Zeus and Nietzsche's guide to becoming organized if you’re anything but

I am without a doubt not a naturally organised person.

It may be dramatic but it was almost as if being organised was painful, the ironic inefficiency of preparation always annoyed me. If something needs to be done I will do it at the last possible second with 120% effort and save time by not doing something as silly as preparing and organising. However this article is being typed into a nicely organised google doc in a specific subcategory folder of Writing - Vocal - Contest - Spring Forward - Draft 1, so clearly something changed, even if for now, just in my writing.

There’s a very good chance that if you’re a creative, you are similarly messy, you are trying to reveal the depths of the human soul, of course there is no time for organisation. Up until the age of 20, I was awful. My homework would never be done, the bicycle that I needed for my job as a courier would be ridden until the tyres were flat, the chain so slack it would slip every stroke. I would refuse to be organised unless ABSOLUTELY forced to.

Enter Nietzsche

He entered accidentally and without me knowing for a very long time. He came in the form of the first job I ever loved, in the form of door to door sales. A job, at first glance, not obviously suited to my often awkward, and shy personality. I had however, always been incredibly interested in people. The many roads that consciousness, as vivid and as detailed as my own could go down. Try and connect with 100 people a day, extremely painful for the insecure teenager still trying to find himself, but still extremely fascinating.

I noticed however, that it was hard to hold up mentally until the end of the day, when the decision-makers and the potential of a sale was home. So I had to find ways to increase my mental fortitude, reduce anxiety, really listen to people when they talked ( not just wait for my turn to talk ), come up with something witty to say, in a fraction of a second. I had to improve if I wanted to keep this masochistic love affair with my new job.

Working out before work, reduces anxiety, mental fog and nicely. However, I had to be prepared in order to have the time. Wake up at 06:00, eat a precise amount of calories, meal prep, clothes already washed, write down my workout on my phone.

Reading books, really reading them, don’t just say the words in your head, understand them, look them up and research them. However again, I needed preparation, to know what was even worth reading. To schedule time to have somewhere quiet enough to read and think, really think. I somewhat suspect a lot of these sales books had more of a placebo effect than an actual effect, but it remains true reading them required organisation.

Finally, for some reason, I had managed to start preparing and organizing. Admittedly badly, crudely and inconsistently at first, but even that was miles ahead of my natural habits. For the first time ever, outside of a video game, preparing and organizing didn’t hurt.

What I had done, without knowing it until many years later, is I had triggered what Nietzsche describes as the “ ruling passion “ or “ organizing idea “ . Nietzsche believed that what we consider us is merely “ the dwelling place where all other impulses live “. That we’re more a pantheon of many personalities rather than just one. Which is why, we consistently do and say things for reasons we don’t understand. Why for me, in my pantheon, preparing and organising wasn’t just slightly inconvenient, it was frustrating and painful. Whatever parts of my pantheon allow me to be creative and open were also throwing a fit every time I dared to try and allocate mental resources away from them. Your “ ruling passion “, according to Nietzsche, could make all other personalities subservient. You could get all the different parts of you moving in one direction without too much kicking and screaming. Not just in the direction of whoever was shouting loudest.

What on Olympus is your point?

That's the one trick, if you’re messy and disorganised and can’t even begin to employ a technique, like sticky notes, or 20-minute sessions, or calendars, or breaking big goals into small ones, or acronyms, then try to find your “ ruling passion “. The one thing that ever allowed me to start getting organised, was finding something that I was passionate about. Something that allowed me to go against my natural character of thinking in every direction, doing everything and never having a plan for any of it. Don’t get me wrong, I have in no way been a perfectly organised force of productivity and administration since my first job. I have fallen many times, watched what worked as my “ ruling passion “ crumble and reform many times. Lately however, I’ve decided to try and become a writer and suddenly I’ve been consistently waking up on time to work in the mornings. I’ve been organizing my projects. I’m currently writing this in Google Docs folder Writing - Vocal - Contest - Spring Forward - Draft 8 which must mean I’m going in the right direction.

You need a Zeus to rule your pantheon and he’s not going to appear until there are titans to be killed!