Fight Clutter the Army Way with an Operation Order

In the Army, we have a format for mission planning called an Operation Order, or op-order for short. When I was learning to be an officer, it was called the Five Paragraph Operation Order, even after the Army added a sixth paragraph for safety.

Since my mission is decluttering, I decided to make a basic op-order for the process. In this post, I’ll describe an op-order and then put a rough one together using my son’s room as an example. Later, I’ll put it to the test and let you know how it goes.

Here are the main parts of an op-order with a short description of each. The full Army version has many sub-bullets for each. See the link above for more details.

1. Situation: A quick description of what the current state is or problem that you’re about to solve. This is to help everyone else understand the big picture. The Army version has a detailed description of the enemy and friendly forces. In our case, the mess is the enemy.

2. Mission: A statement of not just what you are going to accomplish but who will do it, where, when, how, and most importantly, why.

3. Execution: It starts with the overall intent of the mission. This is by far the largest part of the op-order. It contains a step by step plan of how you’re going to accomplish your mission which could be as detailed as you want, including a time line. Tasks should be defined as well as what to do in specific situations.

4. Service & Support: This section describes what resources you have to accomplish the mission (materials, supplies, people, etc.)

5. Command & Signal: Who’s in charge of what. In the Army, a leader had to designate any changes to the command structure as well. Hopefully no one dies during your decluttering mission but maybe you want to make sure that someone carries on if you can’t.

6. Safety: This section was added by the Army mainly to address safety during training, but I can easily apply this to cleaning up around the house. In the case of my son’s room, the floor is currently a minefield of Legos, clothes, board game pieces, and Nerf darts. One of the first things that will be cleaned up are the items that will hurt the most to step on or pose the biggest tripping hazard.

A Note on the Execution Paragraph

In the Army, we used a method called backwards planning to develop a timeline in the execution section. Backwards Planning is just a cool sounding term for something that most of us do every day when we figure out what time we need to get out of bed in the morning so that we get to work on time. I always thought it was ridiculous how much time we spent learning and practicing this process because it seemed so obvious to me. Unfortunately, I’m often surprised to find how many people just do not get the concept.

Backwards planning starts with a specific time that you need to be somewhere or do something. Then you work backwards from there taking into account what activities need to happen before that critical time and how long each of them takes. Some tasks can be done in parallel and some cannot. It’s that simple.

For example, you need to be at work by 8 am. OK. The last thing you do before leaving might be to pack your bag and grab your coat, etc. That takes about 5 minutes. Breakfast takes 15 minutes. 20 minutes for a shower. At least 10 minutes to pack lunch. Don’t forget the fact that you like to snooze the alarm for 10 minutes every morning and that it takes an average of 30 minutes just to get to work. Add all that up and it looks like you need to get up about 6:30 am.

In Closing

I didn’t want to make this too long so I’ll save the actual op-order for later but I think that in general the Army is on to something when it comes to planning out how to accomplish a large task and share that vision with others with the operations order. I’ll let you know how it goes as soon as I can test this out and I’ll post my written op-order. I’m coming up on my one year anniversary since my first blog post so that might be a good topic to celebrate with.

Thanks for reading. If you have time, please share this or another post on your favorite social media outlet and feel free to subscribe to email updates below.

---