Organizational Habits Quotes

Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: 'Oh, that's just the way things are done around here.' Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

In the final analysis, change sticks when it becomes the way we do things around here.

It's the story of my life; I spend my life reorganising my closet. My husband thinks I'm crazy, and I change the rules every six months.

So before I start work on a book, I'm like a pregnant mole - I obsessively tidy and order my closets and everything in my study. Because there's such a cascade of images and ideas that I'm grapping with mentally, I couldn't also be in a chaotic setting.

We can be a little less organized in Stockholm; it's not really that serious. And on the White Marble tour in Europe - I don't think there's as much hardcore fans as in the U.S. In the U.S., it's like this whole celebrity culture.

The idea of stuff just hanging in my closet and not being used - there's a little bit of the African in me that gets bothered by that [somewhat].

There are persons who are never easy unless they are putting your books and papers in order--that is, according to their notions of the matter--and hide things lest they should be lost, where neither the owner nor anybody else can find them. This is a sort of magpie faculty. If anything is left where you want it, it is called litter. There is a pedantry in housewifery, as well as in the gravest concerns. Abraham Tucker complained that whenever his maid servant had been in his library, he could not see comfortably to work again for several days.

I don't like my hockey sticks touching other sticks, and I don't like them crossing one another, and I kind of have them hidden in the corner. I put baby powder on the ends. I think it's essentially a matter of taking care of what takes care of you.

I will not serve lunch to anyone in the middle of a workday. I rarely rearrange my furniture or cabinets; once I find a drawer for something, it stays there. I don't garden. And I don't knit.

I'm quite contradictory - a bit OCD, but quite untidy. I have piles of stuff everywhere, but they make sense to me. And I'll find the one thing in the room that's my boyfriend's, and complain about him leaving it out.

I'm a mixture of untidy and anal.

One has to get through a big pile of mail every day. I don't pass my letters on to a secretary; rather, I try to take care of all of them myself.

I try to get as close as I can to cleaning out my inbox every night.

I have a lot of energy, and if I don't keep myself busy, I go crazy. I alphabetise the spice rack, separate the Lego from the Playmobile, colour-code the knicker drawers - it's scary! My house loves it when I'm working so the linen cupboard can get a rest. I just don't sit around.

I'm on the daft scale. I mean, I am a typical Virgo in some ways. I am driven. I like to be prepared. I make lists. But I also like to muck around.

People have different styles: Some are filers and some are pilers. The people who pile things often know exactly where things are, and they're often just as organized as the people who file things.

To shut the door at the end of the workday, which does not spill over into evening. To throw away books after reading them so theydon't have to be dusted. To go through boxes on New Year's Eve and throw out half of what is inside. Sometimes for extravagance to pick a bunch of flowers for the one table. Other women besides me must have this daydream about a carefree life.

He told me this while ripping through his duffel bag, throwing clothes into drawers with reckless abandon. Chip did not believe in having a sock drawer or a T-shirt drawer. He believed that all drawers were created equal and filled each with whatever fit. My mother would have died.

I like a good cliche because it reminds you that much of management practice boils down to things you need to do but often forget or fail to do often enough.

There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.