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The most valuable real estate in
town isn’t in High Desert or along Rio Grande. It’s on
your desk.
In a standard cubicle, it’s roughly 20 square feet. It’s
your workday stage: your phone, Rolodex, coffee mug,
books, pencils, plants, calendar, in box, files, memos,
projects.
And, if you’re like most people, it’s a mess. “Any
system will break down under sheer volume,” says Liz
Davenport, the Albuquerque author of “Order From Chaos.”
“And most of us have not designed a system to deal with
the amount of stuff we face.” The average businessperson
gets 190 requests for his or her time each day,
Davenport says. That includes e-mail, snail mail, voice
mail, phone calls, cell calls, pages and face-to-face
dialogue. Those interactions leave trails of paper
because there’s too much to remember.
“What it looks like is you get a memo and need to do
something about it but not now. So you set it here,”
says Davenport, a national speaker and instructor on
organization. "Then you get an e-mail but have to ask a
question. So you print it and set it there. Then
somebody brings you something you should read but you
don’t have time. So you set it down. Then you grab
something from your in box, glance at it and set it
aside. Then you write a Post-it note and stick it on
your computer. Then you get a phone message and jot that
down.
"You wind up with all these bits of paper, piled up —
all reminders to do something that you’re not doing
right now.”
And that’s on top of the actual work related to your
job, which, one hopes, is also taking place on the desk.
“If you have a method of dealing with all that stuff,
then by the end of the day it can all go someplace
else,” Davenport says. “But if at the end of the day,
all that stuff is still there, then you’ve got a
problem, because the same amount, if not more, will come
in the next day and the day after that. The piles keep
growing, and you lose track of what’s in them.”
Some people say a worker with a neat desk lacks activity
and creativity. But Davenport says a messy desk, in the
age of information overload, is no small problem.
The average businessperson wastes 150 hours a year
looking for things, she says. “Add 10 more hours, and
that’s an entire work month,” she says.
A disorganized desk also is depressing, stressful and
distracting, she says.
“Having little or no free space on the desk -— some
people barely have a dear 8½-by-11 spot to Work on, and
some work on top of piles -— decreases productivity,”
she says.
“It takes longer to do a job because you’re working on
something, you glance up, see something else, shove over
what you’re doing, address the other thing, glance up
again, see something else that needs to get done. We’re
like magpies, drawn to the nearest shiny object and,
every time, our attention shifts.
"The project that would have taken an hour, takes four
because we keep interrupting us.”
A messy desk also can create a bad impression and has
been known to impede promotions and raises, Davenport
says.
"The bosses notice,” she says. They make snap judgments
just as we do. They assume if your desk is out of
control, you’re out of control. You could be missing
things, and the odds are good that you are.” If you’re
feeling like a failure whose work life is about to go
down the tubes, don’t, Davenport says. Most people are
disorganized, and the problem can be solved, she says.
But before getting started, you’ll need to create some
space to organize into. Throw out anything you haven’t
used in the past six months or don’t know exactly how
you’ll use in the next six months, Davenport says.
“People hang onto to stuff by saying, ‘I’ll need this
some day,”’ she says. “Ninety-five percent of anything
you’ve saved over six months is trash. Let it go. We
fear not having what we need. But we don’t count the
physical and psychological cost of having a whole
truckload of stuff we never use. And in this day and
age, anything you don’t have you could probably recreate
off the Internet or someplace else.”
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On to Davenport’s method:
Step 1:
Create a “cockpit” at your desk.
Set up the tools in your physical space based on
frequency of use. The things you use daily should be
within hand’s reach. The things you use weekly should be
within arm’s reach. “For neither situation does your
butt leave the chair,” she says. “When it does, you’ll
be gone an average of 20 minutes. And chances are you
won’t return with what you went to get.”
Items you use once a month can be in the office space.
“It’s now legal to get up,” Davenport says. “But if you
use something less than once a month, consider putting
it someplace else. You want to create for yourself your
own uninterruptible space.”
Step 2:
Create an “air traffic control system.”
Davenport says every worker needs four key tools: an in
box, a to-read file, a to-file file and a hot file.
The in box should be emptied and reviewed at least once
every 24 hours. ‘That doesn’t mean you do everything.
But you have to be reviewing to know which things you’re
going to do,” Davenport says.
The to-read file holds noncritical material you’d like
to read at some point. “We all get more reading material
that we can manage,” she says. “When the file is full,
fan it out, pull out the three to five most important
things, put those back and throw the rest away. You’re
not reading it anyway. It’s just a huge pile of guilt.”
The to-file file is for things that are going out of the
cockpit.
And the hot file holds “the files you touch every day or
every other day: current clients, current projects or
frequently repeated tasks,” Davenport says.
"These four files will solve a lot of the paper mess on
people’s desks,” she says.
Another recommendation is stacking trays up to eight
high for various piles of papers, such as expense slips,
things to take home, things to be copied, future
projects and the key files. “Think vertical,” Davenport
says.
She recommends a time planner like a Day-Timer to keep
track of appointments and to-dos. ‘The method Benjamin
Franklin invented 200 years ago is still the best,” she
says. “He took a blank diary open to two pages with a
place to write things to do and places to go, and a
blank page for notes specific to things that will happen
or have happened that day.”
Reminders scattered over the desk should go into the
time planner, Davenport says.
"The average businessperson has eight systems of keeping
track of what they’re doing,” she says. “Some of it’s on
the computer, some on the desk, Post-its, phone
messages, on the refrigerator, the sun visor. Get it
into one place.”
Step 3:
Create a pending file to hold the odd bits, the memos,
surveys, dry cleaner slips and other things you plan to
deal with at a later date and that don’t have another
home. "The trick to the pending file is you never put
anything in it that you don’t first write in the planner
as a to-do,” she says.
Davenport says she often thinks about Franklin, who
wrote that of the 13 virtues he believed were most
important in life, being organized (third on the list)
was the one he almost couldn’t accomplish.
“For some of us, this is not an easy thing,” she says.
‘The worst part is that most of us can remember a time
when leaving something out to remind us worked. But the
volume was a 10th of what it is now. We developed
patterns and habits and work ethics from the time when
it was different, and now we’re insane because we keep
doing the same thing over again and expecting a
different result.”
She says that on the office desk, “every square inch is
priceless.” "You’ve got to treasure it; you’ve got to
respect it. Every square inch is costing you in
productivity. Every desk is messy when you’re working,
but it should be clear at the end of the day. The
question is, when the lights are out and you go home at
night, what does it look like?” |
