Imagine visiting a friend who invited you over to their house. You schedule the date and time for the visit. On the day of the visit you made your way to their house and as you approached their front door, you noticed their cooking pans by the door. You knock the door and your friend opens with a broad smile on his/her face and welcomes you in.
The moment you got into the hall way, you saw newspapers all over the floor. You got to the living room and you found their shoes, toiletries and wet towel on the sofa. Question, what would be your first impression?
The reality is that if care is not taken, our lives could get as messy as the situation described above - Chaos. It is easy to identify and deal with physical chaos but more difficult to identify and deal with the most dangerous form of chaos – mental chaos. It is even possible that as you are reading this blog right now, you are admitting that your life or schedule needs some help.
Many physicians tell us that many of the illness we experience are psychosomatic. Chaos is very expensive and the cost of chaos goes beyond what can be measured. Can you imagine how much money we lose and how much time we waste as a result of living a chaotic life or a life in which there is no order – missed deadlines, late payment charges, double booking, personal stressed, missed opportunities and the list goes on.
Life happens so fast, that if we don’t put our lives in order, we will lose control of our lives. The demands of life never stops coming, we all have to joggle many balls in the air to meet the several demands that life places on it and if we don’t have order in our lives, we may not be able to cope as more ‘balls’ are added to the mix as we progress in life.
The Law of Nature : It is the law of nature that anything left to its own devices will deteriorate from order to chaos. If you leave your garden without paying attention to it, it will become messy and degenerate; if you leave your marriage to its own devices, it will deteriorate. it is called the Law of Entropy. The same is true with our lives, any area of our lives that we leave unattended to will degenerate – our relationships, finances, work, family and the list goes on.
Maximum Effectiveness : It is impossible to be successful by living a chaotic life. Creativity, clear thinking and productivity increases in an environment where there is order. If you desire to be maximally productive and effective, you will need to live an orderly life. Yes, there are people who live a very chaotic life and it seems that they are successful; the truth is that they will not be able to sustain that success. Increase of their success will start a chain reaction that will lead to personal stress and reduced productivity. So for us to live and continue to live a successful life, we must impose order into our lives.
Let there be order
For you to apply order into your life you need to understand what I refer to as the ‘Law of Order’ which simply states that everything must be in a place and there must be a place for everything. You can simplify it further to say everything in a place and a place for everything un:yes'>Whenever there is chaos in any situation, pick each item one by one and ask, is there a place for this? If yes, find the place for it. If no, discard it. The same principle applies when dealing with a disorganised room, chaotic schedule, unproductive team, stressful relationship and mounting work pressure.
Question, what are the ‘things’ that you are involved in right now that should not be part of your life? This is a very important question to answer because it’s the things that are not important that always stand in the way of the things that are important. A simple test that can help you identify the things that are important to you is the funeral test .
After identifying the things that are important to you, you now need to create place for them. A give way to start this process is to set categories in your life. I will recommend 6 categories to start with, namely: Faith, Self, Family, Service, Finances and vocation. Further explanation on how to establish order using these 6 categories is available on the post ‘ Balance; The Key to Life’