What do the flex office and the home have in common? Everywhere, we now have to tidy up. All the time. It has become an obligatory passage, even a religion, born surely of the price of real estate and a general tendency to frame, regulate, "process-ize": today, each space is shared, whether it is an office, a living room or a bedroom. Marie Kondo triumphs, children's rooms are tidy, desks cleaned, colleagues respected. Making room for themselves has become THE rule of etiquette.
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Right angles
Packed, business, every night in a locker. Arranged, legos, dolls and various junior encyclopedias, on the shelves and in the baskets. Set appointments, forceps or shoehorns, big shots of Outlook invitations, in our overwhelmed calendars. Every day, you have to offer "slots" – for lunch/breakfast/staging a meeting or even having a drink. Invitation not sent? Drink cancelled! We do not laugh with the Tetris of the agenda, this daily equation at right angles, gifted level. To avoid dizziness, or holes in the racket – stop at the round! – we multiply the squared post-its. Stick randomly days on the corner of a computer, the cover of a notebook, the cover of a file. Some days, we don't find ourselves there anymore. Where were they stuffed? In which bag did we gather everything so quickly, that we lost them? This is the Kafkaesque question that is best avoided if one wants to maintain any semblance of dignity.
Abiding by the Joos Mind/Getty Images rules
"No, Alzheimer's is not there yet, it's normal what you are experiencing, your attention does not have time to fix," reassures me my GP in front of my fear of having become Julian Moore in "Still Alice" (where the heroine of the film is diagnosed with an early neurodegenerative disease, and who ends up losing the post-it notes on which she had recorded her thoughts). This is the other problem: the one who tidies is also, usually, disturbed. Not yet of the mind, according to the medical opinion (although it will not be long). But being interrupted, constantly, by an urgent email, a request, an irruption of immediacy, clearly creates, after a while, a little frying in the post.
Stay aligned
"Be careful," says a coach, "the one who refuses to tidy up may be signaling a need to no longer be disturbed" – you follow me? Personally, I confirm! For my constantly diverted thinking must redouble its efforts to order everything. Tidying up, etymologically, means to line up - trees, vegetables, armed soldiers... From this point of view, I recognize myself enough: when I am not interrupted, I am usually someone quite aligned. Attention bis! Specify the dictionary this time. Ranger can also come from the English word "ranger", which means the guard, the soldier, the one who is entrusted with difficult missions, or who always responds to the appointment.
Read alsoHow to apply for the Business with Attitude award?
The sentinel, would almost advance the Robert. It's a bit like what has become of strong, powerful, funny (because they remain so!), gifted, mega organized women, that I have the chance to know or observe around me. Guardians of the Temple – in business, or in the family. Heroines, real ones, who arrange situations, settings, take care to maintain a form of general harmony and humanity, despite all that they can go through themselves, including, sometimes, illness. At the risk of being too accommodating? This is the question I ask myself, sometimes, and the limit, perhaps, that we must all keep in mind so as not to forget ourselves.
Out of the frame
These sentinel women that I observe around me, confronted with a way of life that would like to robotize them, keep in them something that resists the algorithm, and pays tribute to their non-artificial intelligence. Something of the order of resourcefulness, of an irreverence that hides its name, but says strength in the fight and also, curiosity, humor, a window always open to the world. Their gaze makes the difference, it explores and feeds on complex thoughts, innovative visions, never really satisfied with others, and puts on life the filter of creativity. What allows us to confront, accept or forget the dictatorship of the box is never to fully enter it.
Thought, a non-geometric form. simplehappyart / Getty Images/iStockphoto
My diagnosis:
If you too feel in a box you can:
– Put more aesthetics in your lives. Colors. Do you have to put your things away every day? You had to repack mood boards and images that helped you create? Carefully choose the supplies that come with you each day. Water bottles, cups, notebooks, pouches and shopping bags for your computer... Recreate a personal universe that, even if mobile, looks like you.
–Read. Again and again. Learn, rub your thoughts with those that attract or exceed you. Always seek otherness and learning. "Reading an hour a day will represent 4% of your time, but this 4% will take you to the top of your field of activity in less than 10 years," says Patrick Bet David, famous American entrepreneur and mentor. Find the time. »
– Create areas of disorder: forbid yourself to tidy up on weekends. Suggest to your colleagues that everyone keep their office for a whole week, before shooting. Everyone should breathe.
– Think round. Explore the Wheel of the life domains of Hudson, an American psychologist who advises to evaluate in real time and from 1 to 10, each area of his life (love, career, friends, money, well-being ...) divided in a circle. How to make sure that the wheel is as homogeneous as possible if you have to move with it? This exercise, very simple, makes it possible to readjust certain imbalances of its existence and to make it more homogeneous, harmonious, less rectilinear and binary. Getting out of the organization to rethink energy and distribution: it feels good.
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To meditate before the next letter:
"Two dangers continue to threaten the world: order and disorder." Paul Valéry
« Disorder is simply the order we do not seek. » Henri Bergson
"To think is to disturb one's thoughts", Edmond Rostand.
