A Quality of Being in the Right Place

 September 30, 2025

Hello!  How is each and every one? I am being challenged by this post since yesterday.  I find myself going against the effects of a virus that caught up with me.  Tracing how it did, I remember somebody who had it sneezing in my direction.  I was unaware of how strongly she had it.  I did not really pay attention until now that I have caught it.  I have been with it for already 5 days. Fighting against drowsiness.  Yesterday we celebrated the Feast of the Three Archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael.  And we had a birthday celebrant; upon her request, we watched Michael Knowles hosting in Turning Point USA.  Actually some of us have already been watching and listening to different segments in You Tube. Indeed, the examples of these persons are laudable and edifying.  We are full of hope for the future generation of young people who will take on.  They are already doing so.  Let us support them in every way you and I can with our very ordinary life of work, family and social life, prayers and other offerings.

Following is the next chapter on the superhabit of orderliness (From  SUPERHABITS, The Universal System for a Successful Life by Andrew V. Abela, PH.D., Dean, Busch School of Business, The Catholic University of America, 2024)

#7 ORDERLINESS

David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system, a five-step process for getting organized.

Step one in GTD is “capture”:  collect everything that needs your attention.  This took Aliman, Sears, co-founder and chief operating officer of a not-for-profit psychiatric social work agency, Community Empowerment Resources (CER), a whole month, as he worked through five separate, towering stacks of material.  Steps two to five ran more quickly:  clarify what to do with each item; organize each item by entering it into a to-do list, project file, or calendar; reflect on what you have gathered, to make sure that you are working on  the right things; and engage with the tasks you have identified – that is, do the work.

Aliman’s adoption of GTD turned his life around.  His email inbox reaches zero at least once a day.  His staff knows that he’ll always follow up, so they pay attention to what he asks for.  And he sleeps better: no more 2:00 a.m. wake-up calls from his frantic subconscious mind.

Can it really be that easy to get organized?  Sometimes. Much depends on your personality type.  The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) categorizes people along various personality dimensions, and the relevant dimension here is your preference for how you engage with the outside world.  On one end of this dimension are the “judgers,” who like to be in control and make decisions.  They tend to like structure.  On the other end are “perceivers,” who prefer to experience the outside world rather than control it; they would rather have flexibility.

If your preferences lean strongly in the direction of judging, then adopting a personal productivity system like GTD will probably be self-reinforcing.  Chances are it will satisfy your preference for structure.  Your life will improve and you’ll stick with it.  If you have a strong perceiver preference, though, words like “organization” and “structure” might give you a sick feeling in your stomach.  You can still get organized, but your approach might look very different from GTD.  Most people’s preferences lie somewhere in the middle.  No matter what, you should try to find an approach that works for your particular personality type.

Even if you have to invent one of your own.  Example, the Bullet Journal Method, a cross between a planner, diary, notebook, to-do list, and sketchbook,” all combined in a single paper notebook.  This system was designed by an (ADD) attention deficit disorder, Ryder Carroll.  Fast Company magazine featured the system.  Ryder created a website, with videos and tutorials to explain it on several major websites. The Bullet Journal method had become a global movement, with millions of people using it to bring more order into their lives.

Perhaps the Bullet journal method would work for you.  Or maybe you should keep looking for something else.  Either way, there’s strong evidence that getting in the habit of being deliberate about how to sequence your activity will make your life better.

Orderliness is the superhabit for keeping order in our life.  It is the superhabit for getting work done by figuring out in what sequence to do things, and then doing them. A critical aspect of Orderliness is time management, and a recent meta-analysis of 158 separate research studies found that time management improves job performance, academic achievement, and well-being.  Interestingly, the improvement was stronger for well-being than for performance – and even in cases where time management had no effect on performance at all, it still had a positive effect on well-being.  Life is just better when you don’t have to wake up at 2:00 a.m. worrying about whether you’ve forgotten something important.

Perhaps best of all, Orderliness helps answer the question “What if I just don’t feel like doing anything at all?” – although the answer might not be quite the one you would expect.  After all, unless you’re clinically depressed, it’s almost never the case that you really don’t feel like doing anything.  Usually, when you don’t feel like doing anything, that really just means you don’t feel like doing what you should be doing.  Growing in the habit of Orderliness means channeling your “desire to do something” toward the thing you most need to do.

Orderliness in your activities is supported by order in your surroundings.  When your surroundings are organized, your brain doesn’t have to work as hard to find things.  Disorganized environments, on the other hand, cause stress.  More generally, when combined with hard work and self-control, Orderliness is a good predictor of superior academic performance, work performance, physical health, marital stability, and well-being. It is also associated with lower levels of stress and a higher quality of life in both children and adults.  Orderliness can even make you more creative (but we’ll save that for later when we talk about the superhabit of Creativity).

Like Humility, and most other superhabits, Orderliness is the mean between two extremes.  In this case, the extremes are too little and too much structure.  Too little structure is the vice of disorderliness – the bad habit of going through life doing whatever thing you feel like doing next, without some kind of organization or plan.  Back in my college days, when there was something I needed to do, I would usually wait until I felt like doing it.  Guess what?  Most of the time, that feeling never came, which meant either lots of last-minute scrambles before deadlines, or worse, things not getting done at all.  It was stressful.  Too little order in your life causes a lack of both peace and productivity.

But too much structure is also a problem.  How much is too much structure?  That’s a complicated question.  Professor Joseph Reagle, in his book Hacking Life, describes the extremes to which people he calls “life hackers” will go to organize their lives.  His exemplar is Tynan (That’s his full name), who describes himself as “a minimalist nomad” who “has spent his life exploring the outer reaches of human experience and making them accessible to everyone.”  According to Reagle, each morning, as Tynan’s “Smart phone wakes him, his curtain opens automatically, and as he brushes his teeth, his agenda for the day is displayed on the forty-inch LCD embedded within the mirror.  His home secures, vacuums, heats, and cools itself.”

Reagle argues that life hackers like Tynan have a vision of organization that is so tightly confined to a particular set of goals that they ignore other important aspects of life.  I don’t know Tynan, so I cannot say if this is true of him.  I do like that Tynan’s book, Superhuman by Habit, promotes the ideas that having good habits reduces your reliance on willpower for getting things done – he’s exactly right about this.  But the vice of possessiveness, or too much structure, can arise when you are hyper focused on too narrow a set of goals.

Theologian Hans von Balthazar writes disparagingly of “appointment books in which every moment has been sold in advance.” As we’ll see in the next chapter on Eutrapelia (the habit of playing well), there needs to be some room for leisure in our lives, for doing things just for their own sake rather than to achieve yet another goal.  Otherwise, our minds will never get any rest.  When the amount of structure in our lives gets in the way of real leisure, that’s too much.

So how do we become more orderly, without going to extremes? There are over fifty thousand books related to theme management on Amazon.com.  It’s impossible to summarize them all.  The main points are that there are many, many ways to become more orderly; some fit better with certain types of personalities than others; if you’ve tried to get organized before, and failed, it might be because you used a technique that wasn’t a good fit with your personality preferences; and, most importantly, it’s worth trying again.

Here’s what not to do:  multitasking.  Research shows conclusively that multitasking is not productive.  Even when you think you’re doing several things at once, you aren’t – your brain is just switching from one task to another.  Since there are significant costs to switching, it’s more efficient to complete one thing and then move to another.

External interruptions are even worse.  Not only do they tend to slow you down, but they also cause stress.  Try to set aside blocks of time to do a single piece of work, and protect yourself as much as possible from being interrupted.  (Cal Newport’s excellent book Deep Work is all about how to do this).

Next, do the following:  set some goals; make a list of the tasks you need to do to accomplish each goal; and then prioritize each task.  Also, reward yourself consistently after completing a task.  These things have all been demonstrated to improve organizational skills.

If your Myers-Briggs personality type is “judging” (i.e., having a preference for structure and control) consider the “Getting Things Done (GTD)” system if you incline toward big picture thinking, or Bullet Journaling if you’re more detail oriented.  If your type is “perceiving” (a preference for flexibility), consider the following.

Molly Owens is CEO of Truity, a company she founded to offer low-priced but high quality personality assessments.  She offers the following advice for people who want more flexibility:  do make lists of the important things you need to do, but tackle them in any order; do keep focused by blocking your time, but set a timer so that you only work for twenty-five minutes at a stretch – then take a break (this is called the “pomodoro technique” because its inventor used a tomato-shaped timer: pomodoro is Italian for tomato); interruptions can be particularly disruptive for perceivers, so try really hard to avoid them (it’s hard to regain focus after an interruption); and get help with staying accountable by sharing your aspirations with a friend or colleague, to whom you can report back.

If you have trouble staying focused, consider the Optimal Work online app and its “Golden Hour” approach.  The Golden Hour is a period of highly concentrated work. It can be an hour, or more, or less – your choice. The app guides you through gathering everything you’ll need for this period, from deciding what kind of ideals you’d like to practice during this period, to dividing up the work that you want to accomplish during the period into discrete steps, to spending sixty seconds of deep breathing prior to beginning the Golden Hour.  I have found that I am often more productive in a single Golden Hour than in two hours of less structured time.

Finally, if you already have a system that works for you – but you would like to kick it up a couple of notches – consider the following ideas that author Kevin Kruse gathered from interviewing two hundred ultra-productive people.  He interviewed billionaires, Olympians, successful entrepreneurs, and other super-achievers to ask them what their number one productivity tip was. I’ve adopted the following three and can affirm that they are hugely helpful:

1.      1. “Focus only on one thing.  Ultra-productive people know their Most Important Task (MIT) and work on it for one to two hours each morning, without interruptions” (That’s how I wrote this book while also running a business school, maintaining a consulting practice, and trying to be a good husband  to my wife and father to six children.  In fact, I tried to do a Golden Hour of writing, first thing each day, every day). 

2.     2.  “Touch things only once.  How many times have you opened a piece of regular mail – a bill perhaps – and then put it down only to deal with it again later? How often do you read an email, and then close it and leave it in your inbox to deal with later?  Highly successful people try to ‘touch it once’. If it takes less than five or ten minutes – whatever it is – they’ll deal with it right then and there.” (This is very important. Implementing this strategy allows me to get to email zero, if not once a day as Aliman Sears does, at least once a week). 

3.  3. “Don’t use to-do lists…. Instead schedule everything on your calendar”. (Although I do have a to-do list, I use “time blocking” to make sure that each task on my list is scheduled for a specific time and duration on my calendar.  What I love about time blocking is that I don’t have to worry about whether I have enough time to do all the things on my to-do list, because they’re already scheduled in my calendar.  It also reduces my availability for meetings, and it helps me say no to requests when I’m already too busy.  Most to-do list management apps integrate with your calendar, to allow you to do this.  For several years I use GQueues, which integrates well with Google Calendar.  Recently I switched to Sunsama; it goes beyond just time blocking to really help you plan your day).

Orderliness is the superhabit that navigates between the chaos of too little order and the obsessiveness of too much.  It is the habit for dealing with the desire for what to do next.

But what if what you want to do next is just to have fun?  There’s even a superhabit for that too. It makes our leisure time more enjoyable – and usually more frequent.  It can also have life-changing consequences, especially for those of us who have workaholic tendencies.

I find myself navigating within those three ideas suggested above.  I focus on the item that has a specific date and time in my list of to do things.  I have tried and still do touch items only once but again depending on the urgency of the items. I have to do lists which I check as I get to accomplish the items. 

Although I am way passed retirement age I still maintain a personal schedule of work and activities.

As usual I suggest you and I dwell further on the above virtue of orderliness in our moments of conversation with God and ask Him how you and I can better serve Him every day, every moment that He gives us each day.  As we go through our day’s activities, we come across occurrences, events, news, things, that give us a reason to be thankful, to be sorry, to be awed and to ask for the needs of the others around.  These attitudes are actually the four ends (adoration, thanksgiving, reparation and petition) of the Holy Mass or the Holy Eucharist.  We can live the Holy Mass the whole day when we do acts of adoration, thanksgiving, reparation and petition. At the same time we can be united to the intentions of the Holy Father for peace in the hearts and minds of peoples all over the world.  The truth is you and I can do this from wherever you and I are during the day.  The only thing we need is to have the intention to do so and actually doing it.

Come on let us do so, right now and from here onwards.  Let us pray for each other as we do so.

See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care; ‘til He brings us together again.”

Affectionately,                    

Guadalupinky