You have dishes piled up in the sink. Unread newspapers clutter your table. You can't see where the dust leaves off and the furniture begins. You feel overwhelmed at the thought of keeping on top of email, studying, cleaning, making and keeping luncheon dates, preparing for holiday events, scheduling your weekend activities, meeting deadlines, or filing paperwork. This anxiety is taxing, distracting, and a stimulus for procrastinating.
Maintaining a sense of orderliness can feel like paradise compared to missing deadlines and duplicating efforts caused by misplacing objects or files. By progressively mastering efficiency techniques, you can make them automatic and habitual.
Successful companies have priority organizing systems that may be their most valuable asset. These control systems govern how they do business. Developing a proprietary control system to organize your time and activities, takes a four-step process:
1. Identify organizing objectives.
2. Develop an effective organizing system.
3. Practice your system to increase your efficiency and effectiveness by meeting your organizing objectives.
4. Revise and update the system.
You can build an efficient proprietary organizing system by using this how to get organized series and build a system that works for you.
If your organizing system saves you just fifteen minutes per day from rummaging for misplaced items or ruminating over what to start, you will gain the equivalent of almost twelve eight-hour workdays each year!
As a practical matter, you can't put all this time spent searching together into twelve consecutive days. However, the daily strains you avoid by getting and staying better organized may be worth as much or more than the drips and drabs of time that you save.
Catch Up, Keep Up, Get Ahead
The pileup of tasks from the past becomes a pain in the present and distracts from actions to make for a better future. Imagine what it would feel like if you could confidently get rid of this pain, keep up-to-date, and get ahead of things to open more time for beneficial future activities.
Organize your work into three groupings: catch up, keep up, and get ahead. Catch-up activities are the things left undone that haunt your present. Sure, you can probably stretch them out a bit more, but why let them linger, or "season." Like rotting fruit, they will eventually attract attention. To support your efforts to get beyond this pattern of delay, make a cross-out sheet of what to do. Block off time. Plan to work by project. Tackle them in a bits-and-pieces fashion: attack chucks of work and whittle down the list. Eventually you want an empty catch-up file.
Keep-up activities are current. If you get them out of the way, they don't make it into your catch-up category. Plan to complete reasonable things in a reasonable way within a reasonable time. This do it now strategy will help you get timely things done and avoid procrastination.
Get-ahead activities include doing what advances your enlightened long-term interests. Suppose you want to start your own business. Your get-ahead plan can involve marketing research, developing advertising materials, creating a proprietary control system, financing the operation, and testing the viability of your plan.
As you free time from catch-up and keep-up activities, you have more time available for advancement activities as well as old-fashioned fun. Challenge yourself to place your greatest emphasis on keeping up and getting ahead. You'll have less work to carry over from the past. You'll feel less stress from clutter hanging over your head from the past.
Organizing procrastination is likely to be your constant companion. This is the process of putting off either developing or executing an effective organizing plan. If you fall into this trap, here are two blogs to start you on your way of addressing this and other procrastination factors (P-factor):
Take a procrastination test. See where you stand. Find links to corrective techniques.
Learn to beat deadlines:
Substitute productive actions for procrastination distractions using End Procrastination Now:
Dr. Bill Knaus