I have found that the number one reason we struggle with tasks is that they are actually projects, that we TREAT like tasks. So what’s the difference between a project and a task? The easiest way to answer that question is with another question: How do you eat an elephant?
That’s an image of a Starbucks coupon entitling me to a free drink. You will see that it expired yesterday. Here I am at Starbucks today, writing this blog and paying full price for my coffee. What a waste. Or is it? One of the reasons I became a professional organizer is that I hate waste. Whether it’s waste of time, waste of money, waste of resources, waste of energy, waste of food, waste of stress, or waste
“Dedicated Zone” is an expression professional organizers (like me) Read More
So what does Sheriff Brody’s immortal line Read More
When speaking of people, “the right sort” tends to have a very nasty usage, but when speaking of excess stuff, “the right sort” is the best way to get some really good organizing started. Typically, when one resolves to organize a cluttered basement or home office, there is a tendency to throw out not enough of what needs to go, too much of what shouldn’t go, and put the keepers into systems that won’t last. All of this can be solved by good sorting practices.
I don’t know when the modern tradition of bringing out championship caps and shirts during the celebration of sports victories began, but as an organizer I really hate it. Before I start my rant—er, blog, I want to congratulate the St. Louis Cardinals on winning a very exciting World Series. I read online this morning that in late August, St. Louis stood a .02% of making the playoffs.
“That’s been one of Read More
A while back I described how to organize your to-do’s by comparing them to newspaper headlines. Today I want to share an actual model of what that might look like. To summarize, the front page of a newspaper is made up of a series of short compelling headlines. Each headline may have a short blurb, but it always has a connecter to the full story inside. Much of the time, what piles up on our desks are full stories.
To get organized the word “important” needs to be used carefully. If “important” is used too much then there is no distinction and the most important stuff can get buried in the less important stuff. Put another way, if everything is important then nothing is important. If “important” is used too little then important is seen as a small category unto itself.
Are you flooded with paper in your home? BIG paper challenges require BIG steps. An easy way to be as aggressive with your paper flood as it is with you, is to start by sorting shapes. The biggest deterrent to dealing with paper is making decisions. The vast majority of these decisions are easy, but we tend to tie them to the minority of difficult ones. The best approach, therefore, is to take the majority of easy decisions out of the way first. Here’s how.
I guess it all started in my dear Read More
I hear it all the time. “You wouldn’t believe how many times Read More
