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Today we’ll finish up the bounty off quotes about being organized that we started last week (see the March 20 post):

• I find it helps to organize chores into categories: Things I won’t do now; Things I won’t do later; Things I’ll never do. (Cartoon Character “Maxine”)

• The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. (20^th century abstract expressionist painter Hans Hoffman)

• Organization can never be a substitute for initiative and for judgment. (early 20^th century U. S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis)

• Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it’s not all mixed up. (A.A. Milne, English author and creator of Winnie-the-Pooh)

• A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being. (American atuhor Anne Dillard, from The Writing Life)

• The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they’re organized for. (American author Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote Little Town on the Prairie)

• We adore chaos because we love to produce order. (Dutch artist M. C. Escher, known for his precise and mathematically-inspired woodcuts)

• Time is really the only capital any human being has, and the one thing he can’t afford to waste. (American inventor Thomas Edison)

• The person who moves a mountain begins by carrying small stones. (Ancient Chinese Proverb)

For the 17th consecutive year, April has been designated “Stress Awareness Month.” Throughout the month, health care professionals and health promotion experts across the USA join forces to increase public awareness about the causes and cures of stress.

Perhaps you, like me, find it quite interesting that such a month includes the Great National Stress Inducer, April 15—the day yearly income taxes are due.

Stress Awareness Month is sponsored by the Health Resource Network (HRN), a non-profit health education organization established in 1982. HRN also sponsors “National Stress Awareness Day,” held every April 16. Probably not by coincidence, that’s the day after income taxes are due!

And then comes the annual “Organize Your Files Week,” which always falls on the third week of April…right after the tax filing deadline. Again, this can’t be a coincidence.

Try to keep your stress levels down over the next few weeks. Stay as organized as you can. If you find yourself procrastinating about doing taxes, utilize the kind of system we’ve talked about so often on TaskBlog. Break the giant task down into small components. Arrange them in chronological order. And then take the first small component and start working, making your way down the list until the entire task is done.

Good luck!

The seemingly impossible desire to be orderly, disciplined, and/or organized seems to have perplexed people for centuries:

• Start at the beginning, the King said gravely, and go till you come to the end; then stop. (19th century author and mathematician Lewis Carroll, from his classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

• Don’t agonize. Organize. (Florynce Kennedy, 20th century US lawyer and civil rights advocate)

• There can be no one best way of organizing a business. (Joanne Woodward, Actor)

• Good order is the foundation of all things. (Edmund Burke, 18th century Irish statesman and philosopher)

• In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves … self discipline with all of them came first. (Harry S Truman, U.S. President 1945-1953)

• It is best to do things systematically, since we are only human, and disorder is our worst enemy. (Hesiod, ancient Greek poet)

• Each morning sees some task begin/Each evening sees it close/Something attempted, something done/Has earned a night’s repose. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 19th century US poet and educator)

• It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. (Eleanor Roosevelt, mid-20th century First Lady and lifelong political activist)

• Order is the shape upon which beauty depends. (Pearl S. Buck, 20th century American writer; winner of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes for Literature)

• Out of clutter, find Simplicity. From discord, find Harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. (Albert Einstein, 20th century Nobel Prize winning physicist)

Think you can’t get anything done because of constant interruptions? You may be right. According to Jonathan Spira and Joshua Feintuch—authors of The Cost of Not Paying Attention: How Interruptions Impact Knowledge Worker Productivity (Basex, 2005)—28% of a knowledge worker’s day is taken up by unnecessary interruptions. In the US alone, these interruptions translate to an astonishing 28 billion lost hours yearly! Another study estimates that, on average, most of us are interrupted in our work about 50 times each day.

Here’s a way to get a handle on interruptions in your own work day: keep track of interruptions for one week. Keep a small notebook on your desk, and jot down a quick record of each interruption—date, time, name of interrupter, length of interruption, and what it was about. You’ll also want to rate each interruption with a 1 or 2 to indicate whether it was (1) Important or (2) Needless.

At week’s end, study the results and figure out how you can eliminate the Needless Interruptions. Perhaps one or two people are responsible for most of those interrutions; if so, find an agreeable way to point out that they are consistently interfering with your work.

On the other hand, maybe you, yourself, are responsible for many of the interruptions. For example, maybe you’re jumping eagerly at your email inbox each time  you hear the words “You Have Mail” (or whatever). If so, consider revising your approach to email. Turn off the sound, or just keep the program closed and only look at email two or three times per day.

And for a humorous take on this subject, be sure to check out the Bureau of Workplace Interruption. The folks there boast that they “harness interruptive technology to expose the secret possibilities of the workday.” Fill out their form and they will endeavor to “create surprise, the kind that slices through the banal and opens up new places for your mind to wander.”

I like being organized because it reduces hassles and saves time. My parents were organized, so I picked up an attitude about that as a child and have kept it ever since. Over the years I’ve developed a few organizational schemes, and from time to time I’d like to share them with you. Here’s the first one:

One day long ago I was setting out to a big party with one of my brothers, Ron, but at the last minute I couldn’t find the invitation (which had the address). It wasn’t in any of the usual places: tacked to my office bulletin board, in my purse, or on my desk. I found it in the end, but not before my brother turned me on to his foolproof method for temporarily storing event-related information.

He keeps a dozen file folders, labeled January through December, in his desk’s hanging file drawer. Any backup data needed for calendared events—invitations, directions, or other info—gets clipped together and placed into the appropriate monthly folder. The current month is always the front-most folder (i.e., right now March is up). At month’s end, that folder is moved to the last position. Keeping the folders in the desk drawer is important because the info can be immediately filed and accessed.

I began using this 12-folder setup as soon as I learned about it, and I’ve been happy with it ever since. At some point I discovered that this method is known as a “tickler system,” and that it comes with a few variations—the most popular of which is to add another 31 folders, labeled 1-31, for each day of the month. That sounds like a great method for someone who has many appointments all week long, but the simpler 12-folder system is all that I require.

This system can be used for other reasons than keeping track of event info. For example, if I want to take action on something at a future time, I’ll stick it in the appropriate month’s folder and then create a popup reminder to myself in Outlook. When it pops up I can instantly retrieve the paperwork from the folder and make a decision.

Remember all those predictions a few years back about the disappearance of paper? The futurists agreed that, as we traveled further into the digital world, we’d see less and less of the stuff.

They were wrong. Paper and its evil twin, paperwork, still haunt us and show little sign of going away. Since we must keep fighting the paper wars. I’m passing on a few ways I’ve learned to deal with the stuff over the years:

• First is an important paper-war rule: try to never handle a piece of the stuff more than once. When a memo or letter is in your hand, deal with it on the spot. Consider setting aside a daily 10-15 minutes to do nothing but deal with accumulated paperwork. Some papers are bound to need additional thought, time, and/or action. However, if you try to adhere to the “touch only once” rule, you’ll be amazed at how much paper you clear from your life.

• Keep only two paper trays on your desk. One is for incoming paper; the other for outgoing paper.

• Discard drafts of anything you write. You’ll never look at them again anyway, so why keep them around? (I also discard all but one digital draft of anything I write—in other words, I keep the current copy and one backup only.)

• Limit the length of routine correspondence to one page—or less.

• Don’t keep business cards. Enter the info you need into a contact manager and toss the card.

• Instead of sending a memo, make a phone call. It adds a nice personal touch and eliminates two pieces of paper—your memo, and the answering memo you’d have received and had to deal with.

• Do you have an assistant, or somebody who receives and then brings your mail? If so, ask that person to sort mail according to its importance—and to attach any related files, phone numbers/contact data, or other information you might need.

• Ask anyone who sends you a report to include a summary and recommendations, which will give you context, speed your reading, and allow you to make decisions more quickly.

• If you’re in a position of authority, ask yourself how many reports really need to be written. Maybe some report findings could be communicated in better ways; maybe the information in some reports doesn’t need to be communicated at all!

• Don’t keep more than a year’s worth of any magazine you subscribe to.

• If you haven’t read a magazine when the new issue arrives, toss it or file it—but don’t keep it around to haunt you and make you feel guilty.

• If you find that you’re simply not reading a particular magazine, don’t renew it.

• Consolidate your credit cards. Use only one (or two, if you need a separate card for business). This will reduce the number of monthly credit card statements you deal with.

If I tell you that I’m a writer and editor, you’ll logically think that I spend most of my work day writing or editing, right?  Well, you’d be wrong. Because I run what is essentially a one-person business, most days I must accomplish tasks that have nothing to do with writing or editing.

Just a few of those tasks include doing research, conducting interviews, marketing my skills, networking, invoicing editors or corporate clients, keeping my accounts up to date, responding to emails, attending meetings, participating in conference calls… I could go on and on, but why bother? Chances are that you, too, juggle such tasks throughout the day—tasks that have nothing to do with the “real” work you must accomplish.

For years I felt frustrated by what I considered “non-work” tasks. I just wanted to write my articles and books and not have to deal with most of those other things. But at some point I realized that the freedom to write wouldn’t exist without the tasks. I stopped fighting the inevitable. I accepted the tasks into my life, learning how to get them done quickly and with as much enjoyment as I could.  I’d almost always rather be writing, but I’ve come to like most of those necessary tasks.

So it was with a shock of recognition that I discovered David Allen’s theory of the threefold nature of work. Simply put, he states that meetings, email, and other tasks are not interrupting real work: they are real work. It’s not the tasks themselves that are to be faulted; it’s our perception of those tasks as bothersome time-wasters.

Allen divides all work into three categories: pre-defined work, ad hoc work, and work definition:

Pre-defined Work is what you would be doing all day if you had no other tasks—in my case, I’d probably be writing (sometimes editing). People with corporate jobs might be working on their Action Lists: drafting documents, making important phone calls, outlining ideas, working on projects, and so on.

Ad Hoc Work is not on your calendar—it’s improvised or impromptu. An unexpected phone call from a client. The boss charges into your office with a new idea. An urgent email needs a quick response. An unplanned meeting is called for the afternoon, requiring two hours of your time to pull a report together.

Work Definition is, essentially, “housekeeping.” You’ll process and empty your  in-basket, deal with email,  put together a plan of action based on a meeting, go through the stack of papers that’s piled up over the last couple of days, or reconfigure your Action List.

While all of this may seem like simple common sense, Allen has noted that many people act as if Ad Hoc Work is a burden and Work Definition is irrelevant. “I don’t get it,” he writes. “It’s all your work. Some is done when it appears, and some is done when you choose to do it instead of what’s  showing up. And processing input is required to trust that the inventory of your pre-defined work is complete enough to evaluate its contents against your new options of things to do… How much of which kind of work to do, when, is the eternal dance of the workday… Get your habits and your systems up to handling it. And get used to it.”

That’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it? The tasks are here to stay—so get used to it!

»» Read Allen’s full treatise on the Threefold Nature of Work.

Someone is always conducting a study of one kind or another on the way people work, organize themselves and their workplaces, and waste or use time effectively. Here’s a roundup of interesting study results from the last few years:

• People who multitask are less efficient than those who focus on one project at a time. Time lost switching among tasks increases with complexity of the tasks. (2003 Study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology)

• A related (undated) study by the Journal Neuroimage determined that managing two mental tasks at once reduces the brainpower available for either task.

• The process of switching back immediately to a task you’ve performed takes longer than switching back after a bit more time has passed. Why? Because the brain has to overcome “inhibitions” it imposed on itself to stop doing the task in the first place. (a 2002 study by the National Institute of Mental Health)

• 48% of American execs admit to having a messy desk, but claim to know where everything is. In contrast, 12% say that—although their desk appears organized—they have no idea where to find anything. Maybe that’s why executives waste an estimated six weeks per year searching for lost documents. (This 2004 survey of 2600 execs by Esselte appeared in the 8/04 FastCompany Magazine)

• A related survey found that the average American “burns” 55 minutes a day, or 12 weeks a year, looking for things they know they own but can’t find. (2004 study by an un-named Boston marketing firm)

• A 2008 study by the National Association of Professional Organizers found that 55% of respondents would save from 16 minutes to 1 hour each day if they were more organized. That translates into anywhere from two to 15 wasted days each year.

• Of the total 8 hours wasted each week in paper document management, we spend 1 hour finding documents, 1 hour finding it difficult (for various reasons) to share documents, 1 hour in distribution/storage, and .5 hours in archiving and retrieval. (2003 study by the Gartner Group)

• According to a study by the Small Business Administration, 80% of papers that are filed are never referenced again.

• Way, way back in 2003, the average worker was sending and receiving more than 190 messages each day. (2003 study by Pitney Bowes, Inc.) Note: The numbers can only have multiplied steeply since then, don’t you agree?

• Sales reps in a survey were most productive when they assigned themselves only three tasks per day. It gave them a greater sense of accomplishment when they were able to cross off those tasks. (An undated study by Accountemps)