A system you can keep for life

“I need to get organized so I can do my work,” people say to me often.

• I want to write a novel, but first I need to organize my notes.
• I want to get a new job, but first I need to create a system to manage the process.
• I want to take on more clients, but first I need to create a process to manage them.

It’s really tempting to organize in anticipation of a problem, instead of organizing in reaction to a problem. 

But organizing in anticipation is bad. Usually you end up building giant, complex systems that are cumbersome to use that you abandon after a few weeks. You end up not starting your project at all because the organizing was too demoralizing.

Why? We organize to help avoid the problems that crop up while we’re doing the work. But you can’t predict what problems are going to come up before we start. So organizing before you’ve done the work usually creates systems that don’t reflect our actual needs.

That’s bad.

So how do we fix this? 

Well, instead of building a gigantic system up front what we want to do instead is build up a comprehensive system over time, piece by piece.

It’s a special case of Gall’s Law: 

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

The reality is, many of us (me included) spend time organizing in response to fear. It’s fear that: