Procrastination Can Cause a Cluttered Home

Procrastination can have painful consequences for organized living such as clutter. Without constant attention to timely decision making and how to set priorities you could end up with a cluttered home.

You may think that putting things off until tomorrow is a harmless, but it's not! The lasting effects of delaying decision making most often means that later turns into never!

If you have a cluttered home, or if you think of your life as out of control, it could be a matter of neglecting to make timely decisions! You could be procrastinating!

Did you know that delayed decision making is a decision in and of itself?

Whenever you put off making a decision about what to do with something or where to put it you have in fact engaged in the decision making process and made a decision to do nothing! And every time you delay a decision about where to put something or how to handle a piece of personal business you are neglecting your obligations.

You cannot achieve organized living when the necessary decisions are delayed... or if decisions are never made.

If you want to achieve control through organized living.......

One of the habits of highly organized people is that they make timely decisions for those "little" things that come up in everyday life. Highly organized people do not procrastinate.

Highly organized people are aware that not making decisions in a timely way can result in the painful consequences of a cluttered home, and emotional stress.

A Decision Not Made is a Decision Delayed

Organized Living Decisions

where do I file this?
when should this be paid?
do I answer the phone or let it go to voice mail?
do I really need to buy this?
do I really need to keep this?
where do I put this if I decide not to keep it?
where do I start?
how do I start?
what can I do now to handle this?

and on it goes...........................

A habit of procrastination will only make needed decisions pile up. Eventually you will feel completely overwhelmed by the number of small decisions that need to be made and you might even make the decision to make no decision at all.............and so the cycle of procrastination continues!

Every piece of paper cluttering your desk, every piece of clothing on the floor, every piece of unopened mail in your cluttered home represents a delayed decision. You cannot control anything if you do not make timely decisions.

The television show Clean Sweep highlights interventions with participants who have volunteered to undergo an organizational makeover. The professional organizer on the show, Peter Walsh, is very strict about forcing quick decision making.

He will often give a very tight time line for the show's participants to make decisions about what to keep and what to throw away. This provides the pressure necessary to force the decisions that need to be made. Up until this point participants in the show have been masters at delaying decisions so unless some pressure is exerted the usual pattern of procrastination will prevail.

Peter Walsh knows that most decisions necessary to achieve control can be made within a few minutes. Making these decisions at the time they come up is very important in gaining control. It is the accumulation of a lot of little decisions that overwhelms people.

So when it comes to those many decisions that need to be made for organized living how do you overcome procrastination?

Just make a decision!

Not making the decision is never the right thing to do. It only delays the inevitable.

Nobody makes the right decision every time a decision is made. But if a decision is never made you will never know if it is a good decision or not.

For more information on how to overcome procrastination and develop better time management strategies visit www.effective-time-management-strategies.com

For more information on factors affecting decisions needed for an organized life see the section on decision making and using a decision tree.

Go from Procrastination to the article on the benefits of clutter control