Order

Reading the historical wording

Franklin’s original precept

Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography, Part II · Harvard Classics 1909 text

Order covers both places for possessions and times for business. Franklin later calls this the most troublesome part of his scheme. A master printer receiving people at their own hours could not follow a timetable as exactly as a worker whose time was more predictable.

A contemporary adaptation

Give important things a findable place and important work a realistic time, leaving room for circumstances you do not control.

An ordinary choice

You have arranged the tools from shortest to longest, drawn a handsome timetable and reserved the next hour for repairing a chair. A visitor arrives with the missing screw. Your schedule has no category for an interruption that makes the scheduled work possible. The chair waits while the plan tries to decide whether help is admissible.

An invented contemporary illustration.

What Order gives

Order gives attention somewhere to begin. A findable tool and a visible next step reduce avoidable hunting and renegotiation. The benefit depends on the arrangement being understood by the people using it.

What becomes possible

Shared work becomes easier when people can tell where something belongs and what has changed. A simple return point for borrowed items may help more than an elaborate system only its designer can remember.

Order: finding the balance

Someone brings useful information during an hour you reserved for a task.

The best arrangement may include a way to change the arrangement.

If the interruption is genuinely non-urgent, agree on another time. Flexibility does not require making every request your immediate priority.

Who can use this system without asking me?

Order in ordinary life

The shared shelf

Put the common charger where everyone can reach it, rather than in a personally perfect drawer nobody else knows.

The revised afternoon

When a task runs long, tell the person expecting you. Updating the plan preserves more trust than pretending the original timing still holds.

Nearby virtues, different work

Prudence

Prudence chooses arrangements suited to the circumstances. Order makes those arrangements usable.

Reliability

Reliability concerns what others can depend on; a neat schedule is useful only if its commitments are realistic.

Order and its counterfeits

Tidiness as authority

This is a counterfeit of Order and responsibility: demanding that every shared object follow your private system gives convenience to one person at everyone else’s expense. Genuine Order invites a workable shared arrangement.

Busy planning

This is a counterfeit of Order and Industry: redrawing the timetable avoids the chair that still needs repair. A useful plan leads to an actual next step.

How to cultivate Order

• Choose one recurring search, rather than reorganizing your entire life.
• Agree on a findable place or a visible next step with the people affected.
• Leave slack for the interruptions your circumstances actually produce.

Try it today

Make one frequently used thing easier to find. Ask another user whether your chosen place is findable for them too.

Questions worth returning to

• Who can use this system without asking me?
• What happens when the first estimate is wrong?
• Which part of planning has become an avoidance task?

Keep the practice proportionate

Unpredictable work, care responsibilities, inaccessible spaces and limited storage constrain order. An interrupted or untidy day is not proof of lesser worth. Do not arrange another person’s belongings without agreement.

Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause or skip an exercise. Putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage. These quotations retain their historical wording; the notes offer contemporary interpretations.

1. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

   Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography, Harvard Classics 1909 text · Part II, thirteen-name list, item 3 · excerpt

   Places for things and times for business are distinct parts of this demand. Franklin’s later account of interruptions tests how far a private arrangement can govern a social working life.

2. My scheme of Order gave me the most trouble; and I found that, tho’ it might be practicable where a man’s business was such as to leave him the disposition of his time, that of a journeyman printer, for instance, it was not possible to be exactly observed by a master, who must mix with the world, and often receive people of business at their own hours.

   Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography, Harvard Classics 1909 text · Part II, difficulty of Order · excerpt

   A printer whose customers control their arrival times cannot simply obey a private timetable. Franklin’s admission makes interruptions part of the circumstances to design for.

3. It will probably be conceded that it is desirable people should exercise their understandings, and that an intelligent following of custom, or even occasionally an intelligent deviation from custom, is better than a blind and simply mechanical adhesion to it.

   John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Chapter III · excerpt

   Mill distinguishes an intelligent use or departure from custom from mechanical adherence. This later comparison asks whether an inherited arrangement has been understood and chosen, rather than treating routine itself as evidence of good order.

4. Such orderliness of conduct is, therefore, to be observed, that everything in the conduct of our life shall balance and harmonize, as in a finished speech.

   Cicero · De Officiis, 1913 Loeb edition · Walter Miller translation · Book I, §144 · excerpt

   Cicero’s image is harmony among parts, rather than a schedule controlling every interruption. This classical comparison asks whether one arrangement supports the rest of a life.

5. It would scarcely help you, would it, to be told to arrange coins in piles, the best coins at top and bottom and the worst in the middle, unless you were first taught to distinguish real from counterfeit.

   Xenophon · The Memorabilia · H. G. Dakyns translation · Book III, chapter I · excerpt

   Socrates questions a pupil who has learned a formation without learning how to judge its components. Xenophon’s military example tests the value of an arrangement: neat piles are not enough if their contents have not been understood.

6. To each sort of impression we have an automatic, ready-made response.

   William James · Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, 1899 · Talks to Teachers, VIII: The Laws of Habit · excerpt

   James describes routines becoming available without a fresh decision each time. As a later comparison, this helps explain how a dependable place or sequence can save attention; his historical numerical claims about habit are not endorsed as current science.

7. The good husband finds method as efficient in the packing of fire-wood in a shed or in the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns or the files of the Department of State.

   Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, First Series · Prudence · excerpt

   Emerson notices method in storing fuel and a harvest. This later household example values useful arrangement at an ordinary scale; the historically gendered word husband does not restrict who can provide that care.

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