Why Your To-Do List Isn’t Working
Your to-do list isn’t working for you because you are trying to reduce 3 steps to just one. To get your to-do’s to done, requires three essential action steps:
The Secret to the 10 Minute Purge
You know those magazine articles or online features that offer “Great Organizing Tips!”? They almost always include a tip that says something to the effect of: "Spend just 10 minutes throwing out unwanted items." Often they advise to “just start with the junk drawer!” A ten minute purge can be very unsatisfying without three key guidelines. So the secret to the 10 minute purge is actually 3 secrets:
Book Review: A Mom’s Guide to Home Organization
If you find that your biggest organizing challenges come from the trials of being a mother, A Mom’s Guide to Home Organization is a great resource. It’s written by Debbie Lillard, a mother of three children and a professional organizer since 2003.
When is it OK NOT to be Organized?
The other day a friend asked, when is it OK NOT to be organized. I was stumped by the question, but I've been giving the matter a lot of thought, ever since.
Product Review: The Time Timer
I don’t like most organizing gadgets and for one simple reason. They aren’t simple. The Time Timer, however, succeeds in simplifying your life because it is actually simple. Very simple.
The Weekly Round Up
I have touched upon my system of Project Corrals in past posts, but today I am going to go into it in more detail. As always I believe a good system is an EASY system. This system involves an easy habit I call the weekly round-up, which I will demonstrate using my own projects and tasks as an example. The most important takeaway I got from David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity is this.
What’s Making Your Tasks So Difficult
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?
What My Headlines Look Like
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 Organize Is To Prioritize
Being organized is not about hiding everything in pretty baskets or about buying the latest organizing gadgets. In fact, you stand a better chance of being organized WITHOUT adding the baskets and gadgets. Good organizing is more of a subtractive process. It’s about subtracting barriers. It’s about taking the less important stuff in your life out of your way, so you can get to your priorities.
Just Say “No” To Notebooks
Bound and spiral notebooks may make sense for taking notes in school or keeping a journal, but they are terrible for keeping you organized. I have seen thousands of (usually) half-used notebooks in my clients homes and not once have I seen one used as an effective organizing tool. I would add notepads to this list and exclude binders, which can be useful for reference material.
Organizing Work-At-Home Moms
Anyone who has worked with me knows what a fan I am of Julie Morgenstern. If you want to read the best books on organizing, start with her classic "Organizing From the Inside Out." It begins with a story about her "day of reckoning" when she and her baby daughter missed out on a beautiful day because she was (then) so disorganized. I know from working with work-at-home moms that there always seems to be a nagging feeling of missing out, because of the tremendous challenge of keeping it all together.
The Value Of Headlines
When I work with clients with terminally cluttered desks, I always start by asking how much of the pile is stuff they have to make a point of acting upon and how much of it do they just need to be able to find? Not surprisingly, they usually tell me it ALL needs to get done. Well, there’s no way to focus on an amorphous pile of competing papers.
