by Eileen Roth
Looking at the whole picture of what you need to organize can be so overwhelming that you don’t get started at all. Or maybe you do, but then you quit in an hour because there’s still so much left to do. Biting off more than you can chew isn’t comfortable in your mouth or your mind — so chunk it instead.
When you don’t have the time or concentration to complete the whole Herculean job, simply break up tasks into bite-size pieces that you can reasonably accomplish. Choose one file drawer at a time, and soon you can have the whole filing system down. Start with a single kitchen cabinet and do the second one tomorrow or next week. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Chunk what you want to do and get under way.
Setting a time limit
The kitchen timer lets you know when something is done cooking. Use it to signal when you’re done organizing too. When you set a time limit, things get done. You know there’s a deadline, and you may even find yourself racing the clock to accomplish as much as you can before it rings. If you think you have about an hour to work, take a timer, whether your watch or a clock or the one you use while you cook, and set it for your stop time. There’s a trick to this: Subtract 10 minutes from the time you want to work — for instance, an hour becomes 50 minutes — so you have time to put away what you’ve “decluttered.”
Delegating tasks
The best way to get the job done when you’re short on time is to let somebody else do it — delegate. In an office with staff at your disposal, this is relatively easy. You may simply give a copy of this book to your assistant, along with a priority list (desk first, and then files, and then calendar, and so on) and a timeline for what needs to be done by when. Or you could do the reading yourself, and then have a meeting with your office manager or staff to assign projects and establish deadlines.
At home, delegating can be a little bit harder. If you live alone, delegating is called outsourcing. If you have a spouse and/or children, delegating is referred to as delicate family management. Starting out as a team often helps, working side by side to purge and organize the toy collection and home media center or clean out the garage. Eventually, as your children (and your partner) grow up, you can hand off tasks altogether, which helps them grow up further. You can find many hints for involving the family in your organizing efforts in the chapters to come, as well as for hiring out jobs when it makes sense to do so.
Whether you’re at work or at home, see Chapter 19 in Part V on time management for everything you need to know to delegate productively and politely.
Being accountable
Have you ever had someone assign you an important project upon which other people’s decisions, schedules, or success rode? If so, you know what being accountable is like. The repercussions of a sloppy job or missed deadline could range from wrath or a ruptured relationship to losing a job. The result is that you work hard and fast. You can put the power of accountability to work in your organizing projects simply by telling someone — a sibling, spouse, colleague, neighbor, or friend — what you’ve promised yourself to do. Once you’ve told someone else your plan, you won’t want to disappoint that person or look like a failure. Being accountable spurs achievement.
Want to make your accountability really stick? There are two ways to up the ante. One is to tell someone who truly cares about the outcome. Promise your boss you’re going to clean off your desk, and I bet you won’t delay. Say to your best friend or significant other, “I won’t be late to meet you again because I’m finding ways to organize my time,” and you may be doubly vested in planning your day. The second way is to set a definite date and/or time for your accountability buddy to call you back and ask you if you did what you said you would. Do you know how great it feels to say, “Yes?”
Pretending to move (or really moving)
Last but not least, a powerful motivator for getting organized is to move. When you consider the cost of moving all that extra junk, and the excess stress that your lack of planning and time-management systems will cause in the process, you’ll get on the stick. No immediate plans to move? Well, you could make some in the interest of the cause — or just pretend. Set a real date for the move. Schedule it on your calendar, planning backward from the move date to today about what needs to be organized by when. Put the subgoals on your calendar too, and get moving!
Organizing your space
Organization takes place in space, and a question I commonly hear is, “Where do I start?” My answer is that you have two possibilities, depending upon the situation and your personal style. They are the following:
Beginning with the hot spot: Choose your organizing space by selecting the place that frustrates or bothers you the most — the hot spot. After that, everything else will be downhill. If you go crazy every time you drive into the garage, skip straight to that chapter and spend your first organizing weekend creating a nice, welcoming home.
Starting slow and easy: If the hot-spot approach has you splayed out on the couch in dread and defeat, simply turn 180 degrees and start in the space that’s easiest for you. If your desk is fairly clear but your file drawers are a mess, begin with Chapter 15 to see how simple bringing organized perfection to your desktop can be, and then use the energy of your accomplishment to move on to the next project.
Wherever you start, you want to work where the organization is taking place. Don’t pull all your clothes out of the closet and take them into the living room to sort and toss; it requires an extra step and leaves you nowhere near a mirror or a rod for rehanging. You may need to clear off some space first because empty surfaces are vital to most organizing tasks. Make like a snowplow and push it all aside.
Organizing for the people who work, live, or play here
Organization is a people-based process, designed to make people happy and productive on a daily basis — so do ask “Who?” in all the organizing you do.
To personalize your organizing systems, ask yourself, “Who works, lives, or plays here?” What do they want and need? If you’re reorganizing your file system, your new setup can affect whoever retrieves or files records there, so you might want to work with your assistant, staff, colleagues, or other family members to design the system together. At the very least, let them know what you’ve done. If you’ve just reorganized the pantry, a few labels are worth a thousand words in terms of guiding cohabitants to finding the snack center and putting the potato chips back. Are you single or in business for yourself? Use the tips in this book to organize in ways that work best for you but remember that you may also want to set up systems that meet client needs or make a visitor comfortable.
Getting organized is one of the most personal projects you can undertake in your life. Everyone thinks, acts, and feels differently, and no single system works for every person on the planet. If there was, someone would have packaged it into a pill long ago and I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of writing this book.
How You Do It
This is a trick title because, of course, the rest of this book is about how to organize all the specifics of your life. But I’m training your mind here, so take this opportunity to discover how getting organized can be as simple as 1-2-3.
1. Pick your target: The good news is that getting organized can improve every aspect of your life. That’s the bad news too, because you can’t possibly do everything at once. The first step toward using my system to organize your life is skimming the Table of Contents and choosing the target chapter you want to start with. You’ve already established your mission and set your goals, so this presents no problem.
2.Read this book: Sit back, relax, and read the chapter for your first target project. You can take notes or scribble in the margins, or get ultra-organized and read the section in Chapter 19 on how to underline and highlight for maximum reading retention. No matter what, you can find what you need to know and keep the text on hand as a reference all along the way.
3.Schedule your organizing project: Write your first organizing project in your calendar a
nd set a deadline for completion. Break down each goal according to the sections or subsections of the chapter and set aside the time to work toward your objective. Match the length of the session to the scope of the task, whether the timeframe is 15 minutes or an hour a day, 3 hours a week, or a few work days or a weekend. Set aside the time on the schedule and go.
Maintaining Organization
Many people are hesitant to put the effort into getting organized because they doubt they can maintain an organized state of affairs. Like going on a diet, why bother if the excess pounds or clutter are just going to come back?
The beauty of getting organized is that it does retrain your mind, and there are no biochemical cues trying to confuse the message. In fact, organization is one of those self-reinforcing pleasures in which a mind and body, grateful for the reduced stress and strain, are eager to explore more. Enter maintenance.
If you follow the systems I describe, you may only need to have a major organizing session once a year or less to clean up any given area. A few basic tactics common to all these systems make maintenance easy. Here they are, for the benefit of your newly organizing mind:
Right now. Clean up clutter as soon as you create it.
Every day. Spend 15 minutes at the end of each day putting things away so tomorrow is a brand new start.
The one-year rule. Every time you come across an object or piece of paper, ask yourself if you’ve used it in the past year. If the answer is no, chances are the item can go.
Plan and schedule. If a major organizing job arises, don’t sit around waiting to have the time to take on a grand action. Break it down into chunks today and write each upcoming task into your calendar.
Set routines. Establish patterns, from the annual purging of everyone’s closets before buying new school clothes and repaving the blacktop driveway to weekly grocery shopping, laundry, or housecleaning on the same day each week, and so on. Clean out the china cabinet and the garage each spring and fall. Write the car’s oil changes into your calendar. Straighten up the house the day before its weekly cleaning. Purge a few files every day. The more routines that you can set, the faster and smoother things can go and the stronger your organizational systems can be.
Share. Remember that maintenance isn’t your job alone. Set up systems to share with or delegate to staff, family, and roommates.
The seeds are planted in your mind. All you need to do is fertilize them with all the information herein, and then watch your organized self blossom forth.
Chapter 3
Assembling the Tools, Supplies, and Systems
In This Chapter
Organizing systems for your space, work, information, and time
Disposing in environmentally and socially conscious ways
Using containers to put everything in place
Choosing the right supplies and avoiding the wrong ones
G etting organized is a systematic process, so it makes sense that there are some systems and supplies that go into making it work. On this subject, I have good news and good news. First, the right resources, from pullout drawers for your desktop to a calendar/planner matched to your scheduling needs, can make organizing far easier than you may have thought. Second, when you assemble the right resources to get organized, you don’t need many. Some key containers and time-management tools, a small selection of information-management supplies, and six simple organizing procedures you can easily carry in your head to handle any organizing question are the sum total of what you need to change your life for the better.
This chapter will introduce you to organizing resources that you’ll meet more specifically in the chapters to come. Important note: Sit still and put your checkbook away. Don’t buy a single thing or redo a space until you read the chapter for the area you’re working on. That’s where you can fill in the details you need to know to choose right the first time and accomplish your organizing goals. In the meantime, here’s a big-picture view of how you can turn your organized mindset into action.
Paper Clips, File Folders, Binders: What’s It All About?
Stocking your desk and office right is half the fight for productive and efficient work. In Chapter 15, you can find out how to divide and organize your desktop and drawers into task-driven centers, and how to choose and use office supplies. For instance, why you may want to toss out most of your sticky notes and find a better way to white things out. An organized approach to office supplies saves time and money and makes every job easier, so no matter what your position or post, take the time to simplify and supplement your supplies as Chapter 15 describes.
Whether you’re organizing at home or the office, you probably have plenty of paper and electronic information to deal with. The right tools can keep info in its place, which is right at your fingertips.
At work and home, all active papers are best kept in file folders inside hanging files. Loose files fall over, and loose papers do not make the organizing grade. The same goes for loose computer files, running around your hard drive with no rhyme or reason. Inactive papers and electronic files need a space of their own, located outside your prime productive area and with the same system for easy additions and retrievals.
The basic tools for any paper filing system include:
Drawers or containers
Hanging files
Hanging file tabs
File folders
File folder labels
Add in binders and perhaps a few file pockets and wallets, as well as a color-coding system for your tabs and labels, and there’s no piece of paper you can’t tame. Discover everything you need to know about the ABC’s of filing for office or home in Chapter 16, and carry the same concepts through to your computer in Chapter 17.
Organizers and Planners: Lists to Live By
Organized people don’t trust their memory — they trust their lists. You can find out how to live by lists and their close cousins, calendars, in Chapter 18, to help you get everything done and leave your mind free for more important things.
Two lists can manage your time, plain and simple. You start with a Master List, which, just as it sounds, covers everything in your life, sort of an ongoing download from your mind. The Master List flows to your To Do List, the tool for scheduling your day, meeting your deadlines, and achieving your goals.
Once you have your lists in place, filling in your planner and putting it to work is as easy as pie. Chapter 18 explores all your organizer options—electronic or paper or both; daily, weekly, or monthly; large or small; filled with this feature or that. You’ll even find out what color to write which engagements in. If you haven’t tapped the full power of a planner before, getting organized on this front can fill a big gap in your potential.
When you go shopping for your organizer, which you shouldn’t dream of doing until you read Chapter 18, here are a few formats and names you may see.
Paper and paper-to-electronic systems: At a Glance, DayTimers, Day Runners, Filofax, Franklin Covey. Old-fashioned paper has several advantages even in the twenty-first century: easy access, portability, and the ability to flip quickly and scan your schedule at a glance.
Electronic systems: Palm Pilot and other portables (Casio, Hewlett Packard Jornada, and Royal daVinci) and various computer programs such as Microsoft Outlook. With the power to carry and categorize vast amounts of information, many electronic organizers also offer access to the Internet and e-mail via your Internet connection for computer programs, and through a wireless connection for portable devices.
You can spend anything from less than $10 to several hundred clams on an organizer, depending upon whether you choose paper or electronic and how many features and add-ons you want. The information in Chapter 18 will help you reach the right cost-benefit ratio when it’s time to shop for your planner.
Office supply stores, as well as mass-merchandise stores, carry various brands of organizers. The Franklin-Covey organizer is sold only in its own stores, and stationery s
tores are the place to spot Filofax planners.
Though most organizing vendors are online, I recommend examining an actual organizer up close before you buy, to view what’s on a page and determine which brand you want to try. If at first you don’t succeed, try again with another type. Finding the one that works for you is worth the search, and fortunately, many organizer refills fit in other binders. Be sure to buy a size that you can carry around with you, because you may quickly discover that this single volume can contain your entire life.
Putting Things in Their Place: Containers
Every time you set out to organize a space, you need containers to clean out the deadwood and create homes for the survivors. Whether you’re working in the garage or getting your office into shape, the following tools and techniques can help put everything into place.
No-strain containers: Types, shapes, and sizes
Containers can organize things by like type, such as trays for cosmetics or pens and pencils or dividers for desk or underwear drawers. They can keep food fresh, as a sealed canister does your pasta or pet food. Containers can facilitate cleanup — for instance, preschoolers’ toys in big open baskets children can easily access. From the kitchen to the office, the boardroom to the bath, containers are your organizing friends.
Remember, don’t dash out and go shopping yet. Just review some container basics here, and then I’ll make loads of specific suggestions in the following chapters for matching containers to the job. I don’t want you to end up with a closet full of unused crates because you really needed drawers instead.