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Eight a.m. Monday morning. You
arrive early at the office so you can get that letter
out to the big account in Denver. That’s the one you
meant to do on Friday but the telephone rang off the
hook and then you had that big presentation to send to
the client in Monterey that couldn’t wait any longer.
You grab a cup of coffee and sit down at your desk. The
folder with all the information in it was right next to
your in- box when you finally got out of the office at
seven o’clock Friday night.
You reach for it, but it isn’t
there. It must be under all those papers you ran off
from the web for the Monterey event. No. It isn’t there.
Well, maybe it slipped behind the basket and is under
that other pile; the one with the envelopes; and the
solicitations from the non-profits. No. It isn’t there,
either.
You don’t remember filing it but
maybe you did. You yank open the file drawer but just as
you suspected the Denver folder isn’t there. It isn’t
behind the file cabinet either or next to the water
cooler. Maybe you took it with you when you went to the
bathroom . . .
OH, NO! If you did THAT, the
custodian would have thrown it away by now. You shuffle
through every paper on your desk, look on the floor
under it, run out to the kitchen where you made your
make shift dinner last Friday and then began going
through every paper in the file cabinet. It is now 10:30
a.m. and you still haven’t found the folder. Now, what
do you do?
YOU STOP. You look at the chaos on your desk and you
decide that NOW has to be the time to get organized. In
fact, you should have done this months ago but so many
new projects came pouring into your in box, pushed at
you on your e-mail, jangled your nerves on the
telephone, that you just never got around to it. It’s
too late now for Denver.
You actually made a mess of
Monterey as well because you had lost half the file.
“The average business person receives 190 pieces of
information each day . . . and wastes 150 hours just
looking for stuff,” said Liz Davenport, author of ORDER
FROM CHAOS: Six Steps to Organizing Yourself and Your
Business, published last year by Random House. “Add ten
hours to that and it equals an entire month’s work
hours. Just think how much more you could get done if
you got organized.”
We all know that we could work
more efficiently if our desks were in order, but very
few of us are willing to take the time to get it that
way. Instead, we have many organizing systems going on
at once: one for our computer material, one for dealing
with the mail, one in our calendar and one for meetings
and conferences. The problem is that these systems don’t
always work as well as they should and they often
overlap.
There are categories that either
fit in several slots or none at all. “What everyone
needs is one, simple easy to maintain system, “ said
Davenport. “Until you have that, attempting to clean off
your desk will only thwart, exhaust and annoy you.”
If you have only one system of
organization, you don’t have to make thousands of
decisions every time a paper crosses your desk. Instead,
the minute you get record a call or receive a letter you
know just where to file it. It has only one home in only
one place and that home is NOT on your desk blotter.
“You need to change the way you
think about those 190 pieces of incoming information"
said Davenport. “The biggest mistake disorganized folks
make is believing there is a later. All the things we
optimistically put off till later end up just laying
there for days, weeks, months or years.”
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All right. If there is no later, you need to start
figuring out a good system right NOW. Where do you
begin?
You begin by organizing what Davenport has labeled
THE COCKPIT OFFICE. “I recommend spending at least one
week accomplishing each step in my six step plan, but I
don’t care how long it takes to do them,” said
Davenport. “This is a very simple system for business
people that works for everyone.“
No one in business will disagree with Davenport’s
theory. But few are willing to force themselves to
implement it. “We get so caught up in the feeding frenzy
of other people‘s emergencies that we don’t take the
time needed to create an effective workspace for
ourselves,” said Davenport. “If people follow my plan, I
guarantee they will save an hour EVERY SINGLE DAY and
will alleviate much of the stress caused by always
searching for things they cannot find.”
The whole idea of the cockpit office is to keep the
things you need immediately at your fingertips and get
rid of all the material you do not use. “Consider your
desk your cockpit,” said Davenport. “Inside your
cockpit, you want only “now” kinds of things, not old,
moldy objects that have not seen light for several
years.”
Once your get rid of the obsolete files and put your
information in logical order, what is next?
Next, according to Davenport is to establish Air
Traffic Control. You need to route your papers to their
logical homes immediately. You must establish a separate
section for appointments, one for to-dos and a third for
important notes relevant to the day you are in.
Schedule all your activities ONE DAY AT A TIME. You
only have to address them when you need to act on them
instead of letting them clutter your desk and remind you
of all the work that will be driving you up the wall
tomorrow.
Once these two basic steps are achieved its time to
create a pending file where you can see at a glance what
needs to be accomplished the next day or by the end of
the week. “After step three is completed, you will have
one simple, all encompassing system for all your papers,
appointments and to-do’s in your life.” said Davenport.
“Then it is time to deal with your attitudes about those
190 pieces of information that come in each day.”
Sounds sensible doesn’t it? You can read about how to
accomplish the first thee steps of Davenport’s plan in
her book ORDER FROM CHAOS. Then you will be ready to
reorganize your decision-making abilities and constantly
revise your priorities daily to meet your current needs.
Your last step is to CLEAN OFF YOUR DESK AT THE END
OF THE DAY.
There you have it. When your desk is organized
logically and you can find the projects you need to
address when you need them, you will be organized. You
will have saved one month of fruitless searching and you
can actually begin thinking about that vacation you have
never had time to take before.
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