There are millions of articles online about changing habits. As a professional organiser, I work with people to help them gain order in their lives and homes. Clients almost always assume this involves making changes to their habits. But while I don’t rule out habit changing, I prefer to start from a place of working with them.

Becoming organised is much easier and requires making fewer, more gentle adaptations to how you operate than you might imagine. The key is to work with your ingrained habits rather than against them.

I’ll give you an example. Say you have a habit of throwing today’s clothes on the floor before you get into bed. You wake up the following day and, in a rush to get ready for work, you leave yesterday’s clothes on the floor. They build up. You want to be someone who takes your clothes to the laundry cupboard, but you can’t get into the habit.

Tidying your bedroom and putting your clothes in the right places will not stop them from building up on the floor again. If you haven’t managed to walk to the laundry cupboard thus far, it’s unlikely you’re going to start doing it now. You might start doing it for a few days, but within a week or so, your old habits will slip back in, and so will the mess. So what if, rather than trying to change yourself to work with your home, you try changing your home to work with you?

To work with this habit, I would suggest you buy yourself a nice-looking laundry basket to keep in your bedroom, within a throws distance from the bed. Doesn’t that sound like a simple yet much more maintainable solution?

You can extend this way of thinking to other areas of your life. Say you have a habit of scrolling through social media for the hour following your lunch break. You know you should be working, but you’re tired and social media is mindless.

I would, of course, work on suggesting a few lifestyle changes to help increase your energy in the afternoon. But I would also suggest you try to accept this dip in your energy levels as part of your day and encourage you to manage your time around it. Scheduling your important and mentally-taxing work for the morning would mean you can save your email checking, social media scrolling and light admin tasks for the hour that follows lunch where your body and mind is asking for easy.

Working with your current habits doesn’t mean you won’t self improve or grow as a person. By working with what you’ve got, you can start to see improvements to your life while you gradually add healthier, more productive habits should you wish. It’s about being realistic and making things easier for yourself by not demanding sudden overnight changes.

Expecting instant changes is a recipe for self-loathing as we seldom meet our demands and end up berating ourselves for it. Instead, we can choose to be kinder to ourselves and work with and celebrate who we are right now. Try it out yourself. Think about a problem you have and consider the habits that surround it. Rather than pushing against them, how can you work with those habits to help solve your problem?