I like to clean and stay organized. It really helps me stay in a good mood, find things, and it gives me a productivity boost. Yet it’s so easy to fall into the trap of incrementally losing control of it all. Every second I lose looking for something through the clutter I’ve created becomes a minute, and those minutes eventually become hours of productivity lost. It’s the same thing with your mind, the more junk you keep in there, the harder it will be stay focused and find the right thoughts.
Next time you download a neat little jQuery library or icon set you find, why not make sure that before you even open the file you put it in a folder where you know you’ll find it? Next time you go to bed and change into your sleeping garment, why not make sure you fold it neatly so you don’t start a pile? Oh, and here’s a good one, next time you start a client project, why not organize your thoughts, assets, and tasks for your project so that you’re not as a butterfly, fluttering from flower to flower and stay on task?
Have purpose, direction, integrity, and focus. You cannot do this without a clean mind and enviroment. Take the first step, because people are hardly going to do it for you. Seek, organize, learn, and conquer. That or hire a butler.