What is the root cause of your disorganization?

We are disorganized as a family. Our house is full of clutter. All of us attributed this disorganized state of our home to some deep seated disorder in our personalities; Perhaps we inherited some faulty "disorganizing DNA" from our ancestors.

Our belief grew over the period of years until few months back when we decided to sit down and examine this "we are disorganized" belief. After several discussions and analysis we came to a conclusion that the major cause for our disorganization is lack of storage devices.

Please find below the reasons for us being disorganized.

1. Our strong held belief that we are disorganized


2. Plenty of ever increasing number of loose items such as books, clothes, paper and other stuff we shop and accumulate


3. Very poor storage devices in our house for these loose items


4. Our indecision to buy storage equipments

This led us to a vicious cycle as depicted in the picture.

Last week, we bought three book racks. We decided to focus on books as they are the major ones that are causing all the clutter in our house. The book racks had a near magical effect on our clutter. A large part of it vanished as our books got neatly organized in our book racks.

Our house now looks less cluttered. We also bought an extra storage Almira for our clothes which further reduced our clutter.

We still have to work on other areas such as papers, DVDs etc. which we have decided to tackle in the coming weeks.

The learning from this experience was profound for me. Many a times we conclude that we have a personality defect like disorganization and use that as an excuse to do nothing. What I realized is that invariably the major part of the problem could lie outside us rather than inside us.

It is important to elicit both internal and external causes of the problem. It is far easier to tackle the external cause of the problem (example:buying a book rack) rather than trying to change an internal personality trait that may not be the primary root cause of the problem.

The questions you need to ask yourself constantly are:

1. Have I identified the internal and the external causes of the problem?


2. Have I tackled the external causes first?


3. What is the effect of tackling the external causes?


4. Is there any internal cause to tackle or was my belief that there is such an internal cause wrong?

Try this approach and do give me a feedback through your comments.