From Further Secrets of Adulthood:  If you can’t find something, clean up.

This is one of the Secrets of Adulthood that sounds too easy to be true, but over and over, I’ve proven its value to myself.

If I can’t find something, I clean up — and I almost always find what I was looking for, plus some things that I wanted to find, that I didn’t even know I’d lost.

It continues to amaze me, every day, the degree to which (for most people) outer order contributes to inner calm and inner self-command. More than it should!

Losing your keys is no big deal. But it sure feels like a big deal.

In The Happiness Project and Happier at Home, I wrote a lot about clearing clutter. And then in Better Than Before, it came up again! There’s something so enervating about disorder.

How about you? Do you have any easy tricks for staying on top of order and disorder?

UPDATE: I wrote a new book about how to de-clutter and organize to make more room for happiness. Order Outer Order, Inner Calm here.