The Key to Organization Is Not Disorganizing in the First Place

Written at 2025-09-20

Some people think having an organized environment is the result of frequent organizing. My personal journey of becoming more organized actually makes me question this belief. Yes, we can organize things at fixed intervals. However, in practice, I find it too difficult to make this effectively work. To me, the fixed intervals approach associates organizing with costs. You now have a new chore to remember when the time comes. You also keep letting disorder build up until it’s time to clean. So the work sucks more when the time comes and you become more likely to say things like “I’m so tired from work right now, I should rest and put this off.”

Let’s say your takeout arrives. You sit at the table and open the bag. Instead of putting the bag and extra sauces you don’t use into the trash, you directly proceed to eat. After eating, you don’t do anything and leave everything (forks, spoons, plates, etc.) as it is, and walk back to your room.

Well, my friend, the problem isn’t how often you clean. It’s how quickly you let things get disorganized.

I think building habits that prevent disorder helps more than just focusing on organizing afterward. Remember that with each action you do, you possibly increase entropy.

Generally, when we do something, we need to temporarily change our surroundings. We take out the things we need at that moment and use them to do something. And we also usually have both idle and active times when doing stuff. What I see is that these idle times are perfect moments to tidy up the mess that usually occurs in the moment. Let’s say you’re making sausage and eggs. You take the eggs and sausage out of the fridge. You slice the sausage, toss it in the pan to cook, and while the sausage is cooking to a certain point, you don’t want to add the eggs yet. You’re IDLE. Why not put the sausage and knife you just took out back where you got them instead of standing there waiting by the pan? You’re done with it anyway.

Postponing these small things to be done later once the task is finished might seem more efficient, but believe me, most often it is not. You are not only adding a new task to keep in your head, but you are also making it harder for you at that time.

I think this is a bit like garbage collection in programming. You can let unused stuff pile up and then clean it all at once (like a big cleanup session), or you can put things away as soon as possible when you’re done with them. I think in general, the second approach feels more stable. Just spread the work out and prevent disorder from building up. This way, you don’t need to worry about organizing as much.

I feel that, ideally, organizing should happen only when something new comes up. After that, your habits should maintain order. Once you’ve set up a system, your real task is simply not to disorganize it again.