You CANNOT become EFFECTIVE without getting yourself organised.
Why be organised first?
It creates efficiency. Take the least amount of effort to get something done. Picture any hypermarket. Rows of neatly and logically organised products. This allows you to get what you want without having to run up and down looking for something. Effectiveness is about reaching your goal or perhaps even maximising your effort and resources. To create efficiency, we need to get an overview of what is going on to identify and remove obstacles.
If you want to lose weight, get your meals and schedule organised first.
Once you become organised, you will start to feel confident. Think about a student who is underperforming in a subject. Usually, their notes are in a mess and they are pretty clueless about the major concepts in it. They will usually not know how many topics they have to study or how many questions will come up for each topic and their weightage. Once they get organised they can very quickly see what needs to be covered and how much more effort they need to devote to the various topics.
We want to accomplish many things in our lives. We need to make the TIME and create the resources necessary to get them done.
How is that some of us get more done in a day? Surely being organised must have something to do with it.
Think of a company that is cluttered both physically and in their digital information management. They are highly inefficient because their staff spend a lot of time looking for, recreating or waiting for someone else to get back to them. They can't find their staplers, files and other mission-critical resources.
You will be pleasantly surprised how much better life becomes when you take the small steps to keep your personal and your professional live organised. If you are a business person reading this take the next week and invest your efforts in reading up about Information management systems. Being organised does not make you rigid it releases you from clutter to a life of freedom.