Highly organised Virtual Assistant that I am, the headline of this blog caught my eye: Tip for Getting More Organized: Don’t.

The writer, Michael Schrage, gives a salutary warning that I would endorse wholeheartedly “The personal productivity issue knowledge workers and effective executives need to ponder is whether habits of efficiency that once improved performance have decayed into mindless ruts that delay or undermine desired outcomes.”

Too true. You can end up organising yourself and your business to death, and we’ve all wasted a ton of time tidying and filing, to no purpose whatsoever.

Fair enough. Here’s a mantra to remember: Get On With It.

That’s all very well. But the article goes into chilling territory after that: “[Clients and colleagues] want meeting invitations and schedules with embedded links that instantly trigger — and sync — commitments on their calendars. They don't want to spend more time overseeing scheduling logistics; they expect their technologies to smoothly structure time slots and highlight — and even anticipate — conflicts in advance.”

Do they? Really? I’ve seen this sort of technology. How much do you love interruptions from your software giving you suggestions, advice and attempting to anticipate problems?

No, me neither. This adds stress and complexity and it will waste time.

Good organisation requires human intervention and human intelligence. Technology is great, but when we stop viewing it as a tool and start asking it to run our lives, problems follow.

For example, email has made communication so much faster – but when it’s out of control, it’s a serious hindrance to productivity. An efficient, functional human being at work needs to be able to survey their obligations and their diary and make their own, very human, decisions about the goals they’re chasing and tasks at hand. It’s a necessary process, part of an effective working day. Even if you entrust someone like a Virtual Assistant to manage it for you, organisation is human and technology is a tool.

The underlying assumption here is that we need to be free to work harder, faster and more intensely. I’m against that 100% - we need to slow down, do less and enjoy our work in the moment. In fact, I’m currently reading and loving a book called In Praise of Slow by Carl Honore – come back next week for my review.

Schrage’s concluding sentence is a recipe for disaster: “It's not that we're becoming too dependent on our technologies to organize us; it's that we haven't become dependent enough.”

How much time do you use, need or waste on getting organised? Share your thoughts below.