Whitmore - T.I.M.E: Things I Must Experience: How to Manage Your Time More Effectively So You Can Do More of What You Love

Why you need to be organized to be creative

Many people hide behind the theory of creative chaos and how it leads to great achievements. But if you care enough to research the theory, you will find out that it doesnt apply to your everyday life. It applies to a universal structure of a pattern much greater than what your mind can perceive and imagine, so what seems like a disorganized and chaotic pattern now, is actually a great plan that will unfold sometime in the future.

In your every day, human existence chaos is just what it is a state of utter disorder and confusion, leading only to more chaos. Lets put the theory in practice. Your desk is flooded with papers, documents, pens, erasers, and maybe even the book you read is peaking underneath some week old newspaper. If a coworker calls and asks for a document, you start looking for it on your desk, inside your drawers, and end up printing it out, just to avoid going through the mess. You didnt take the time to create different folders on your internet browser, to keep different types of bookmarks organized, so you try to think of the sites names and search it through your history. Your email is another story. Luckily, now you can just type a keyword in the search box and all emails with the keyword will appear. But there were times when you could look for a certain message for over an hour. Searching for a file on the computer is a quest for the most courageous and those with free time on their hands.

All this chaos only creates stress and headaches. At the time, you may convince yourself that you are in control of your time and space, and that you have everything you need handy and where you can see it. If you summarize, you will realize that you spend an hour every day looking for stuff. Thats at least 5 hours each week. Dont forget that these habits rub off on your personal life. You do the same in your kitchen, closet, hallway and we all know you have a chair designed to hold all the clothes you changed throughout the day, or week. Paying bills, scheduling appointments and organizing activities for your free time is also done at the last possible moment. No wonder you have no time.

As human beings, we tend to excel in finding and creating patterns. If our nature was designed differently, the ancient man wouldve extinct long ago. We dont live in caves anymore and we dont hunt wild animals for food, but our contemporary lifestyles awarded us with modern problems. Nowadays, if you keep your environment cluttered and you let time pass by without taking the effort to manage it effectively, you will upset the equilibrium between your personal and professional life. This equilibrium must remain balanced. Otherwise you are risking stress related diseases, professional failures and a number of limitations in your personal life. So if you have a pattern of letting the chips fall where they may, maybe its time to change it and learn a new one. One where you are in charge and in control of your time, and your life.