Meaning

I am still struggling to find meaning for this object. Actually, it has no meaning...so now what?

As an entrepreneur who is delving into the business of organizing I often question myself and wonder if what I am trying to do has any validity. I like to be organized and I really enjoy to build furniture that helps me get organized. In fact, building furniture is one of the reasons I got into this business in the first place. I enjoy figuring out creative solutions to my, well, let’s say, “organizing issues.” But I was not sure if better furniture was the answer to getting organized.

What do people need to get more organized? You always hear of ways to help people get organized and of people searching for the end-all solution. Being organized is subjective but if you ask me what being organized is I will tell you it is “a place for everything, everything in its place.”

I came across this post by David Allen that had some interesting thoughts and it helped me better define my vision of organization. I like the way he puts being disorganized: “You are disorganized if you need something somewhere that you don’t have it or have something somewhere that you don’t need it.”

The bigger point in getting organized is to assign meaning. Every object you possess needs to have a clearly defined meaning to you personally. “Is it a tool?”, “Is it one of you childs best pieces of art?”, “Is the object needed to help you stay organized?” We get disorganized when we have conflict or are unable to assign meaning to objects. These objects or things that don’t have a clearly defined meaning hang in “limbo” and get put into “material purgatory”. No clear meaning and we don’t know how an object fits into our lives and where it belongs.

To complicate matters even more, objects have different meanings to different people. In tomorrow’s post we discuss the dilemma of different means and how that complicates how we organize. We will pick up on this idea in Part 2 of this post tomorrow.

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