In my opinion, organization falls into 2 distinct areas:

• Sorting
• Planning

Let’s look at each of those in turn.

Sorting

One of the key tricks related to organizing is to have a place for everything.  I’ve seen countless people who keep all their paperwork in a shoe-box, then wonder why their finances are completely disorganized.  Heck, when I first met my wife, she was horrified to see that all my paperwork was dumped just as I’d received it in a removal box, and the box was more than half full!

The only way you can keep on top of the reams of paper that seem to bombard us every day is to have a clear and simple filing system.  This can either be hanging files in a filing cabinet, 2, 3, or 4-hole files on a shelf, or even a compact home file.  Make sure that every category (such as electricity, car insurance, mortgage, employment, taxes, etc.) has its own section so that you always know not only where to find something, but more importantly, where to file it.  If you go back to Monday’s post, you’ll see that I outlined a strategy for dealing with clutter on your desk.  This same strategy can now be applied to any paperwork that comes in, with the ultimate goal that you handle the piece of paper only once.

Planning

Planning is simply a more understandable word for ‘Time Management’.  However, I always find the notion of managing time quite funny as no matter what we try to do and how hard we try to do it, we all end up with the same 24 hours every day!  So, rather than trying to manage time itself, we have to learn how to manage ourselves in such a way that we use the time we have available most effectively.

Also note that I’m not just talking about being efficient.  Efficiency is about doing things right – effectiveness is about doing the right things right!

I find that I work best by making an overall plan each month regarding what I need to do during the following month.  This gives me an overview that I can work to each week.  Every weekend, I then sit down and plan out the coming week.  Finally, I take a short time every evening to schedule out the next day.  Doing this is the only way that I’ve found to hold down a full-time job, write 2 blogs, market on the Internet in several niches and be a loving husband – as well as fitting in time every day for God.

Take some time to think about how you can apply these ideas to your own life and please share your thoughts, tips, experiences and ideas in the comments below.

Best wishes,

As someone who used to thrive in the chaos of a messy desk, I could never understand what all the fuss was about.  When anybody tried to get me to change, I used to remind them of Einstein’s comment on tidy desks:

If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?
Albert Einstein

More recently though, I’ve come to appreciate the benefits of working in a clean and tidy environment.

Last year, I was off work for some time suffering from stress and this led me to look much more closely at everything that I was doing to identify every last pressure that I was experiencing and find ways to remove them.  I noticed that whenever I sat at my desk in my home office, I started to feel stressed.  I remembered reading at some point that clutter on the desk serves as a constant distraction to your subconscious.  It’s always calling out “I need attention”, or “remember you have to work on me”, or even just “you forgot to file me – you’ll never find me when you need me!”  With all this going on in our minds, whether we realize it or not we end up more stressed – and it’s no wonder really!

Once I had this eureka moment, I set about tidying and sorting and filing and organizing and even cleaning my workspace then sat down again to see what difference it had made.  It was amazing.  It was like night and day.  I could now relax at my desk and focus purely on the task at hand!

Since then, I’ve been very careful about keeping my office tidy and organized and it’s had a real calming influence on me.  I’ve become much more productive with my blogs which could never have happened in my former chaos.

If you’re facing a similar challenge, here are a few ideas to get you started:

1. Start by removing everything from your desk

If you have on your desk only the things that belong there, you automatically feel calmer and more able to focus with the chaos that you’ve probably just dumped on the floor (tip – don’t cut off your exit route in case you need to get away from the debris for a while!)

2. Make a decision about what to do with every item that you removed in step 1

It’s no good leaving everything on the floor and just having a tidy desk – you need to work your way through the rubble so that your whole office ends up organized.  There are only four options that you have for each thing that you pick up:

• Do it
• Delegate it
• Diary it
• Dump it

What do these mean?  Well, let’s take a look:

Do It

This means that we deal with it right now.  Maybe it’s a form that needs filling out and mailing.  Maybe it’s a reminder to send a quick email.  As a general guideline, we’re talking here about things that you can do in a minute or two then be done with it.  Once you’ve done it, you can either file the associated paperwork or bin it.

The other key part of doing it is to file everything that needs filing as soon as you pick it up.  Quite simply, if you need to keep it but don’t need to do anything with it for the foreseeable future then get it filed and move on.

Delegate It

Some of the things that you pick up could maybe be handled more effectively by someone else.  I found that when sorting my office, much of what I was hoarding on my desk were actually things that my wife would normally deal with!  If you can delegate it, do that immediately.

Diary It

Most often you’ll pick things up that need more than a few minutes work but do need you to spend some time on.  Create a file for these items and make a note in your daily planning system to follow up with it at a specific time (you DO have a planning system don’t you???)  One idea that I like to work with is a 1-31 file.  Let’s say I have something today that I don’t have time to work on right now but I know that I’ll have time on Friday.  I simply put this in the pocket labeled 15 (since Friday’s the 15th)  and schedule time in my diary to work on it.  Each day, I then take out the folder for today and everything that I need for today’s tasks is at hand!  At the end of today, my file goes to the back so that tomorrow’s folder is at the front.

Dump It

This is the easiest of the four to understand.  If you don’t need it, throw it away.  At first you may find this challenging, but trust me, once you get going you’ll find it really therapeutic!

It’s important to be ruthless here and throw away everything that you don’t really need to keep.  It’s better to throw away that magazine you’ve been keeping “just in case you need to refer to the article one day” and to regain your sanity than to have it (and its friends) preying on your psyche!  If you really do need to refer to something, the chances are very high that you can find it on Google!

3. Keep it up!

It’s easy to drop back into your old habits after doing an exercise like this, but that’s the worst thing that you can do!  Think of all the effort that you’ve just put in to get a clear desk?!?  Now that it’s free and you have the freedom to focus, get into the habit of handling everything that comes across your desk just once, using the 4 decisions above.

If you find that you need help clearing your desk, I can recommend an excellent book called “Clear Your Desk” by Declan Treacy.  This book is a little old, but the concepts in it are timeless.  This book was the first place where I ever came across the 4 decisions and was very helpful when I made the decision to get organized last year.  Like I said, if you’re struggling, go and read it.

I’d love to hear from you.  Do you work best with a tidy desk or are you with Einstein on this one?  Do you have any other tips that we could all learn from?  Please leave a comment and let me know.

Good luck!

So what does “success comes in cans” really mean?  Does it mean that you can buy a can at the grocery store and when you open it you’re successful?  No – not really.  However, I love the image that this creates – the thought of a stack of cans next to the baked beans, all labelled “Success”!  Keep that image in your mind whilst reading the rest of this article and it will help you to keep hold of the necessary frame of mind that we’re looking to encourage.

So if we’re not talking about actual tin cans, what does the expression mean?  Well, it comes down to attitude.  As children, many of us had loving, protective parents who told us “don’t do that, it’s dangerous” or “you can’t climb up there – you’ll fall” all of which was well-meaning, but leaves us as adults as unwilling or unable to turn our minds to an aspect that will lift us up and propel us dynamically towards guaranteed success.  That doesn’t mean that we’re irreparably damaged just that we need to make a conscious effort to develop a “can-do” attitude.

Practitioners of NLP will tell you that if anyone can do something, then the rest of us can learn how to do the self-same thing by modelling.  This is great news for those of us who constantly strive to better themselves as it means that whatever we’re asked to do, we can choose to answer “yes” even if we’ve never done it before, confident that we’ll either figure it out easily or that there’ll be someone somewhere who we can model.  It’s this confident, can-do attitude that’s the essence of the saying “success comes in cans”.

Consider a real-life scenario where you’re asked to do something at work that’s way outside your remit.  Assuming the request is reasonable and congruent with both your own values and those of your employer, you have two choices: “yes” or “no”.  If you’ve never done this particular task before, your initial instinct might be “I can’t do that” or “I don’t know how to do that” or even “I wouldn’t even know where to start”.  Clearly, this path is not particularly productive and whilst it may not have any immediate impact, your boss will probably label you as someone who lacks ambition.  However, if you take the other path and say “of course I’ll do it, although I may need a little guidance” you’ll stand out as a “can-do” person and your boss will be only too happy to help you to grow either directly, or by having you consult with someone else who’s done this task in the past.

What’s the worst that can happen if you say “yes”?  Well, you could try and fail.  However, ‘failure’ is a great learning opportunity.  If you go back to your boss and tell them that you’ve tried but you’re not getting anywhere, they’ll be only too happy to give you a pointer in the right direction.  That way, you still grow and your boss knows that you’re someone they can rely on.

Use the imagery if it helps – I know it does for me – but whatever you do, I would encourage you to always keep in mind that “success comes in cans”.