Excellent answer David.

I think that people consider organising and time management as a waste of time, and perhaps more specifically a waste of life.

Yet by having a more organised, structured (but not too structured!) life, one could have more time to experience 'a life'.

Good question. I suppose our natural survival instincts lead us to a behaviour of responding to the most visible current need. The same way a dog's behaviour is governed by whichever stimulus is greatest at the time:

being attacked - fight or run,
hungry - eat,
tired - sleep,
full bladder - empty it

and so on.

Time management techniques help us to see past the instinctive nature to behave in this way, but of course, instinct being instinct, it's only natural to fall back into the same old patterns. That's why it's so important to regularly focus on medium and long-term goals to avoid this.

I was watching my 19-month ols sort block shapes into a sorter toy just the other day. Two months ago she didn't get it. Now she gets it. Triangles, squares, circles every time. From this I deduce that organizing is a learned behaviour. Learning requires effort but many people don't take the time to really understand why they want to expend that effort so they give up before realizing the benefits. Others develop more complexity than they really need and drown in it. I personally have found organizing my stuff in the GTD manner has been extremely beneficial. Am I a black-belt? No, far from it at this point, but I'm streets ahead of where I was before adopting GTD as an organizing approach. It still requires effort though.

It is human nature to maintain the status quo. Change is hard. As David pointed out, you have to be sufficiently dissatisfied with your current level of organization (and its effects) to make a change. In the "change industry" we refer to the "burning platform-" you have to be aware that your oil platform is on fire before you are motivated to do anything about it.
Dr. Deming repeatedly said, "how can they know what they don't know?" when asked why people resist change. You have to be aware of the possibility that there is something better as a first step to change.

This seems like it relates to how someone values "later" vs "now". Getting organized is something that will pay off "later". All other things being equal, people always prefer "now" to "later" (AKA, would you rather have $100 now or in a year?) The question is how much. If you'd rather have $100 now than $200 in a year, I'd say you're not very long term. If you'd rather have $100.01 in a year that $100 now, I'd say you're a little over the top.

Getting organized has some real similarities. People must absolutely learn to value now less than they naturally do (think about how impatient children can be). The ability to give up current pleasure (doing something besides organizing) for future pleasure (not being a big stress ball when the fecal matter hits the arial circulation device) takes learning and discipline not everyone has. You essentially are learning to invest in the future, just like learning not to max out your credit cards and instead open a savings account.

I'm sure that the certainty and degree of belief in the benefits of being organized play into it too. If you're just told that getting organized will make your life better, it's just not as real to you than if you've actually done it before and really felt it. You have to "go on faith". Essentially, you discount the future value because of uncertainty, a very rational thing to do.

That probably relates to David's response. For something you really value and do often, the benefit of being organized is probably quite easy to see, both because the value is higher and you can envision what being organized really feels like (or at least know what being disorganized feels like!).

Anyway, in case you can't tell, I'm a little obsessed with economics. It's actually a tremendously useful way of understanding why people do things. Not just about money at all!

Is there some sort of double post curse? I swwear I checked and double checked. Sorry...

I think it can be explained in part in GTD terms. Getting organized is a project, a pretty big one. Unless you have a way to approach it, it just seems overwhelming and you end up avoiding it. And if you're disorganized, you may be feeling pretty overwhelmed anyway. If you can break it down into next actions, it becomes manageable.

I was wondering if, in my case, it has something to do with being attached to incompletes. I don't know a better way to say that. In some sense, GTD provides a structure and practices for being complete with everything at every moment and having ones commitments in existence in a powerful way. I keep sliming out of that, and I think, for me, it is pure and simple self-indulgence and some sort of avoiding my fear of being consumed by obligation to others.

That's everything that came up. And I like your appraisal best of all, along with the observation about what we don't know we don't know.

All - thanks for the food-for-thoughtful responses. In some way, I think it comes down to freedom. Is what you're doing getting you free, or constricting you? Is what you're doing creating expansion and opportunity, or limitation? And a lot of that has to do with the horizon you're working from. - David

I don't think that is hard to be organized, as David has pointed out. I think Richard Davis is correct - being organized is a learned behaviour. And so is being disorganized. So when your life gets busy enough that you decide you need to "get organized," you need to break a LOT of habits, and you desire to break them quickly. Speaking as a lifelong nail-biter, some habits die hard. Speaking also as a former smoker, given enough visualization and time, most habits can be mastered.
I have watched a few of those shows on TV where a professional organizer comes to a person's horrible cluttered and disorganized home and helps them get it sorted. Usually, this involves some sort of emotional breakdown, as one of the reasons that the "stuff" has been undealt with is that the person didn't want to deal with their feelings attached to the stuff. Again, as David says in his book, when you don't deal with your stuff, and it becomesw "overdue," everytime you loook at it, you feel guilty, and who wants to feel like that?
The upshot is, I think organizing is sometimes hard because it recalls all the bad feelings we have associated with our disorganized stuff.

Fascinating discussion. It reminds me of the "nature versus nurture" argument. What is human nature (avoidance of pain?) or learned behavior (organization, positive self talk)? How do we manage the interaction of these to be better than we are, or as good as we want to be? Our beliefs, circumstances and experiences influence how we view ourselves and the extent to which we choose to take control of our lives. These all establish the context for our lives. Thus we can all choose our paths within context of our lives, but most do not see beyond artificial limitations.

Why is the idea of being “totally organised” so powerfully attractive?

Dave