Remodeling | Administration, Operations, Certified Contractors Network: Who created the mess that's on your desk today? You did, of course, but it needn't stay that way. Productivity consultant Cynthia Kyriazis can help you dig out.
Kyriazis is a strategist, coach, and trainer at Productivity Partners Inc. On Sept. 30, she gave these tips to attendees at the Certified Contractors Network's Peak Performance Conference on how they can get their life back in order.
11 comments:
These are amazing and so helpful! Everyone should read, whether you have do paperwork or not!! So many of these steps can be applied to pretty much who has a job that they have to sit down a desk at some point during their day. The most important take aways from the article are about post-it notes, letting go of paper, and discipline. Now the idea of not using post-it notes may not be a life-chancing concept but I think it helps change managers motivations and concepts about the work they are doing. Being raised in the beginning of the generation of kids who grew up with computers, I feel pretty comfortable stating that I have already started to give up on paper. There still are advantages to it, but the world we live in is changing and it's time to accept that. Finally, I completely agree with the article on the fact that it is all about discipline. If you can find a way to make yourself more productive, embrace it and live by it.
I think this is very general guidelines to help you organized. And speaking from a used to be extremely unorganized person perspective (me), I think this is an okay guideline to print it out, stick to the board, aiming to follow every step of it and change your life forever. In reality, it’s not that simple. I’m not a firm believer that any how-to get yourself organized would help if it does not root into your brain and stick there. Age and experiences also one of the ingredients. I’ve been trying to follow so many how-to get yourself organized since elementary school and bought so many organizer gadgets throughout my life and it never worked, I got bored and tired and threw them all away or shuffled it somewhere I could never find them again because I am unorganized. And one day I just changed. Didn’t say that it’s magic or anything but I believe there is no absolute magic solution or fast-track in changing people’s habit unless you really wants to make it work, and changing habits takes time.
Anyhow, useful trips to keep in mind.
This article is helpful for people that have no choice but to print out a lot of pieces of paper (or are given many pieces of paper as part of their job.) However, I was a bit disappointed with this article for a few reasons. First, I thought it would give some tips for how to handle the sheer amount of paperwork many of us need to complete on a day to day basis, rather than just organizing it after it has already been created. Second, many jobs out there today do not require this amount of paperwork to be printed out. I can't think of many jobs in the theatre industry that require people to have stacks and stacks of paperwork on their desks. Especially in our digital age, so many things are shared via Google Drive or Dropbox, and never need to be printed at all. Google Drive and Dropbox are really useful for keeping yourself organized, as they allow you to sort paperwork in different folders. Regardless, I think one very useful thing this article offers is the Act, File, Toss, or Read system. Whether you are dealing with physical copies of paperwork or digital ones, using this method sounds like a really good strategy for keeping yourself organized. The trick, however, is finding the time in the day to go through your documents. This article makes staying organized sound easy, but in reality finding the time to devote to organization can be very difficult.
As far as organizational tips go, these were spot-on in terms of accuracy and usability. One of the most important ones I picked out the bunch was that the main usage for filing should be retrieval, not storage, meaning that it should be easier to find things than put them away. This is a trap that we all fall into. By putting a little bit more work into the storage end of consolidating files, they'll be easier to find in the future and when you actually need them. That's the reason for keeping all those files, after all. Having one inbox is also something that we talked a lot about last semester in PRM. Too many inboxes, and you can't keep track of all of them, let alone decide which ones need to be acted on right away. For instance, one personal thing I use on the email side of things is the 'star' function on gmail. It's simple enough to sort out the action items from a slew of other emails. As far as the left/right brain organizational part of things, I don't believe in pigeon-holing yourself into categories like that. Use whatever situation works for you.
I think this article makes an excellent point about just spending those small extra minutes/ seconds to help yourself out later. What really destroys a space is the time you put into trying to find something you have put away. I also find myself destroying my entire organization system when I'm in a rush and I cant find something, it ends up affecting everything else. I agree with the idea of looking at organization backwards. It allows us to take something out when we are in the moment. usually when you are putting something away or cleaning it means you are just coming off a project or you have time on your hands. I also believe that these tips are not only useful in real life but also on the computer. I constantly find myself filling up my desktop with layers of files and folders. I have to go back at the end of the month and reorganize everything to make more room for future folders and files. I think they should teach these skills early on rather than in college. I feel like I have developed bad habits that have kept me from improving my organization strategies.
I definitely find this article helpful. I recently realized that putting all my papers in one place is extremely helpful. In the past few years, my biggest trouble and difficulty when it comes to organization is I forgot where I put a particular paper, they are all scattered everywhere. The steps in this article are very specific and most importantly, practical. Another important thing that the article mentions is to learn to let go of paper. I've recently learnt that as well and it does tremendously help. Judging from these two tips from the list that I personally agree with, the rest should be useful and helpful as well.
It sometimes amazes me how gargantuan a task like sending a simple email feels, or sorting mail. Subsequently, small - but vital tasks - like organizing personal papers and sending emails can pile up alarmingly fast. They are small enough to brush off at first , until the evidence of my procrastination has suddenly rendered my workspace unusable. In some of the worst times, I have found not only duplicate reminders to do something on my desk, but also reminders to find the specific reminders I had first written.
I do not spend a lot of time at my apartment. My desk, and the papers that land there are easy to ignore. I personally need to work on the art of disciplining myself into actually executing small tasks like sorting papers, instead of assuming that I will find the mere moments it would take to complete the task elsewhere in my day. So perhaps I will address the pile of papers that seems to be growing with a life of its own... next weekend?
Organization has always been sort of an issue for me in my personal life. For some reason, at school or in a professional setting, I am extremely organized and will label and make sure everything is in order and in place. At home, my room sort of looks like a tornado ripped through it. That's not to say that I don't tidy up every now and then (I do have a threshold for entropy) but there is a distinct difference in organization between my home life and work life. I have heard somewhere that the reason why many creative people tend to have clean workspaces but messy personal spaces is because since our room is presumably a place where we are very comfortable, our brains begin to map themselves out. This could just be a complete slob trying to justify their actions, but I like to think it makes some sense. I read a book over the summer called "The Japanese Art Of Tidying Up" and it helped detail some of the problems I had with organizing things. In America, we have such a skewed relationship with our clothing and we don't put enough appreciation for all the "work" our clothes go through in daily wear or tear. If we learn to treat our clothing and our spaces better, that's the first step to tidying up. On the other side, I do believe keeping clean is much tougher than it sounds.
It's all about establishing a system and sticking to it. The same tactics could be employed for emails and organizing your computer too, just thinking about your desktop or your email inbox in the same way the author of this article is describing desk space. Clutter as a symptom of delayed decision-making is the best explanation I've heard in a while, because while some people may choose to keep everything on their desk, most people just have things extra paperwork on their desk because they have no idea what to do with it or where it should go next, or even how to handle the task that goes with the piece of paperwork. I'm the type of person that like to use colors and labels to identify things, and I don't think that one's organizational style is contingent upon which side of their brain they use, since we all use most of our brain all the time. Organizing your space also helps you know better where all your paperwork is going and helps you get in the habit of making a decision and then actively doing something about it.
Getting organized is never an easy task. And the thought of procrastinating cleaning that giant pile of paperwork for later always seems so tempting, but a wise teacher once told me that procrastination is just a synonym for fear. It always seems by putting it off until later we are saving ourselves from making the wrong decision in the moment, but ultimately forcing ourselves to have to rush and make a decision that might end up being less informed later on. When it comes to organizing papers keeping a clear focus on the task at hand is really crucial for being time efficient and successful in keeping a system in the long run. By sticking to the Act, File, Toss, Read piles it helps to void the thousands of piles that lead to organization and the keeping the person on task but it doesn’t help the organization of paper and files in the long run because it’s not a sustainable practice if it a paper you have just received and need to sort it right away in my opinion. And coming from a right brained person, the thought of using cubies to organize my papers is how I tend to end up with a stack of papers in the first place.
Paperwork is such a special thing, and I would be lying if I said I loved doing because sometimes I absolutely hate it. I know that this sounds crazy coming from me as a manager, but it is so true. One of the best pieces of advice that I was ever given was, “It does not matter if you every single piece of paperwork, or you do not do any of it. What maters is that you do not miss a cue. The moment you miss a cue than you need to reevaluate the way you are doing tings to be more efficient.” What makes this so amazing is that it is so true. You are the only one who knows how you work best, and you need to do what will help you. If the best thing for you is to do every last piece of paper work than do that, but do not feel like you have to.
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