I won’t deny that there’s a correlation between being organized and being productive, but there have been countless times where I’ve completely stopped what I was working on to clean the room, clear off the desktop, archive the inbox and then had to refocus on what I was doing prior. The issue though is when housekeeping tasks become interruptions rather than being a part of a daily routine.
For instance, usually I’ll try to take care of most of those little tasks before I begin bigger projects, otherwise it becomes easy to become preoccupied with them later in the day. There’s been days when I tried to think back and account for where the time went, and I realize that the larger blocks of time in which I normally would have utilized for large projects have been broken apart by these small tasks that demand immediate attention. When I take the time to get all of the smaller tasks out of the way at the beginning of the day, I find that I get a lot more accomplished each week.
