How much do you value shit? Shit, like poop. Probably not very high, unless you’re a gardener, then you might greatly value it because it’s a phenomenal fertilizer.

Value is relative, which makes it somewhat elusive.

Another example, high-end wine is marked up just because marketers know something priced higher has a higher perceived value. Diamonds were/are valued because the Debeers company mined and controlled all of them creating a false scarcity, and now you just want them because of the marketing that has turned into a cultural norm. You think a diamond is a highly valued luxury item, so it becomes one.

We all love getting packages in 2-3 days with free shipping, thus why Amazon is valued at billions of dollars.

Or

On the other hand, someone may have been given a plastic hulk hogan belt buckle, and simply because it was given to them by a close friend who passed away, it becomes their most valuable possession.

Despite the relative nature of value, certain things and concepts have an inherent value that holds true in a majority of circumstances. For example health, something often truly valued only in moments of sickness.

What else fits into this category of value? Being organized.

Being organized has a compounding positive effect in several categories, those being; accessing things easily, saving time, a more beautiful aesthetic, allowing others to find what they are looking for, and lastly providing a feeling of relief. Let’s dive deeper into each of these categories to further spotlight why being organized has an initial payoff, and then continues to pay off over the long term.

Ease of access

2-5 times in your life.

That’s probably the amount of times you’ve actually experienced true ease of access in all its glory. It’s pretty challenging to get 100% right, however once you do, it’s orgasmic. You think I’m kidding, but the feeling is remarkably euphoric. Whenever you go to access an item from an organized space, and it’s easy to find and acquire, you repeatedly get to experience that euphoria over and over.

Having to dig and search and rummage is tiresome, frustrating, and time consuming because most of the time you desperately need what you’re looking for, but since you’re not exactly sure where it is, and there’s stuff piled upon stuff, you have to go through everything until you finally find that glorious item tucked away deep in the bottom right corner under all the tangled wires you never use.

Imagine how remarkable it would be if you could just go to your closet and within 2-5 seconds find exactly what you were looking for.

Sadly however, we can’t help you save time making a decision on what to wear, that’s on you to deliberate for thirty minutes.

There’s no debate on the fact that having easy access to everything in every room, in every cupboard, in every closet, on every shelf is of tremendous value.

Saving Time

We all have things to do, places to go, and people to see. So wasting extra time searching for something, completing a task, or simply just accessing something can really cost you.

What we all probably value most is our time, as you hear ‘time’ and ‘time’ again in motivational videos and $5000 seminars we can’t get it back and we must do our best to use the limited time we have on this earth wisely. But no pressure . However, I would agree that time is more valuable than money even though most of the time we’re using money as a judge of value, even though it’s a poor judge.

However, for the sake of this augment I’m going to do that as well.

So let’s say you’re a doctor or a lawyer and your time per hour is worth $150. Now, on a Saturday evening you puncture your tire. It’s not fixable so you have to get a new set. But tires are expensive and you think you’re going to save some money by installing the tires yourself, but are you really?

Let’s look at a breakdown:

Do it yourself

Tires: $300

Time to get tires: 2 hrs – $300

Time to install tires – 4 hrs – $600

Misc expenses – $100

Total – $1300

Pay someone to do it

Tires: $300

Labor: $300

Pick up and drop off: 2hrs – $300

Total: $900

You end up saving $400 as well as a bunch of frustration if you just pay for someone else to do the word, who will also probably do it better than you will. But we like the feeling of having money in the bank, and listen, I get it, but it’s often better to spend that money when it saves you time in the long run.

Because even though that time may not have been spent on work, it could have been spent on something more valuable, like being with your kids, reading a book, or kissing your husband/wife.

Organizing can also save you some money and time, although on a smaller scale. Let’s say it takes you 3min a day to find something you look for everyday in a drawer, if you look every day that’s 1008min year which equates to $7.50 a day or $2520 a year in money lost searching. Let’s say you get organized and cut the search down to 30sec a day which then cuts the minutes down to 168 per year and only costs you $1.25 per day and $420 per year.

Just by organizing a drawer you potentially save $2100 per year.

Helping guests without saying a word

Well maybe one or two words.

But after that the guests will be able to find exactly what they asked you for.

Isn’t it the worst when you have someone over and they ask where you put the grilling spatula and tongs. You then tell them it’s in the second drawer to the right of the sink. They go to look, open it up and what do they see? A mess of utensils thrown in there. They search and search but can’t find it. So what do they do? They come back to you and ask where it is again, this gets frustrating because you’re busy making the pie and margaritas for the party. So now you have to stop what you’re doing and look for the spatula which was actually in the drawer on the left of the sink because everything in your kitchen doesn’t have a respectful place to live.

When everything goes where it’s supposed to, and especially if you label where each item goes, you can save yourself frustration. As well as time when you have guests over because you know exactly where everything is, but you have also made it easy for guests to find what they are looking for when they need to search themselves.

The Atheistic

An eye feast.

That’s what your eyes get to engorge themselves with when they take in an organized space.

For them It’s the equivalent of a grand ball room filled with decorations, beautiful people, and a table that stretches the entire room filled with the most delicious foods.

Don’t you want to give your eyes a glorious feast every time they open a drawer and see how clean and orderly it is, or spread open the doors of a closet and get to consume everything neatly folded and hung where it’s supposed to be?

There’s not much that can match the value of giving your eyes the joy of a glorious feast everyday. When things look appealing and clean, our eyes feel good, and our eyes happen to be connected to our brain, which then signals us to feel good.

You want to feel good don’t you?

Feeling of relief

We all just want to feel.

It’s why we watch movies, it’s why we have friends, it’s essential to living.

Obviously we tend to seek positive feelings more than the negative ones.

So when it comes down to it, all the other aspects that make organizing valuable and great boil down to the feeling it gives you.

Basically organizing is taking shit, and turning it into a grape tree that gives you yummy grapes that you can also form into wine and get drunk and happy off of.

Just watch, when you get your space organized you’ll take a deep breath in and let out a deep sigh of relief.