Once you’ve done the hard work of getting organized, develop habits to maintain your systems.

Sometimes the hardest part of getting organized is staying organized. All September we’ll be tackling tips and strategies for maintaining your organizational systems.

Any system, whether it is the engine in a car or an exercise program, requires maintenance for it to continue to serve you. The same is true for your productivity and organizing systems. By continuing to use, tweak, and improve your systems you will continue to reap the benefits of having them in the first place. If you’ve already spent time and effort to get your systems set up, maintenance will help ensure that they will serve you well into the future.

If you were engaged in a fitness plan, continuing to go to the gym or eating healthy is a commitment; so too is staying organized. That doesn’t necessarily mean you should spend every waking moment maintaining your organizing systems. Rather, you should look for ways to keep your organizational systems and your productivity at top level, and build that into your life in a way that makes sense for you.

You are going to have to build new habits around staying organized, especially if you’ve never done so in the past. The habits can be really simple. It might be an extra fifteen minutes at the end of the day to keep your systems up, especially as you are first learning them. Maybe once a week you spend an hour or two keeping your systems up to date and putting away any additional clutter. Look for the systems and the strategies that you can build into your own life that will help you keep the systems up to date and keep them refreshed, so that you can continue to use them over time.