Ask The Pro: Organize Your Way To Proactivity!
What are you communicating about your professionalism in the way you keep your office, or even your computer? Like it or not, a chaotic desk or cluttered computer desktop speaks volumes.
As the papers and other clutter pile up, the task of organizing becomes more and more daunting.
This month we sat down with Pamela Kristan, author, teacher, and consultant, who has helped countless individuals and businesses get organized through retreats, workshops, talks, and individual consultations. She is the author of The Spirit of Getting Organized: 12 Skills to Find Meaning and Power in Your Stuff (Red Wheel/Weiser 2003), and her next book, The ABCs of Sustainable Time
Management, is in the works.
Q: What does organization have to do with leadership?
A: Leadership – the ability to distinguish what’s important from what’s not, and then act on it – is exactly what organizing is all about. You bring what’s important front and center and let the rest find its place on the periphery, in the file, or in the wastebasket. Getting organized is nothing more than having your physical environment reflect this distinction.
Q: How do people see you, if you are disorganized?
A: With all that stuff lying around, you might appear busy, but your boss, your clients, and your colleagues are wondering (just like you) what’s lurking in those piles! In a disorganized environment, all you can do is skim the surface and do what’s right in front of you. This is the classic definition of
reactivity. In reactive mode, the impetus for action lies outside of us – in this case, with what happens to be on top. A calm physical environment supports proactivity and the reflection needed to move through information, decisions, and projects.
Q: Is there hope for people who haven’t learned how to bring order to chaos?
A: Every human being knows how to make order out of chaos. We’re hard-wired to do it. We naturally classify and categorize. The challenge is to access these natural abilities in an atmosphere of “everything is important; nothing can be thrown away.” Our American culture, with its drama, speed, urgency and information overload compromises our good instincts. We would be wise not to automatically accept these external messages, but rather reflect, gather information, slow down, and
take concrete steps. This may sound simple, but it’s not necessarily easy!
Q: What impact does organization have on productivity?
A: Research in 2003 showed that 150 to 400 hours a year were spent searching for stuff that should be available and isn’t. More recent studies say it’s more like 30% of total work time. That’s $26,000 of an $80,000 salary – talk about bottom-line impact! Disorganization is a time-sink, a mood-sink, and an energy-sink. In contrast, a vital, lively physical set-up is like a master craftsman’s workshop. All the tools are at hand, ready to serve our creativity and the common good.
Q: How do you get started? What are the first steps?
• Square. The first step of my four-step Straighten Up! program doesn’t seem like much. It’s called Square. In the first five minutes you square up everything (and I do mean everything!). You jog those amorphous masses of paper into discrete piles, and you put miscellaneous doodads, pencils, business cards, and paperclips in a box. You make the books on the shelf upright. You don’t sort anything, you don’t read anything, and you don’t decide anything. Then identify the pile that’s really bothering you (you know the one!).
If you start there, you’ll really notice it.
• Sample. This step seeds the system. A random 1/2-inch ‘core sample’ from the middle of your most-horrible pile has about 40% to 80% of the categories you’ll need in your whole system. You gain a lot of benefit by working with just a small sample. The first task is sorting into workable categories, and, remember, reading, mulling, and doing aren’t sorting! For the sake of the exercise, just sort through the sample in 3 minutes.
• Staging. The next task is crucial; I call it staging. You have the categories; now what do you do with them? Each category needs a contained place to hang out as it makes its way through your system – sorters, magazine holders, bins, etc. You’ll likely throw out from 20% to 65% of the stuff in the sample. Before you do, capture the criteria that allowed you to confidently get rid of it (a duplicate, out-of-date, irrelevant, etc.). Clarifying your shedding criteria makes it easier later on.
Q: What are the three best methods for maintaining order in your office?
• Acknowledging. Every time you put energy into organizing, acknowledge the difference. Let it sink in. We’re so used to focusing on what’s left to do that we miss what we’ve done.
• Organize Within Boundaries. The second skill is to contain organizing within firm (yet flexible) boundaries. Dedicate just 10 minutes to organizing. At about minute 7, move into a 3-stage close-down. First, step back and acknowledge your progress. Second, identify the very next step (in this case “Create staging areas for the new categories”) and schedule the next session. Lastly, square up the space – distribute what you’ve sorted into their proper places and set the To-Be-Gone-Through pile out of the way. Now you’re ready to leave organizing mode cleanly and go on to something else.
• Process Incoming Stuff. The last skill is to process incoming stuff while working through your backlog. You can’t afford to neglect either one. Containing your work allows you to start it in the first place – you won’t be stuck with either the Inbox or the backlog for the rest of your life! Let your incoming system take shape as you use it.
Q: How can you bring these strategies to your daily calendar?
A: The key to organizing is to take full responsibility for your actions. If you take it out, you put it back. If you open it, you close it. If you agree to it, you agree to all of it. For example, the calendar entry “Meet with John” is really shorthand for a whole series of tasks which includes dealing with the “stuff fall-out” from the meeting (filing, tossing, updating an action list, and more). Once we accept the task in its entirety, we build realistic time into the schedule to accommodate it and no longer leave a wake of unacknowledged consequences trailing behind us. We also need to accept the impossibility of it all. Right now every single one of us has more on our list than we could possibly do, and so we’re making choices about what to do and what not to do all the time. It’s our highest challenge to become more aware of this fact and bear it gracefully.
Q: Once you have done the hard work, how do you maintain it?
A: Although it’s great to put some concentrated energy into organizing, we need to beware of the ‘binge-and-purge’ cycle of putting off organizing until it gets unbearable then exhausting ourselves. The trick is to do it just enough so you feel comfortably supported, but not so much that you feel oppressed. Good staging tools and the containment/close-down procedures help. Of course there’s no time to do it; we know that already. But if we accept the impossibility of it all, and make the choice
to give ourselves good support, ultimately, being organized will allow us to make better decisions, maintain our vitality, and give us lives worth living.
To contact Pamela Kristan:
Time and Stuff Management
www.pamelakristan.com
617-522-4956
pam@pamelakristan.com