You can’t get to sleep but you don’t want to get up. You can’t seem to concentrate at work and you have no energy to apply yourself. You are becoming less and less organized and slipping futher and further behind in your work. And the strange thing is – you’ve noticed that you don’t really care any more. In fact, you really don’t care about very much right now. Even those golf clubs which you used to keep busy every weekend, haven’t left the cupboard in months.
You may be suffering from depression. One of the key symptoms is a lack of energy and diminished interest in things that used to be important to you. With the lack of energy comes an inability to organize. Filing, sorting and especially deciding all take emotional energy. An individual suffering from depression doesn’t have the energy it takes to focus on some of these tasks and see them through to completion.
If this sounds like you, it is important that you get treatment from a physician or other health care professional. There are many different medications available for the treatment of depression. There are other treatments available as well. Don’t let depression deprive you of enjoying the beautiful life you deserve.
Archive for Organizing Strategies – Page 7
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Are you a procrastinator? Are you overwhelmed with the tasks at hand and would rather just avoid them?
Here is an excellent, short discussion around procrastination at the office and what to do about it:
http://www.lifeorganizers.com/office/procrastination-at-work.htm
You recognize its time to increase organization in your business. You’ve been working diligently to increase your personal organization. As the paper clears and the dust settles, you realize your staff are also working in a cluttered, ineffective environment. It’s time to change the culture in the office from “No one really cares since these aren’t public offices” to “We are proud of the professional environment in which we work“. These strategies will help.
1. Set the Standard Yourself
As head of the organization, directorate or department, your leadership sets the tone. If your office is a pile of disorganized papers, you give your staff the impression you don’t care what the place looks like. Why should they? I know, I know. You can find anything you want in the office right? Are you sure? How long will it take you? And if you don’t show up tomorrow is that the way you want your leadership role remembered? To increase organization in your business requires increased organization for yourself. Get help if you need it and struggle to manage the space, time or stuff.
2. Walk the Talk
Start talking about professional presentation and image at meetings. Add it to performance appraisals to make staff accountable. In order to increase organization in your business, you will have to set the standard across your business practices. The top of your desk is only one place. Staying on time for, during and at meetings speaks volumes about how your expect your staff to perform.
3. Make it easy
Ensure that every staff member has immediate access to a blue box for recycling; right beside their desk in place of a garbage can wouldn’t be tool close.
4. Give staff the Tools
Ensure that every staff has the tools they need to be organized in their work space. Do they have reasonable access to appropriate filing space? Do they have a desk that works? Is there a book shelf or alternative for holding company policy manuals or obligatory preventative maintenance reports? If you aren’t sure what is missing or why an employee is so disorganized, consider having a professional organizer conduct an assessment of the work space in question. There may be more complex organizational issues that the employee is struggling with.
5. Make Organizing a Habit
Schedule a semi-annual clear out day. The rules for the time are simple. Everyone participates in a clear out of their work space on this day. No other meetings or activities are booked. Order lunch for the gang. To increase organization in your business requires routine and practice.
A client recently expressed the following frustration:
“I have too many casual-use dishes, and they are taking up a lot of space in my cupboards. But I can’t bear to part with any of them. One set (of about eight) was given to me by my late mother and includes a set of casserole dishes, mugs, coffee pot, salt and pepper shakers, butter dish with cover, and so on. These are my favourite, but they’re not microwave safe. The second set (of four) was given to me by my daughters when they were younger, one of the first gifts they bought for me with their own money. They’re pretty, and I like the shape of the bowls, but some have broken so now there aren’t enough. And they don’t go with anything else I have. The third set are plain white, which is practical because I can use them to supplement my good china. All three sets came with cups and saucers, which I never use and would give away, but I don’t like to separate them from the rest of the set. Do you have any suggestions for how to reclaim space in my cupboards?“
This is a classic expression of the frustration we all experience when objects pile up and emotional ties prevent us from letting them go. Here are some suggestions that might help you in this situation:
- If you like the objects, get them out of hiding and use them.
- Consider that your mother probably did not expect you to keep the dishes forever and would be very sad that you were experiencing so much stress over them. Who would she suggest that you give them to or what would she have liked you to do when you were finished with them?
- Move the dishes out of the cupboard and lay them out in a different room. Taking items out of context often helps the sorting/separating process by changing perspective.
- Play the strangers, acquaintances, friends game. Which of the dishes are friends and which are strangers? Send the strangers away.
- The emotional attachment in this case is not likely to the dishes, which are at the end of the day, just dishes you are not using. The attachment is to your mother and your daughters. Rather than keeping a cupboard full of dishes, pick one or two which serve as a representation of the love you have for them and send the rest away.
- Often by giving items which hold a strong emotional memory to someone or someplace of significance to us, the emotional attachment to the object can be diminished by the emotional experience of the giving. Are your daughters setting up their own homes yet? Could they use the dishes? Do you know a single mother who is struggling to make ends meet? Would she enjoy some lovely dishes? You get the picture.
- Take a picture! Get a friend or family member to take a picture of you using the dishes and with the entire set. In the case of the dishes your daughters gave you, have them in the picture too. You can now save the picture to remind you of the dishes and to elicit the same feelings of love for your family members without keeping all the objects.
I am going to stay with the email theme. A common challenge for all of us is dealing with the email messages in the Inbox that have been read but not deleted or filed. Some days/weeks/months later there is a significant backlog and clearing it out is such a huge task we all avoid it.
Try this: Dedicate 10 minutes every working day for a month to email clear out. Start by changing the sorting criteria for your Inbox (just for clearing out purposes). If you have email sorted by Date Received, switch to Sender or Subject. Start anywhere at all, it doesn’t have to be at the top, and quickly scan the messages in the reading pane. Notice how your perspective on the messages changes?
By changing the order of the email on your screen, you change the perspective for your brain which is often all it takes to boost the Keep or Delete decision making process. In organizing, its the equivalent to moving all the material you need to sort through out of its usual living place and sorting it in a completely different environment. Try it and remember: 10 minutes a day.
Congratulations – you turned off the email alert and scheduled yourself to clear email after 11:00 am – didn’t you?
Messages are easily lost in the Inbox. To avoid forgetting about a message, learn to use your flag alerts. If you are visually oriented, chose a different colour for different types of alerts: e.g. follow up from your VP could be blue, follow up for you subordinates could be green. Your computer will keep track of the messages that are flagged.
Meanwhile, try and delete messages as soon as possible and file those messages that you need to keep but don’t require any further action. The filing system in your email should mirror that of you paper files. That way, your brain only has to remember one system and is more likely to remember where items are located. Finally, in the worse case scenaria affectionately known as the “beer truck phenomena” (what happens if you don’t show up tomorrow because you have been hit by a beer truck?) the risk to your company that something important is lost, is reduced, as the likelihood of finding material in your computer is increased.
Overwhelmed with email? Many of us are. Many of us are also concerned with the amount of time it can consume. Have you ever found yourself still clearing email several hours after you started, not having realized the time that was eaten up?
To begin taking back control, turn off the email alert on your screen. Very few of us really need to know when emails are coming in unless we have a time-sensitive message for which we are waiting.
Avoid clearing email first thing in the morning. Having planned your list of things to do the night before, you know what your top priorities are: let those have your best hours first thing in the day. Schedule time to clear email towards the middle of the day and again later in the day. Allocate a certain amount of time and stick to it.
Individuals coping with dyslexia are often looking for strategies to support them both in the workplace and at home. As a professional organizer, I am often asked about organizing strategies for managing varies learning disabilities. This knol, recently written by Sandra Crux, may be helpful to those of you who are managing with dyslexia. The knol, or bit of knowledge, is designed to be an authoritative article on a subject. Ms. Crux provides a comprehensive collection of strategies for managing dyslexia both for adults and childrens. I hope you find it helpful.
http://knol.google.com/k/sandra-crux/dyslexia-4-using-organizational/8d8s0hdum67q/5#
For entrepreneurs, small business owners and those of us with home based businesses keeping work and personal life separate becomes a significant challenge. With only one filing cabinet, business and personal files have no choice but to co-habit. If your office is the corner of the family room, tax time may find you with receipts all over the dining room table while you sort, add and prepare for your annual tax submission. Even if you have a large corner office, you may find that there is some information that always gets handled from your office and therefore you keep those files stored at the office.
When tax time is over, or the big project is complete, whichever is your reason for extending beyond your “office”, it is important to develop boundaries and borders that separate work life from personal life. Working animals, such as sheep herding or seeing eye dogs, have defined cues that tell them when it is time to play and when it is time to work – the harness for example. Without these cues and without clear separation the animals become confused as when they are working and when they are just playing.
The same is true for the rest of us although thank goodness we don’t have to wear a harness to tell us when we are at work. Wtihout this clear distinction, however, our lives become imbalanced, productivity decreases and destress time disappears. Here are some tips for home based workers to help maintain boundaries and borders:
- Start by designating an office. No matter how small or large, ensure that the space is preserved for your business work space.
- Separate your files by using a different colour label or file folder for personal and business files. Ideally, use different file drawers.
- Schedule your time so you know when you are “on the clock” and “off the clock”. The timing of the work day is less important than the designation of the working hours.
- Use specific cues to tell you when you are at work. This could be a coffee mug that is reserved for work hours, a pair of shoes that you “go to work in”.
- If you are working on a big project that requires spilling onto “non office” home space, try designating a large basket to house the project work during non work hours rather than allowing it to takeover the living room completely.
