No Big Deal

If you are a creative artsy type, like me, more often than not, the word organization gives you the creeps.

You are a creative for crying out loud, your whole mode of being is much closer to chaos than to order.

That is precisely why you need organization in your life.

Organizing is an effort and it takes real estate in your brain that you would rather keep available for creativity, but you have got to do it from time to time to avoid stagnation and disaster.

So you are in a conundrum because your brain is all over the place and that is how and why you get all of your brilliant ideas. You'd rather make another drawing, write another story, make another beat than spend your precious idea-having time cleaning your workspace and planning your day. But you also know that if you don't organize your day and your space, you'll end up mysteriously stressed, distracted and your creativity will suffer.

You need a certain amount of organization for your ideas to actually become something more than just ideas.

Usually, the need for organization is brought upon me by the chaos becoming overwhelming at which point my anxiety forces me to fix the situation or else. As you can imagine, avoiding a panic attack is plenty motivational, but it is definitely not enough to carry me through the whole process of actual change and action taking required, without tricking my brain a little. What I do is I make it as effortless, easy, and simple as I can. Possibly the process should be as doable, obvious, and straightforward that actually not doing it becomes the less desirable option.

To get there I first sit down with pen and paper and organize my thoughts with words and doodles. I put all I have in my head on the page and then sort it out. Once I have a list, a bottom line, a vision, then I know what to aim for. The next step becomes to figure out how to make it all lazy-proof.

I try to boil everything down to few easy things to do that make sense to me and then I find a way to make them an integral part of my daily life so I can do them almost by default with minimum effort required, basically without having go too much out of my way.

For me the trick to make change happen, to organize my life and my days is to make sure the whole affair is not a big deal. Stakes and pressure need to be very low and every step of the process easy, simple and obvious.

We can get really creative with finding ways to organize our life, outlining our belief systems, envisioning our rooms tidy, imagining our days flawlessly productive, creating amazing to-do lists...and never actually implementing anything. Once the joy of creating the plan has evaporated we are just not into it anymore. We create plans but we don't execute them.

So if we want to change something, to organize something, we really need to make it as doable and effortless as possible. It needs to be as easy to do as drinking a glass of water already full in front of us on the table, and as simple as clapping hands to give an applause.

The main thing about change is doability, you need to see yourself doing or at least starting. You need to make a big deal into not a big deal.

Not only, you need to make it enough of a big deal for your brain to find meaning and worth in the pursuit of it and enough of a not big deal for your brain to not get discouraged after one try. You are playing with the boundary between boring and overwhelming, be careful.

Your goal is not to achieve the prize for "person that managed to do 100 pushups in one sitting" 100 days from now, your goal is to become the person that does pushups daily, whether you do one or 100. No big deal.

Your goal is not to lose 100kilos by June, but to become the person that eats healthy every day. Healthy, tasty, easy to cook food. No big deal.

Your goal is not to tidy your room today and declutter your studio tomorrow, but to become the person that does many little acts daily that prevent the room and the studio from becoming unreasonably untidy, overcluttered, and unclean.

Whatever the change you seek to make, whatever the part of your life you intend to organize, your brain can figure out a way to do it no problem, but you do have to help it a little by making sure the whole affair is no big deal.

Kajo