioned letter was really just the prologue to e-mail. In contrast to face-to-face conversations, writers were given the opportunity to express their thoughts without interruption. All the way back to the invention of email, I suddenly felt the need to personally adapt to this new form of communication immediately. One of the reasons is that the ability to send messages was very instant. Until it hits me that receiving e-mail is just writing a letter “digitally” and that I can wait until the end of the day or midnight to “organize” my e-mail. took a while. .

Even now, we have baby boomers and retirees who take more than a few days to reply to emails that I think are quite time sensitive. I’m a little envious of the laissez-faire attitude that responds to every situation. Or maybe they have hundreds of emails to deal with and I’m just low on their priority totem pole. For many of us, email feeds our compulsive side.. Then came tweets, text messages, and even more immediate means of communication, often with disastrous results. Most of us don’t need to elaborate on how we set fire to our regretted texts and tweets. And for some, it has literally become a career or friendship-ending mistake.

With this speedy form of communication and the use of abbreviations (lol), time itself seems to speed up, putting pressure on people to “perform” and keep pace with everyone else. It’s taking more. Social media has also taken us into an entirely different stratosphere. AI now sometimes completes sentences. But the pendulum has moved in the opposite direction, with people taking time off from technology to restore personal balance and reduce stress.

We could go on and on about how toxic things are becoming more and more harmful as technology dominates our lives, but there’s also the saying, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” . If our lives continue to be fast-paced, regardless of whether we have signed any agreements, By decluttering your life, you at least get a way to actually cope and function.. Being organized, both at home and at work, personally and professionally, can help deal with the inevitable extra stress. Being organized also helps you to be more creative, so you can stand out, be noticed, and be appreciated more in this automated, impersonal world.

It is no coincidence that I became a professional feng shui consultant. Because part of my job is to guide and inspire people to live more peaceful and productive lives through metaphysical means and very mundane approaches such as organizing.Use whatever tools you have at your disposal and check out our other tools too way of organizing Topic-specific Excel how-to articles.

Author: Kartal Diamond
Company Name: Feng Shui Solutions®
From the Tao of Organizing blog series