From Further Secrets of Adulthood: If you can’t find something, clean up.

This is one of the Secrets of Adulthood that sounds too easy to be true, but over and over, I’ve proven its value to myself.

If I can’t find something, I clean up — and I almost always find what I was looking for, plus some things that I wanted to find, that I didn’t even know I’d lost.

It continues to amaze me, every day, the degree to which (for most people) outer order contributes to inner calm and inner self-command. More than it should!

Losing your keys is no big deal. But it sure feels like a big deal. @gretchenrubin (Click to Tweet)

In The Happiness Project and Happier at Home, I wrote a lot about clearing clutter. And then in Better Than Before, it came up again! There’s something so enervating about disorder.

How about you? Do you have any easy tricks for staying on top of order and disorder?

Gretchen Rubin is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Happiness Project—an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier—and the recently released Happier at Home and Better Than Before. On her popular blog, The Happiness Project, she reports on her daily adventures in the pursuit of happiness. For more doses of happiness and other happenings, follow Gretchen on Facebook and Twitter.

Image courtesy of stokpic.com.