Organized Living Requires Logical Decision Making

The achievement of organized living will require constant decision making in order to set priorities and control the amount of stuff coming into and leaving your space.

Historically, decision making has long been recognized as a challenging activity.

Decision making can be made even more challenging because of:

• emotional interference


• no knowledge or understanding of the decision making process


• lack of experience with the decision making process


• lack of awareness of the questions that need to be asked to promote decision making

Decision making can be thought of as a cognitive process whereby an individual chooses between a number of alternatives so there is a single course of action or outcome.

Logical and informed decision making is essential to gaining control of your life. Emotional decision making seldom leads to control!

There are many ways to make a decision such as tossing a coin, however a coin toss might not be the best method for gaining more control of your life! Control is only achieved if you can reasonably predict the outcome from the decision making process. 50% odds in a coin toss are not good enough odds for me!

Let's examine each of the reasons for difficulty with decision making more clearly to see how they influence organized living.

Some reasons people experience difficulty with making decisions for organized living

Emotional interference

Human beings might be made of flesh and bone but it is our emotions that control us. Emotions can make it difficult for some people to make even the simplest decisions needed for organized living such as:

• "Do I toss or do I keep?"
• "If I keep it where do I put it?"
• "If I put it somewhere how to I get it?" etc etc

If you see yourself in this description you are not alone. In fact most of the decisions made by human beings in everyday life are based on what a person is feeling and not what a person is thinking!

Making decisions from an emotional base will very seldom lead to control. The only way to stop the emotional interference is to be aware of its influence. When you are having difficulty with a decision ask yourself these two questions.

• What am I thinking about this?
• What am I feeling about this?

Reflecting on the answers to these two questions will reveal whether it is the logic or the emotion that is influencing the decision.

Lack of experience with decision making

Like any other skill, without opportunities to practice making decisions your confidence and competence will be reduced!

If you have not had much experience with decision making you may not be very good at it. Often parents will try to protect their children from the risks of poor decision making by making decisions for them. Unfortunately these well intention parents rob their children of the opportunity to learn a very important skill.  You can never learn how to make good decisions if you never make a bad one!

Decision making carries with it a risk that not all the decisions you make will be good, or work out exactly the way you think. But as with any skill practicing decision making can lead to improvement.

Your goal should be to make decisions that produce consistent outcomes. Unless you are reasonably sure of the outcome making decisions can be scary. In a coin toss  you can predict the results with a 50% accuracy. There are only two results possible you will be right 50% of the time!

However, if you are trying to achieve control a coin toss might not be the best way to make a decision. You really want a much higher probability than 50% when you are trying to achieve control through organized living.

No knowledge or understanding of the decision making process

If you want to explore the decision making process in more detail you can increase your decision making confidence here. Since Dr. David McDermott has done a great job of an in depth analysis on his decision making site I will not repeat that here.

Instead I will explore more fully those decisions that are necessary to help you achieve control through organized living and then provide you with some decision trees to assist with some of those decisions.

Lack of awareness of the questions that need to be asked to promote decision making

As stated in Simple Truth #3 you cannot control what you do not understand, so let's explore more fully the decisions that are necessary to achieve control.

There are basically three categories of decisions that influence organized living. I call these the 3P's of decision making for organized living.

Making the necessary decisions for purchase, purging, or placing might seem mysterious if you are not aware of what questions to ask in order to make those decisions. Without a doubt, knowing what questions to ask is one the keys to controlling your life, yourspace, and your stuff.

Each of the 3P's has specific questions that need to be asked in order to make the decisions necessary for organized living.

• Purchase decisions - questions you need to ask yourself before you purchase something


• Purging decisions - questions you need to ask to enable you to sort through your belongings and decide what to keep and what to get rid of.


• Placing decisions - questions you should ask to determine the proper placement of items that you need to keep

Each of the 3P's is explored more fully on it's own page and I have created some decisions trees to help you visualize the decision making process used in organized living.

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