Have you ever wondered why things will not stay organized? It takes a special kind of person to keep things running along smoothly in the same fashion day after day, week after week. That person is a warrior in the battle against entropy. Learn what entropy is and why you must do battle with it on a daily basis in everything you do.

Entropy is the tendency for all order to deconstruct toward chaos. No matter what you might organize, left unattended, it will quickly begin to break down and become disorganized.

Examples:

• You clean your desk clear of all papers. Two weeks later, you desk is again covered in papers.
• You empty your inbox and neatly file away all messages. For a few days, you use a system of attacking your email that keeps your inbox empty. a few days after that, your inbox is again a nightmare.
• You establish a process for people to follow to accomplish a task or manage projects. They follow it for a while, and then they start cutting corners on essential elements and problems that were solved begin to reappear.
• You clean your house. Three days later it is a wreck and company is coming over to visit, so you angrily clean it again.

Without active intervention to prevent entropy, any solution to any problem will become messed up all over again.

Some of us are more vulnerable to the force of entropy than others. There are those among us who are able to establish systems and routine tasks that hold everything in place, and they are able to defeat entropy. Pull them out of their roles of doing so and put them in a different job, and not only will you disturb them (they do not like change), you will also see that the person who follows them will have a devil of a time keeping things together, and chaos will begin to wiggle its way through the door.

Covey insists that we “begin with the end in mind.” Drucker implores us to focus on results to be effective. Buckingham asks that we define outcomes for work to be accomplished.

In all of this planning, setting of objectives, and defining what our hoped-for results are from the next meeting, project, or business effort, consideration of entropy will aid in strategic vision. Once you build your shining city on the hill, who will clean the streets?  Who is going to vacuum those buildings? Who will manage it long-term and keep it running?

All too often, managers establish new processes and procedures which require their attention to keep going. Typically, the manager who is good at thinking up new, creative, innovations to solve business problems is not an effective warrior against entropy. In fact, they may be more of a catalyst for introducing chaos and actually inject entropy into everything they touch. That’s OK, because change is inevitable, and without change, the world passes us by and what used to work stops working.

This problem happens on the desk of any individual in a business. Anything that is cleaned, arranged, scheduled, orderly, and systemized will fall apart without regular attention. Therefore, establishing a routine of giving regular attention to the systems in place is essential.

“Inspect what you expect.” If you regularly check to see that status is updated, and then you stop checking, status will stop being updated. If you regularly review call center call times, and you stop reviewing them, call times will move in the wrong direction.

It is, therefore, the sworn duty of everyone in a business to consider the long-term need to keep things together by creating reports that tell how things are going, and then measuring each report against goals to see that things are still chugging along like a well-oiled machine.

Entropy is the alternative.