…not necessarily the orderliness of your systems.
Order around us is generally helpful and a good thing—of course it is, but at the end of the day…
What really counts is our own internal order—how organised we are in what we do and how we think and who we are.
Sometimes we need to allow a little disorder outside to have order inside.
For example, it may not be vital to have one neat and tidy task management system. What is vital is effective and, ideally, efficient completion of tasks in a sensible enough order. That might mean running several management systems in parallel and accepting the messiness that entails.
In other words…
Make sure you’re optimising the right thing.
Culturally, the assumption is orderly externals lead to orderly internals. Sometimes it’s the other way round. We need to allow for the possibility—in organisations as well as in ourselves.
And if you’re more orderly inside, you’ll create more order outside.