The second law of thermodynamics rests on a simple but uncomfortable idea: entropy.

Entropy is a measure of disorder in a system. It also describes how much energy in that system is unusable, energy that exists but cannot be converted into work. The higher the entropy, the less useful energy remains. In plain terms: the more chaotic something becomes, the harder it is to make it do anything productive.

This law doesn’t just apply to physics labs or heat engines. It applies everywhere.

Left alone, systems drift toward disorder. Rooms get messy. Organisations become inefficient. Relationships decay. Businesses rot internally. Minds lose clarity. Heat dissipates. Structure collapses. This is not pessimism, it’s physics.

The default state of the world is chaos.

Nothing stays hot forever. Nothing stays sharp without effort. Everything, given enough time and neglect, bends toward coldness, randomness, and decay. Order is never permanent. It must be constantly defended.

This is why work exists at all.

To work against entropy requires energy, intentional, focused, directed energy. That’s what “doing work” really means: pushing back against the natural drift toward disorder. Every meaningful outcome you care about; building a company, learning a skill, raising a family, maintaining integrity, exists only because someone is actively fighting entropy.

And here’s the part most people miss:
You can’t fight disorder while being disordered yourself.

The only time you can do anything meaningful is when you become orderly.

Order is not aesthetic. It’s functional. It’s the difference between energy that leaks everywhere and energy that actually moves something forward. A scattered mind leaks energy. A chaotic schedule leaks energy. A vague goal leaks energy. High entropy, low output.

Planning, then, is not bureaucracy. It is entropy reduction.

When you plan, you are converting raw energy into usable energy. You are imposing structure on uncertainty. You are deciding what matters, what comes first, and what gets ignored. Planning is the act of saying: This is where my limited energy will go.

But planning itself depends on something deeper: clarity of mind.

You cannot organise what you cannot see clearly. A foggy mind produces foggy plans. Mental clutter creates strategic paralysis. This is why rest, solitude, and reflection are not luxuries; they are prerequisites for order. Without clarity, effort becomes motion without progress.

So if you feel stuck, overwhelmed, or unproductive, the problem is often not laziness. It’s entropy. Too much disorder, too little structure.

The solution is not motivation.
The solution is order.

Reduce chaos. Create structure. Decide deliberately. Plan with intent. Conserve your energy for what actually moves the needle.

Because in a universe that naturally decays, the act of building anything worthwhile is an act of resistance, and resistance requires order.