Why Organisation is the Practical Support Your Motivation Needs

Everyone needs more organisation! Do you know why? It’s hugely useful when it comes to getting that motivation and inspiration flowing. When you no longer have to worry about all the little things because you’re on top of it with your organisation, you open up those mental pathways to better motivation and momentum, and who knows, maybe a little inspiration too!

We All Want to Get More Done

We all want to be doing more, doing better at work, college, in our hobbies. Getting more done, and achieving a better quality of work is always the name of the game. Whether you’re competitive, in need of a promotion or just want to excel, working to the best of your abilities should always be a goal. No one should be content to do the bare minimum.
However, what do you say when someone’s bare minimum is requiring them to work really hard? Even though they’re not achieving much at all, what they are getting done is costing them an inordinate amount in terms of time, effort, stress and other factors. There’s a strong chance what you’re dealing with here is terrible organisation. We’ve all been through periods of this. Feeling overwhelmed by something that should be relatively simple? You need organisation.

Not only does organisation help us get way more done, but it also helps prevent us from feeling stressed and overwhelmed. By doing these two things, it opens the door to motivation and inspiration. Real results. When you’re constantly stressed and avoiding the important things, you’re going to struggle to reach your potential, and all the amazing creative outputs that require you to be switched on and engaged will be missed because you’re focusing on the wrong things.

Organisation Has a Vital Role When It Comes to Productivity

It might be easy to spend your time believing that productivity, hard work and results are just something that happens sometimes. You know, when the stars align, and everything is just right, the work just pours out of you and everything is great. This is a ridiculous attitude, but subconsciously, many of us are guilty of thinking this way.

Organisation bridges the gap between self-discipline and motivation. We can all be relentlessly self-disciplined, working way too hard all the time and wasting too much time, and we can still entirely miss motivation and inspiration. Organisation turns hard work into smart work. When you view your labour and effort as a resource, and allocate it smartly, you will start achieving bigger, better things. If you’re a musician for instance, does it make sense for you to waste time doing peripheral things, when you should be focused on the act of recording, or focused practice, or playing live? Instead of doing busywork, talking about your plans or making fresh new strategies, just do it.

Busywork can be the death of truly inspired work. It can be semi satisfying too, to spend hours answering emails or doing minor tasks.

This positive procrastination is what holds people back however. Organisation is the antidote. By paying attention to how you’re spending your time, delegating different aspects of your work to different times in the day, you can make the most of your limited work time, and achieve far bigger things.

How Important is Motivation?

This is an interesting question. Motivation is useful, for sure, but important? It’s nothing to count upon. When you’re feeling a little ill or tired, should you let everything fall apart because you’re not particularly motivated? Or should you just suck it up and get on with it? Sure, motivation is a nice boost when you get it, but for the most part, it’s something you should ignore and allow to happen when it happens.

The main thing to focus on should always be self-discipline and organisation. Pay attention to your wants, desires and passions, trust that you’re moving in the right direction with your work, but don’t expect that passion to immediately show in the first area you pursue. Passion in work develops properly through dedication and work. You can’t expect it to just show up. The goal should always be results and skill building, allocating your time and effort to make the best use of your time. Endless hard work isn’t the answer, but waiting for inspiration to strike doesn’t work either. You need the balance. Enjoy motivation when it comes, but don’t count on it coming when you need it.

Organisation and Self-Discipline

Fundamentally, the two most important tools in everyone’s toolbox, organisation and self-discipline allow average people to rise above the talented and super-smart. They allow the talented and super-smart to become unbelievably talented and super-smart. If you can learn to utilise organisation and self-discipline in order to make the most of your time, you’ll achieve far more.
What’s the opposite of these two? Procrastination. This is one of the real poisons that can hold people back. Procrastination is an extremely appealing seeming thing. Why spend five hours doing that unpleasant work when instead you could be playing videogames? Why bother? You can always do it tomorrow. This is a lie and an excuse that we all tell ourselves. And we’re not stealing fun time from the world. We’re not sneaking in little extra weekends. No, we’re stealing from ourselves, and the time we’re stealing is valueless, because it’s not true rest or recreation. It’s tainted by the important stuff we’re putting off. That important stuff is still in the back of your head making you anxious. That’s why you can’t focus on your videogame or whatever fun thing you’re trying to do. Procrastination manufactures anxiety, stealing your time from you, and leaving you having to cram the work in at some other point. If you can overcome procrastination and just get on with the work, your free time will be true free time, and it’ll be that much sweeter.

Organisation and self-discipline allow you to both plan through procrastination, and then make sure you stick with that plan. Then once you get working properly, motivation and momentum become inevitable. You start enjoying the work, feeling competent and before you know it, it’s done. Now it’s time to do something else, and this time, getting started isn’t quite so hard. Would you look at that, you’re feeling pretty inspired now, creating stuff at the limits of your ability. Amazing!

Use Every Tool at Your Disposal

The key is to make use of all the tools and abilities you have at your disposal, because without the balance and strategy of doing this, it’s too easy to depend on one thing. For instance, you can do great work when you engage, so you rely on obsessive hard work at the last minute. This option will work for a while, but the attached anxiety, stress and lack of manoeuvrability will eventually start to limit and hold you back. Better to use those powerful bursts of hard work occasionally, but have a much lower level maintenance approach to work that allows you to relax. This is organisation.

On the other hand, you could be uninspired and too organised. You do the bare minimum and get the work done, but you rarely go above and beyond and you simply do what you can to get by. This lack of inspiration is a problem too and can limit you. You need to make sure you’re engaging and stimulating yourself intellectually properly. It’s all about achieving this balance. Once you do that, you can achieve whatever you’re passionate about.

Five Simple Ways to Embrace Organisation

When it comes to embracing organisation and feeling properly in control, there’s plenty of basics that everyone should be doing, here are five of the most important.

The Mighty To-Do List – Put it on a post-it note on your desk. Do one before you go to sleep for the following day. Whatever you do, just make sure you get it written down, and in order of importance too!

Make Use of a Calendar – Similar to the to-do, and similarly invaluable. You need to know what’s coming in the month ahead. Having the calendar somewhere very visual in front of you helps too. Maybe above your desk.

Quiet That Brain and Meditate – One of the big issues with people that struggle with organisation is a feeling of being overwhelmed. Try scribbling down that to-do list, then meditating for ten minutes. Then get on with things. This clarity can help you start working properly.

Break Your Work Up and Ramp Up – When it comes to feeling overwhelmed, something that really helps is breaking the work down into small manageable chunks, and making sure you start the day with easier tasks. By making things easier to start off with and ramping up, you can remove any risk of procrastination. This is something you can incorporate into your to-do list writing.

Just Write It Down – I know, I know, I’ve already said it twice before. Click To Tweet

But just scribbling out all your important ideas, thoughts, reminders in a little notepad is going to massively help you focus on the important stuff and get everything done.