Essentialism (IV): Organizing Our Closets (And Our Lives)

Essentialism, says Greg McKeown in his book of the same name,  is a lot like organizing a closet.

Closets unmanaged can rapidly spin out of control.  They can become stuffed with clothes (and other things) and become disorganized to the point that almost nothing will fit into them.  Every now and again, perhaps driven by frustration or a sheer need to do something, we will purge - but not in an organized way.  And then, as sure as the sun will rise again, the closet will fill up again.

"In the same way that a closets get cluttered as clothes we never wear accumulate, so do our lives get cluttered as well-intended commitments and activities we've said yes to pile up.  Most of these efforts didn't come with an expiration date.  Unless we have a system for purging them, once adopted, they live on in perpetuity".

So we do we organize our closets - and our lives?

1)  Explore and evaluate - We need to turn the questions on our clothes from "Is there a chance I will ever wear this?" to better questions, suggests McKeown, such as "Do I love this?", "Do I look great in this?", and "Do I wear this often?".  If the answer is "no" to any of these, likely they can be eliminated.

The same is true of our personal and professional lives:  "Will this activity make the highest possible contribution towards my goals?

2)  Eliminate - Once we have sorted the clothes, we often have a reluctance to part with them, even though we already believe we will seldom if ever use these again.  This is due, suggests McKeown, to the idea of "sunk cost bias", that we have already spent the money and so are wasting it if we give them away.   The question to ask here is "If  I didn't own this already, how much would I spend to buy it?" If the answer is "not that much" or "I would not buy it", likely it can go away.

For our personal and professional lives, it is the same.  It is not enough to determine the activities that do not lead us to our highest and best contribution; we need to actively weed out and eliminate those activities.

3)  Execute - Once we have organized the closet, if we want to keep it organized we need a system to do this.  We need to schedule regular clean out sessions.  We need to have a place to put the clothes we no longer want.  And we need to have a time set aside to go to the local donation center and turn the bags in.

In the same way, "...once you've figured out which activities and efforts to keep - the ones that make your highest level of contribution - you need a system to make executing your intentions as effortless as possible".  It is not just identifying those things that are essential, it is "stacking" the system of execution in such a way that we make it painless for us to complete them.

From McKeown:  "Essentialism is about creating a system for handling the closet of our lives.  This is not a process  you undertake once a year, once a month, or even once a week.  It is a discipline you apply each and every time you are faced with a decision about whether to say yes or politely decline." 

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Thoughts and Applications:

Cleaning out closets is something that has become recently familiar to me with my move, as well as the practice of having to keep a closet in order (amazing how quickly they fill back up with "stuff".  So what McKeown says resonates with me.

Of these three - Explore and evaluate, Eliminate, and Execute - is there one that is more difficult than the others?  Honestly, for me it is "Execute".  I can evaluate commitments and interests, I can even (in theory) eliminate them - yet I fail to put in place a method to reliably execute on those choices, and so I keep finding myself back at the place that I started, with more than I had intended in my life.

If my life were a closet, you would barely be able to get into it.