I don’t often come across a book that I immediately think, “My clients would find this so helpful!” But I did with this one, and I have to share it with you all.
Easy to read and practical, the book is called Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchin Rubin. As the title suggests, it’s about how to successfully create positive habits and reduce negative ones, because “how we schedule our days is how we spend our lives.”
In a nutshell, our daily habits are who we are; they “free us from decision making and from using self-control,” which can be helpful or harmful depending upon the habit. Rubin’s book takes this a step further by exploring the individual differences that contribute to our habits, and how we can use this knowledge to make and break habits by choosing strategies that work for our specific personality types.
With her signature mix of research, easy humor, and personal experimentation, Rubin puts principles in action by providing 21 strategies for helping us establish the habits we want to create in our lives. There’s even a helpful quiz to assist us in understanding ourselves and our habits better. Once we’ve uncovered our basic temperament and tendencies, we can utilize the specific habit-forming strategies that will work best for our particular temperaments as laid out in her book.
I’m sure you can see where this is heading in relation to our organizational habits. Successfully establishing uncluttering habits will help simplify our lives, making them less stressful and more pleasurable, and who doesn’t long for that? We can learn to form such habits as:
- putting our keys in the same place every day so we save time later not having to go in search of them.
- addressing our daily paperwork (mail, bills, children’s school papers, etc.) consistently so we don’t have piles forming everywhere.
- establishing more efficient morning and/or daily routines so we make the most effective and economic use of our time.
- daily decluttering our home so it’s always (or at least usually!) tidy for unexpected visitors.
Using Rubin’s methods, perhaps we can discover how to establish uncluttering and organizational habits that will help us “create outer order that will contribute to inner calm.” And who couldn’t use more of that?
‘Want to make changes in your life through the adoption of positive habits? You might want to give Grethen Rubin’s book, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, a try. And if you do, I’d love to know what you thought of it.
Want to talk more about how I can help with your organizational needs? Contact me to set up a FREE initial 30-minute phone consultation.
