Organization and Perfectionism
Are You Sabotaging Your Own Success?

Believe it or not, perfectionism can, and often does, prevent you from becoming organized. The idea that circumstances have to be just right before anything can be done will delay you from achieving your organizational goals.

If this is something you struggle with, all you need to remember is one simple truth:

When it comes to organization, done beats perfect, hands down.

It is easy to procrastinate, telling yourself that, since you do not have the time, the necessary equipment or the money to do a particular project right now, it is better to wait. That is exactly the kind of thinking that will ensure that you continue to live in a state of disarray.

Let me give you an example from my own experience:

I have a good friend who has been trying to organize her household paperwork for more than a year. She has thought about her needs and has developed a system that she feels will work perfectly for her. She has all of the supplies and has sat down many times to get started on her project.

One evening she called me, very frustrated with her organization challenge. Each time she had sat down to work on her project, making piles all over the floor in her home office, she was called away before she was finished. She would leave her piles on the floor thinking she would just go back to them when she had more time.

Unfortunately, her children would come into the room and walk on her piles, collapsing them as they went. Her husband would come into the room looking for something and shuffle through her piles. She, herself, had even sabotaged her own progress trying to find something she needed.

The result was that when she was ready to get back to her project, all of her progress had been lost and she had to start over from scratch.

It was disheartening to see all of her efforts failing. She was ready to give up, claiming that it was impossible to organize under these conditions. I told her, quite simply, that she was suffering from perfectionism.

She had developed a pre-conceived idea about how this organization project was going to go. She would sort through every last piece of paper in her office, making piles as necessary. Once she had all of her piles neatly sorted, she would put them into labeled file folders and then put all of the file folders neatly into her file cabinet.

In her mind, it was all going to work perfectly, but in real life it wasn't working at all.

I suggested a solution that would allow her to maintain the progress she was able to make. The project would not go as perfectly as she had envisioned and it would take longer, but she would still be able to achieve her goal of organizing her paperwork.

The point is that you do not need to be a perfectionist to be organized. It is easy to envision the perfect solution to an organizational challenge, but you have to be realistic. If that particular solution will not work, find one that will. It may not be the perfection you were seeking, but at least it will be done.

Don't let perfectionism stop you from living an organized life.