1. How many months is it since you made your New Year's resolutions?
2. How close are you to reaching the organized state needed to accomplish your resolutions?
If you're not making the progress that you had hoped for so far, let's explore one of the reasons you might be bogging down. It is one of the primary points that I stress in all of my time management training seminars.
Committing Your Time.
Finding time in your day for added activities is something everyone struggles with. Organization often gets put on the back burner because everything else appears to be a higher priority. Yet those other priorities would be accomplished so much more easily if you were organized.
It is amazing how quickly you will gain back the hours that you spend organizing. With just one day, you could have a system that handled all the daily papers coming into your home and office, clear your desk and the surrounding stacks, and get a flexible, efficient filing system started - a one-day commitment!
Since the average business person is wasting over one hour per day due to disorganization, within two weeks, you would have gained back the hours that you spent on getting organized because you are no longer hunting for misfiled papers, lost phone numbers, and pieces of contracts.
If one full day seems overwhelming, break it into pieces. You can clean one drawer per day, file one pile of papers per day, or enter ten business cards into your database each day. The important thing is that you actually schedule the activity on your calendar.
While you go through the organizing process, keep a log of the time you spend on each task. You will probably be surprised to find that it doesn't take as long for each piece of the total picture as you had anticipated it would. And you can look back to compare the gains, both in hours reclaimed and the resulting reduced stress. Compare those with the actual minutes spent on the organizing process, and you'll see how it was worth the effort.
Even with small steps, there are still people who prefer not to deal with the organizing work on their own. The process itself may not be fun, especially if your strengths lie elsewhere. When organizing simply is not something you want to tackle on your own, consider using an organizing specialist.
What can you expect from working and training sessions with an organizing specialist?
1. Since organizing is more than just common sense, you will learn the skills and techniques as you develop a system that works specifically for you.
2. You will be working with someone who can get the task done efficiently and effectively in as short a time as possible because they come with total focus on that objective.
3. They bring no emotional baggage, so you get an impartial viewpoint as you sort through items. No time is wasted agonizing over how it got that way in the first place.
4. As you commit your time and budget to work with a professional, you also commit yourself more fully to success.
5. You pick up the skills and a rhythm that help you work alone in the follow-up period.
Time is your most precious asset. It is the only non-renewable resource, and so effective time management can be a goal in itself. The time you spend getting free of clutter and stress from disorganization can save you enough time later to make it a worthwhile investment, not an expense.
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