You can’t take advice from someone too different from you. You would feel like a dog learning how to be a cat. I might have engaged politely with Julie Morgenstern’s time-management advice – spelled out in various books over the years, including this year’s parenting opus, Time to Parent – but I wouldn’t really have been listening with my whole spirit if the life she described, before her conversion to efficiency, had not been so recognisable. It was like looking in a bloody mirror.
“For the first quarter-century of life, I lived in chaos,” she says. “I lived out of piles. I was always late for everything, a real time optimist. Not even time-conscious. People used to lose things in my house – they’d take off their shoes and not be able to find them when they left.”
This hit a nerve. I just dropped 200 quid on a new thermostat; who loses their thermostat?
Such a life, she says, is never entirely unchosen: when you are always 17 minutes late for everything, constantly procrastinating because you don’t even want to start looking for a vital scrap of paper in case you can’t find it, it feels like a triumph every time you are punctual. “I felt like a conquistador of chaos,” Morgenstern says. “As much as I craved order, I was also really afraid of it. I thought it was going to squelch my creativity, make me into this restricted person.”
Her road-to-Damascus moment came when she had her daughter and spent three hours trying to get out of the house because there were 18 things to remember and they were all in different places. “I said: ‘I have to get organised. I can be the hero of my own story, but I can’t do this to another human being.”
Morgenstern took it very slowly: she spent six months just organising her nappy bag, before she moved on to her kitchen, her house and, ultimately, the fabric of time itself. I, conversely, want to do it all in a week, instituting one of her principles a day and becoming a functioning human who is not imposing her chaos on others by next Thursday.
“The biggest obstacle we have to organising time is our perception of it,” Morgenstern says. “We think of it as intangible, relative, qualitative. But it’s impossible to manage if you think of it like that.” Instead, think of your day like an overstuffed closet. First, you need to tidy it: group like with like; get rid of stuff that is broken; put everything in consistent places; excise things that you don’t have room for. This is quite abstract, so it is best to start with space, somewhere you use a lot. Don’t just organise a room you never go in.
It felt hubristic to start with a room when the management overlord had started with a nappy bag, but I couldn’t start with a bag because I never use the same one twice. Perhaps this is part of the problem – that the house is rammed with interim hessian bags, each with one thing at the bottom (a hairbrush, a portable charger, a passport) that I never need enough to decant and consequently will never find again.
I decided to start with my coat; it would become ground zero of my new life. On Friday, I made an inventory for it: keys, wallet and phone in the left pocket; vape, vape juice and school-authorised blue pen in the right; multi-socket charging cable on the inside, with a lipstick with a tiny mirror. Never anything else, never anything missing.
Reader, this changed my life. The final 25 minutes of any house-leaving event, it turned out, were usually spent with me looking for a vital missing item. Out of nowhere, I had nearly half an hour free every morning. I started saying yes to impromptu morning requests – arguing with Nick Ferrari on LBC, making pancakes – that I previously would have laughed out of town. “Research says that the average person loses an hour a day looking for misplaced items,” Morgenstern says. “I’ve been in this business 30 years and, for a disorganised person, it’s easily three hours.” She has given me the gift of three hours, one-sixth of which I have already noticed.
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