Total, Relaxed Organization, The Blog

In a few days, millions of people will start down the path of a new year’s resolution, determined to be better, smarter, trimmer, or more organized in 2012. But a year is a very long road to walk. By next January, only a handful will even remember their resolutions for the year. But a few will succeed.

As a time management coach, I’ve seen the successful ones, and I know how they do it. They have five simple keys that anybody (including you) can use:

1. Simple but meaningful goals.
2. Start right.
3. Plan ahead.
4. Connect with habits daily.
5. Fail without giving up.

Simple but Meaningful

People who succeed with their resolutions for change work on a few simple goals. They are more interested in success than they are in the thrill of contemplating success. They aren’t looking to become perfect overnight and aren’t charmed into the thrill of perfect living for two weeks. They choose a simple, believable goal, leaving other goals for a later date. Knowing they can succeed, they also know that they will have more opportunities to meet goals. Simple.

Meaningful resolutions are also important. Half of America will exercise on January 1st (or 2nd), but the soon-to-be bride will still be exercising in March. Why? Most people resolve to exercise, because they know they should. In contrast, the bride is thinking, “I’ll fit in my wedding dress if it kills me.” When our goals are meaningful, we look beyond the goal to something we want more than [Click title for more...]

Organizing yourself often creates frustration when a new discovery dawns: everyone else is disorganized.  Your boss misses deadlines.  Your spouse forgets appointments.  Team members drop easy assignments and interrupt you constantly.  The more organized you become, the more painfully you feel other people’s disorder.

Team productivity has a greater impact on an organization than personal productivity.  Your ability to reach goals has more to do with your team than you.  Ideally, everyone would be trained and organized with the same, effective system, but sometimes you can’t affect that change.  Fortunately, there are simple ways you can encourage your team to be more productive.

First, insist that every member of your team use an inbox.  Inboxes greatly reduce interruptions and ensure that important assignments all go to one place.  When team members know team assignments are sitting in that inbox–and only in that inbox–they will be much more focused on completing work for the team.
Inboxes also reduce the chance of assignments getting lost.  All too often, the transfer of responsibility goes something like this: “Did you get the report I left on your chair?” or “Did you get the brief; I gave the brief to Joan to give to you?”  Your team needs clear channels for handing off tasks.  Checking one inbox is infinitely easier than checking your office and everyone else’s.  The Law of Collection Points (from the TRO training) holds true for teams as well as individuals: “The more collection points you have, the worse things [Click title for more...]

An office without paper.  Sounds great, right?  Over the last year more and more people have been asking for my help setting up their very own paperless office.  But for some people, “paperless” isn’t always the golden solution they thought it would be.  Here’s what you need to know before you commit to the switch.

What does “paperless” really mean?

“Paperless” means that you convert existing paper documents into virtual documents.  E-paper.  Many e-paper solutions include a filing system for both the scanned documents and your computer-based documents (things you never printed).  Practical solutions usually involve buying a specialized scanner, software, and/or a subscription to an online document manager.  If you have a lot of files, you may need to pay additional fees for more storage space.

Paperless solutions may work over an in-office network, over the Internet, or just for your own computer.  Internet-enabled solutions are the easiest and often include options for viewing documents on mobile devices, such as iPhone, Samsung Galaxy Tab, the Kindle Fire, or your Android phone.

Why are you going paperless?

There are lots of bad reasons for upgrading to a paperless office.

- Saving the environment

- Keeping a clean office

- Saving time or effort

Remember, we are talking about converting existing papers into electronic form.  Because the papers already exist, scanning won’t save a tree.  If papers clutter your office, e-paper will clutter your hard drive.  If filing is too much work, then scanning, labeling, sorting, uploading, and shredding it will [Click title for more...]

As I coach people on their time management skills, they often lament:

“My family is all disorganized, and I’m afraid that I will never be able to learn how to get organized.”

“I try to get organized, but I can only manage it in small bursts. Then everything falls apart.”

“The TRO system would help me a lot, I can see that. I’m just too chaotic to ever learn it.”

Anyone can get organized. There is no “time management gene.” You weren’t born disorganized, and you don’t have to live disorganized. To be an organized person, you need two things: the time management mindset and an airtight system.

The Time Management Mindset

Organized people are absolutely convinced that everything won’t fit. Choosing one activity disallows others, and they make choices based on this knowledge. The time management mindset is the ability to see the options and choose the best use of your time. 

“But that’s too simple to solve my problems,” you say. Actually, it’s exactly the solution for your problems. A few examples will illustrate:

You have work tomorrow, but your friends convince you to stay out late. The next day, you’re rushed, late, tired. To get everything done, you have to work late. You curse yourself for being so disorganized.

You are required to submit a report by the 15th of each month. You set it aside with plans to do it on the 14th, a day early. But several deadlines creep up, overwhelming you in the days before [Click title for more...]

When people claim to “lack focus” they often mean their attention is caught between two places. Family vs. work, sales vs. support, reading vs. daydreaming. The brain can only focus on one thing at a time, so if you split your attention your productivity will suffer.

Creating personal rituals is a good way to regularly shift your entire attention from one thing to another. A ritual is a meaningful pattern of behavior reserved for a certain time, place, or situation. The human mind thrives on patterns, and by building meaningful patterns into your life you build structure and order around which to manage yourself.

Rituals are not routines. Rituals imbue our actions with purpose and mark important transitions. Rituals are habits of emotion. Routines are simply habits of motion. A well-designed ritual engages you in the activity at hand while routines just get the chores done.

By turning a crucial daily transition into a ritual instead of a routine, you can help yourself make the transition quickly, reign in your energy, and focus exclusively on the new area.

Here is how to invent your own ritual:

1. Find a crucial transition in your day, a transition you’ve had trouble with.
2. Identify an action or behavior which would bring your previous activity to closure or release you from the mental burdens associated with it.
3. Create an action or activity which would prepare you (physically, emotionally, or mentally) for your new focus.
4. Identify a regular time when you will enact your ritual. You

[Click title for more...]

Years ago, Steve Pavlina–motivational speaker and blogger extrodinare–graduated from college with a 3.94 GPA after just three semesters. To accomplish this incredible feat, Pavlina averaged more than 30 credits per semester. On his blog, he reflects on what he learned during that time about productivity. The core of time management, he argues, is simple:

1. Decide what to do
2. Do it

That’s it. Productivity in a nutshell. But concealed within this deceptively simple philosophy lies the biggest resason why some people fritter away their time while others live their dreams: Some people avoid “doing.”

A good time management system (like our own TRO training) helps you easily decide what to do. Your task list should remind you of critical deadlines, suggest the most important tasks, help you focus by grouping similar tasks, help you quickly pick your next task, keep you informed while away from your office, and help you focus energy on the things you care about most. A good system can make you the world’s most efficient decider, but some days it’s still hard to cowboy up and be a doer.

Why do people fail to do what they’ve decided to do? Why does it take some people twice as long to do the same task? Everyone has their own reasons, but a few factors tend to be fairly consistant:

• Motivation. Apathy begats procrastination. The more intensely you desire the outcome and believe it is connected to doing the task, the more likely you are do

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Nobody likes waiting, but a slow browser is more than a simple annoyance: It’s expensive. Switching to a lightning-fast browser could be worth hundreds of dollars to you.

Here’s why: The average Internet user spends a shocking 68 hours per month online. If you work online, that number may be much higher. People average 58 seconds on each page. 68 hours divided by 58 seconds means the average user visits a whopping 4,300 web pages every month.

If your browser takes one extra second to load each page, you’re wasting an hour and fifteen minutes every month, just waiting for sites to load.

The cost of this time sap becomes clear when you consider the hourly rate you bill your clients:

• An attorney charges $400/hour
• A chiropractor charges $250/hour
• A programmer charges $70/hour

You get the idea. Saving one second per page is worth $400/month to the attorney. But what happens if his support staff also switches? His entire office? The whole firm? If an office of thirty people switches, the time saved is equivalent to hiring another part-time employee. The hours add up quickly.

Google Chrome is faster than the most recent versions of Internet Explorer or Firefox. It’s more than 4 times faster than old versions of Internet Explorer, which many organizations still use. Chrome is even faster than lightning (almost).

As a time management and productivity coach, I’m telling you: If you’re not already using Google Chrome, you’re missing out. [Click title for more...]

Interruptions can kill your workday, because each interruption diverts your focus. Picking up your work and getting back up to speed afterwards is slow and difficult. It’s like when you’re on a road trip, making good time, and then you stop for gas. Filling the tank may only take a few minutes, but if you’re like the rest of us, you don’t just fill up your tank when you stop. You make a phone call, use the restroom, grab a snack, etc. Actually getting back on the road can take considerably longer than the fill-up.

You can reduce the impact of interruptions by using a technique called bookmarking. When reading a book, you slip a piece of paper between the pages to mark your place. When working, you can use a slip of paper to mentally mark your place so you can easily return to it.

Here’s how it works. You’re focused, working hard, and someone interrupts you:

1. Acknowledge the person and ask for a moment to record what you were working on.

2. Grab a slip of paper (a Post-it note works) and record three things:

a) What you were doing.

b) What you were thinking about.

c) The very next thing you were going to do.

3. If you will need your desk space, gather up any papers you were working with and attach your bookmark to the top.

When you return to your work, simply glance over your bookmark, which will refresh your memory and recover [Click title for more...]