Six months after he lost his job, Marcus had a business. He just did not have a system.
For nineteen years he had been a dispatcher for a trucking company in El Paso. He knew every driver by voice and every route by heart. Then, in 2025, the company installed routing software that did in seconds what he used to do in a shift. He was let go with a handshake and a few weeks of pay. For a month he was angry. Then he did something unusual. He sat down and learned the software that had replaced him.
It turned out that small trucking firms, the ones with five or ten trucks, wanted the same tools but had nobody to set them up. Marcus understood both the trucks and the software. By spring he had four clients. By summer he had nine. And by August his life was in pieces.
His receipts were in a shoebox under the passenger seat of his car. Client passwords were written on sticky notes on the fridge. He missed two calls a day because he was on another call, and one of those missed calls was a client who left for a competitor. He forgot to send an invoice for six weeks. His wife, Denise, found him at midnight at the kitchen table, staring at a laptop with forty-one open tabs. “You are not failing,” she said. “You are just drowning in your own success.”
That is what disorganization often looks like for people who are actually doing well. The expectation is coming. The rain has started. But there is nowhere for the water to go.
The Cord That Holds Everything Together
Organization is very important in setting and meeting any expectation. Living a well-ordered life makes it much easier to complete the tasks that fulfilled expectations require. In the first edition I wrote that organized priority is the birthing place of fulfilled expectations. I would put it even more strongly now. Organization is the cord that holds the other ten elements together.
When you are organized, you express your expectations better, because you know what you want. You see things from every angle, because your information is where you can find it. You stay passionate, because you are not exhausted by chaos. You engage more easily, live in the present, respect time, adapt to change, act with thoroughness and tact, and keep your priorities in order. With these qualities, every expectation becomes possible and nothing can stop your momentum.
It is important to tell organization and prioritization apart. People with highly prioritized schedules are not always the most organized. Marcus knew exactly what mattered most: his clients and his family. His priorities were right. What he lacked was a way of living that let him act on them. Organized people tend to have their priorities in the right order, but having the right priorities does not make you organized.
Organized people are usually sharper in mind, because they regularly unclutter their lives. Clutter is not only on the desk. It is in the inbox, the phone, the calendar and the heart. People tend to be happier when their lives move toward order.
God Is a God of Order
The Bible opens with a picture of disorganization. “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2). What God did next was not only creation. It was organization. He separated light from darkness, the waters above from the waters below, the sea from the dry land. He named things. He set times and seasons. Then he looked at what he had ordered and called it good.
How Marcus Built His Barn
Denise did not tell Marcus to work harder. She told him to build a barn. Over the next month he made six changes, and every one of them came from the tips in the first edition of this book.
- Keep your office and home clean at all times. He cleared the kitchen table and turned the spare room into an office. Work stayed in that room. Dinner stayed at the table.
- Put things back where you got them. Every receipt went into one scanning app the day he received it. Every password went into one password manager. The shoebox went into the recycling.
- Make a to-do list and write things down. Each night he wrote the next day’s five most important tasks on a single card. He stopped trusting his memory with things that paper could hold.
- Delegate authority. He hired a part-time assistant to answer calls and send invoices. It frightened him to pay someone when money was tight. Within two months the invoices she sent on time paid for her many times over.
- Plan ahead. On Sunday evenings he and Denise looked at the coming week together. Appointments, school events, client visits, rest.
- Practice self-discipline. Do not let other people’s lack of planning become your emergency. One client called every week with a crisis at five on a Friday. Marcus set a rule. Non-urgent requests after three on Friday would be handled on Monday. The client grumbled for two weeks and then started planning better.
Organization and the Ditches
In 2 Kings 3, Elisha told the kings to make the valley full of ditches. Notice that he did not say “dig a hole.” Ditches are organized. They run in lines. They are placed where water can flow and be held. A valley of random holes would have turned to mud.
Many people dig for their expectations in a disorganized way. They start ten things and finish none. They prepare for the answer in their hearts but not in their diaries, their accounts or their homes. Then, when the water comes, it runs off, because there was no system to hold it. A raise comes and disappears into debt nobody tracked. A new client comes and leaves because nobody called back. An opportunity comes and passes because the documents were not ready.
What has changed since the first edition
Ten years ago, being organized mostly meant a tidy desk and a paper diary. Today we have more tools for organization than any generation in history. Calendars that remind us, apps that scan receipts, assistants that can draft a letter or summarize a meeting. And yet many of us feel more scattered than ever.
The reason is that tools multiply as fast as tasks. Most of us now have five inboxes: email, text, WhatsApp, social media and the messages inside work apps. We save photos we never look at and files we cannot find. The first edition asked how often you use the apps on your smart phone to help your organization. The question now is whether those apps are helping you or adding to the clutter.
Dig this week
- Make one place for your expectation. Choose your most important expectation and give it a single home: one folder, one notebook or one note on your phone where everything about it lives.
- Write one rule that protects your time. For example: If someone brings me a non-urgent request at the last minute, then I will schedule it for my next planning day instead of dropping what I am doing.
- Make room as if it is coming. Clear one physical space for what you are expecting. A desk for the business, a shelf for the baby’s things, a drawer for the documents your new job will need.
Questions to ponder
- Do you regard yourself as an organized person? Give five reasons for your answer.
- Are you a do-it-yourself person all the time? What is one task you could delegate this month?
- Do the apps on your phone help your organization, or add to the clutter? Which one could you delete?
- What have you done in the last six months to improve your organizational skills?
- What are the last two training activities or courses you completed?
More questions for small groups are in the book.
Spirit of God, you moved over the waters and brought order out of the void. Move over the clutter of my life, and help me build a house that can hold what you are sending.
How ready are you for what you are expecting?
Score yourself on all eleven elements in about two minutes. You will see where to dig first.