The Habits of Highly Organised Individuals

Strategies and Routines for Mastering Organisation and Efficiency

In houses worldwide, you’ll find neatness personified; cutlery organised according to its purpose, colour-coded bookshelves and even seasonally-racked clothes. In many of those houses, you’ll also find a ‘messy drawer’ — a slice; a taster, perhaps — of the human brain’s capability for facilitating disorganisation. It’s a dumping ground for the miscellaneous items we can’t quite seem to find a designated home for, but at the same time, its value isn’t lost on its owners.

If all hope is lost, you try the ‘messy drawer.’ Hay-fever tablets? Try the messy drawer. Plasters, paper clips, post-it notes, sellotape or loose batteries? You know where to look.

It’s an amalgamation of the disorganised and organised mind. It’s easy to feel organised in one sense — for example, having a rough idea of what’s in the messy drawer — but it’s just as easy to resemble the chaos of its contents. While it is a comforting place to look for everything miscellaneous and lost, it’s not a sustainable mindset in the long term.

A lack of organisation scrambles your life into a messy drawer-like state and throws up a clarity-ending fog.