Your Organizing Coach

Learning to See Clutter

Sometimes my clients have trouble identifying what their clutter is. Here's a case in point. The desk and counters of Dave's office are piled fairly densely, making it hard for him to work. I select a pile at random and here's what happened.

Me: Dave, what's this pile?

Dave: Those are binders from our spring conference.

Me: Is there a reason you're keeping them?

Dave: That's our biggest conference of the year.

Me: Right, but do you need 14 copies?

Dave: Well, sometimes people ask me for them.

Me: Do you have it available electronically?

Dave: Oh, yes. It's on the website as a PDF.

Me: Would it be okay to direct people who want a copy to download the PDF?

Dave: Sure, I guess so.

Me: So do you still need all these copies?

Dave: We always keep copies. Every year.

Me: Is there some other purpose you'll be using them for?

Dave: Um, no. We just, uh, keep them. The extras.

Me: So when you go to create this year's binder, you won't refer to these?

Dave: No, I have all the files on my computer, the templates and stuff.

Me: What if you just keep one copy in your archive files? How would that be?

Dave: Yeah, I suppose one is enough.

Me: Where would be a logical place to keep it?

Dave (looking sheepish): Can't leave it on the counter, I guess?

Me: Well, you probably won't need it anytime soon and you don't want it to get buried under a pile. How about filing it with other documents from the spring conference?

Dave (relieved): Oh, yeah. That makes sense.

_______________

This is the source of a lot of desk clutter; papers that were important last week or five months ago, but aren't now. They need to be tossed out or filed away. Paper like this very quickly becomes part of the backdrop in your office. Because it started out being important, you forget to question its presence.

Start questioning. Leave the room and come back in. Investigate the first pile you see. Does it have a compelling reason to be there; i.e. it's important to your current work? If not, is it worth keeping at all? Be ruthless, especially if you have electronic copies.

Declutter Your Reading List

It's book chapter Wednesday. Here you go! Like it? You can buy the ebook here.

Simple Way #9

Reading List

Reading material constitutes a lot of the paper that people struggle with. If you get two daily newspapers, a few weekly magazines and 5-6 monthly publications, your reading pile gets high very quickly. Clipping articles for later is a good strategy, but it’s also time consuming and recommended only for important information you can’t get elsewhere or will use immediately.

Keep your paper stacks under control by making sure you allow time to read all that you subscribe to and when you can’t, that you get rid of back issues to make room for the new ones. This requires being honest about how much time you can and will devote to reading. Newspapers and news magazines should be the first to go because they become obsolete so quickly.

Right now:
If you still have yesterday’s newspaper or last week’s magazines, put them in the recycling now.

 

Don't Sort Things Unless Absolutely Necessary

Here's Chapter 6 of my book. Not exactly keeping to the Every Wednesday plan. I may have to spend some time automating this procedure (make it happen automagically!). You can read right now, or buy the ebook here. Note: if you're going to read right now, why not take the action step too? Just sayin'.

Simple Way #6

Avoid Sorting

Don’t sort paper unnecessarily. For instance, If you do not claim bills on your taxes, don’t waste time filing them into separate folders for electricity, phone, garbage, etc. In the unlikely event you need to look at an old bill, you’ll have to thumb through a large bill folder. But that will take you less time than filing each one individually every month.

When you do need to look at those old bills, you’ll know where to go; that one folder. As soon as you finish paying bills, file them. When people have a folder for each company, they often put off the filing and stack them somewhere for later, which means they often can’t find them when they need them.

Right now:

Label a new folder “Paid Bills.” Find those unsorted, paid statements on your desk and put them in there.

 

Don't Put Off Shredding

Here's chapter three of my new book. Every Wednesday there's a new chapter. You can read them here, or buy the ebook here.

Simple Way #3

Shred
Almost every day you get mail that’s got sensitive information in it that should be shredded. Don’t stack it up somewhere to shred later! Shred it right away. Otherwise, you end up with a shopping bag full and the idea of sitting next to the shredder for an hour is not very attractive (it’ll be too loud for you to watch TV at the same time). Get a quality shredder (one that won’t jam or freak out over staples) and put it where you usually sort mail and paper. Then you can shred as you go.

What you shred depends on your personal comfort level. Some people like to shred anything with their name and address on it, but that’s a lot of work and will not do much to protect your identity. The important items to shred are ones with your signature, social security number or any account number (this includes credit card offers). Additionally, anything with legal or medical information about you should be shredded.

Right now:

If you haven’t gone through today’s mail, look at it now and see if you can find something that needs shredding. Then shred it!

 

Shredding Scissors

I saw these at a store today and did a double take. I've never heard of shredding scissors but I think they're a great idea. Many of my clients stockpile their shredding until it gets to be a huge pile that they then don't have time to shred. Even when I get them to station the shredder right where they sort mail and paper, they still don't use it all the time. In fact, a lot of them would just as soon tear up paper than feed it through the shredder.

I'm going to start recommending these shears. I can see one really helpful application for them and that's to shred just the personal information on a piece of paper, or the address label on a magazine. Credit card applications, for example, don't need to be completely shredded. You just need to get rid of the identifying information by using the scissors to snip up that little section.

These shears do straight cut only, so they aren't as good for entire sheet shredding as cross-cut shredders because theoretically the strips can be reassembled. However, if you're trying to make some paper fringe to decorate your tiki hut or sushi plate, that feature comes in handy!

Organizing Business Cards: Scan 'em

Lots of folks want to go paperless but they feel frustrated because the scanners they already have don't make good enough scans. I've recommended the Fujitsu ScanSnap in the past as a good all-around scanner, but apparently it doesn't do that well with business cards.

It's annoying to have to buy a tool that only does one thing, but for business card scanning, the CardScan is the one to have. Networking maven Valerie Gonyea uses it for her oceans of cards and praises its accuracy. So, if business cards are piling up around you, give it a try.

Filing Is Easier When It's Cute!

My little secret: I hate filing. Even pretty, patterned file folders from Staples aren't enough to inspire me. But kittens, well, now you're talking! I rely upon Cute Overload to make Mondays, and filing, fun.

 

How Do You Spend Your Time?

For clients with time management troubles, I have recommended occasionally that they keep track of what they do all day. It may be startling to find out exactly how much time you spend cruising around the internet or caught up in cross currents of email, but the idea isn't to make you feel bad. The idea is to find out what you're actually doing with your time so that you can change it effectively.

Keeping track can be as simple as having a pad ready to jot down notes at timed intervals. David Seah has an elegant, easy to use version that shows time graphically since you fill in a bubble for each time increment. You can see it immediately; the more bubbles, the more time spent. His tool, the Emergent Task Timer, is available as a free PDF download on his site (which has tons of great productivity information, too).

Benefits of time tracking:

• Find out what you're doing when you're wasting time
• Find out how long you spend working on specific tasks; makes it easier to plan for them in the future
• Get an idea of when your high and low productivity times are during the day
• Discern patterns to tasks that you can use to your advantage. Email flurries at certain times of day can mean that others are most easily contacted then, for example
• Find patterns of work time followed by down time. You may find that some aspects of your work need more downtown to recover from
• Make sure you're taking productive, refreshing downtime; don't count more email checking as an actual break

A key to getting the most out of tracking your time is to do it now, or starting tomorrow morning. Don't wait for a less stressful week, or one with more interesting things going on. Print out enough sheets for the rest of the week and just get started. There won't be a better time.

"Time Disappears" from jtravism's photostream

Circa Notebook, you gorgeous thing!

Now that I've got a bee in my bonnet about returning to a paper-based organizing system, I'm finding wonderful paper goods all over the place. Most of them I've never even heard of before (I did already know about the Moleskine cult, though). One stylish and eye-catching number is the Circa notebook from Levenger. 

The appeal to this system is that it's customizable, rearrangeable on the fly, very flexible and pretty nice eye candy too. I've ouched my fingers in three ring binders too often to put up with them anymore, and I never get good results trying to jam a torn-out sheet of spiral binder paper back into the binder.

The way the paper stays in is very clever and cool looking and tricky to describe. It was hard to see on the company website, but a post on Lifehacker has lots of close up pictures that really show how it works. Their high paper quality, among other things, makes them quite popular elsewhere on the Internet and many users have multiple books for different tasks.

I love the ease of reordering sheets in this binder. And adding complete new sections wherever you want! I wish I could see one in person but they seem to be available only through Levenger, which has no brick and mortar stores in my area. Still, paper is beckoning me...

Well loved notebook from waffler's photostream.

Stylish Office Accessories

I don't focus on products much in this blog because I'm more interested in techniques and concepts, but every once in a while something catches my eye. Products that make sitting at your desk or filing more fun, or at least easier on the eyes, are always winners.

See Jane Work carries many lines of fun, modern and good looking office supplies. The site is oriented toward women, but they have lots of items that would appeal to anyone looking to spruce up their desk.

Says founder Holly Bohn, "There is only so much you can do with smoke-colored plastic trays!" Mmmmm, lime green!