Do You Really Need a Self-Organization Method?

If you want to get organized and be more productive, you might feel overwhelmed by the enormous amount of websites, posts, books, and methods of self-organization. Where should you start? If you are like most people, you will spend some time scrolling through websites and even read a book or two, half-heartedly attempt some improvements, and slip back into your old habits after a while, with a vague sense of frustration.

There is a reason for that. Self-organization is not a science (although maybe it should be). If you want to learn social psychology or advanced calculus, you can pick up any of a dozen established textbooks, and, more or less, they will all teach you the same milestones and concepts. Not so for self-organization or productivity.

You will find charismatic life coaches, detailed methods spread across dozens of books, and dedicated webpages complete with newsletters to subscribe to and (sometimes) merchandising to shop for. David Allen’s Getting Things Done promises stress-free productivity. Tiago Forte’s writings and newsletters will entice you to harness your notes to build a “second brain.” Sönke Ahrens's “smart notes,” which build up from the way the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann organized his personal notes, promise to put order on everything. A simple search on YouTube or Reddit will uncover entire communities dedicated to optimizing note-taking and task-managing using tools like Evernote, Notion, or Obsidian.

If one of those approaches works for you, count yourself lucky and, by all means, stick with it. But don’t be surprised if you spend months trying and have little to show for it at the end.

Self-Organization Is Not a Science

There are serious life coaches who promote specific self-organization methods, including the ones I mentioned above. Many of them have reached best-seller lists. However, there is very little actual scientific research on whether those methods work for most people.

Does that matter? If you read the books, they are full of wonderful examples of people whose lives were changed. Yes, sure. That is called “selection bias.” None of those books has data about how many people try and give up. Judging by how many self-organization books have made it to the U.S. or U.K. best-seller lists over the years, almost everybody in those countries should be happily following a method by now, and there should be little demand for more self-organization advice. This does not seem to be the case.

To be fair, it is not the job of the authors behind those methods to address these questions, and I am not criticizing them at all. In any field, progress is made both by scientists and by practitioners, and best-selling authors of self-organization books are good (sometimes excellent) practitioners who might have identified interesting ideas. It is not their job to test the limits of their methods and find out why they work or don’t work for different groups of people.

Science, and specifically psychological science, works by collecting data and showing that results can be reproduced. This is easier for specific, well-defined tasks that can be repeated and studied in dozens of behavioral labs around the world. It is very difficult for fuzzy, long-term objectives such as “getting organized” or “being more productive” and complicated methods encompassing dozens of concepts and techniques, especially since they all seem to come out of the personal and particular experiences of specific authors.

This does not mean that psychologists know nothing about what works and does not work in self-organization. There is a lot of research in social and cognitive psychology on how specific strategies affect your productivity and satisfaction. For example, implementation intentions (see this post) can help you make specific changes in your life or even formulate successful resolutions (not only for the new year). Research in task switching, cognitive control, and the psychology of attention has taught us many things, including the fact that multitasking is a myth (for an accessible account, see Gloria Mark’s book in the references below).

Putting Self-Organization in Perspective

If you struggle with self-organization, you should keep in mind that there are no miracle solutions. When you see a new book on self-organization in the non-fiction best-seller list, you should treat it as a collection of examples that have worked well for some people, not as a psychologically proven “one size fits all” treatment. If you have the time and interest, read the books by Allen, Forte, and Ahrens (see references below) and fish for whatever snippets might help you. You might even be one of the lucky people for whom a particular method fits perfectly (but don’t count on it).

Productivity Essential Reads

The Dangers of Confusing Activity With Productivity

12 Simple Ways to Increase Your Productivity

There are even some dangers to getting caught in the self-organization literature. First, puzzling out organizational methods takes time and effort. That might backfire in two different ways. It might just become another chore, adding to your workload and making you feel even more overwhelmed than before. Worse, you might become overenthusiastic, trying to optimize yourself by following a detailed self-organization method or learning how to use a specific note-taking software package with a dozen plugins before realizing that it has all just become another form of procrastination, keeping you from actually doing the work.

Second, suppose you seriously try a method and eventually give up (as, in my experience, many people do). In that case, this might increase your frustration and reinforce negative beliefs about yourself, making the original problem worse. If you have experienced this, rest assured you are (most likely) not the problem.

What to Do?

When you are drowning at sea, you do not need an instruction manual on how to build and operate a boat. You need a life jacket. If you are struggling with your tasks or drowning in a sea of notes and reminders, blindly following an entirely new method might not be the right idea. But not doing anything is not a good idea either. If the problem is really serious, you should reach out for professional help.

You can also take a few small steps to buy yourself some breathing space, or make a simple change to how you view your task list. That might be especially important if you are responsible for organizing your own work. The most important change, however, might be to adjust your attitude. Self-organization is a struggle for a lot of people. Acknowledge the problem, and always be on the lookout for small improvements. But go easy on yourself and keep a healthy dose of skepticism about life-changing methods.