Does it Have to be Perfect?

The other day on my Facebook page, I raised a question. If you were going to interview me about my new book, what would you want to know? 

I got some really good questions, but one of my favorites boiled down to this: do you practice what you preach?

Yes, I do. In fact, it's become so ingrained that I can't imagine how I did things any other way. After more than a decade of leading with my styles, I've become a lot more organized, and a lot more sure of what works and what doesn't -- at least for me.

But I'm not perfect and I don't believe that long-term perfection is achievable. The nature of life is such that we must manage a constant flow of "stuff." No matter how good I get at this, there are still days when I look around and wonder if this pile or that stack will ever find a permanent home.

Luckily, being organized isn't about being perfect. No matter your styles, here are a few things to keep in mind.

It's a process. Organizing takes time, and complete and total organization is not a realistic goal. There will always be some spot somewhere that's not quite right, and you may always be questing for the just right container that will take you one step closer to that elusive perfect solution. But imperfect is still workable and perfectly capable of instilling some order.

Celebrate successes. There's a reason S is the first letter of the STYLE acronym. Our successes -- the tools we use, the routines we develop -- are the foundations of our organizational systems, and the first step on the road to Easy upkeep. When we find the things that work for us, we can stick with them and see where else we can duplicate the same solution. That's how good habits are born.

You can't make someone else love your style -- or adopt it. Organizing by STYLE is based on the idea that we each organize best when we work with what comes naturally. While I'd love to make my husband a little less I know I put it somewhere and he'd love to make me a lot less I need to see it, that's not the way it works. The best we can hope for is a better understanding of and a healthy respect for one another's default styles.

And when you think about it, that might be even better than perfect organization.