Positive Yarn

Quick: Do you know where your stash of printer ink is so you don’t have to spend an hour looking for it before you can change it? How’s that shoebox full of receipts for tax time working out for you? Can you remember what you just promised that last customer that you’d do for her “sometime this week”?

When I attended Northeast Ohio’s Council of Smaller Enterprises’ annual conference last month, I knew straightaway that one of my must-see seminars would be “De-clutter Your Life and Workspace.” While I put my assignments for my clients at the forefront and maintain them in a fairly organized fashion, my personal papers are a different story. They include a sea of “I love you, Mom” drawings, coupons I hate to throw away but never use, and receipts I keep meaning to file away. I was hoping this presentation could be the kick I needed to fight the onslaught of clutter in my home office.

I’m pleased to say I was not disappointed.

The presenter, Chris Perrow, has 15 years’ experience as a professional organizer through her consulting company, Perrow Systems. The engaging speaker is also a corporate trainer for FirstMerit Bank.

“Nothing I can tell you that’s new, not since Aristotle first organized the species,” she said at the start. “But fast-forward to today, and not only do we have all the stuff we always had to do, but now we have an in-box to deal with, too.”

In fact, she said, the average person performs 580 tasks a day.

Organization basically comes down to chaos control, she said, because we’ve become a society programmed to constantly berate ourselves with “I should do this, I have to do that, I could do this.”

As a result, she said, “our mental filing cabinets might look a lot like our physical space — overflowing.”

The propensity for clutter has spawned a growing industry: When Perrow first joined the National Association of Professional Organizers (yes, such an animal exists) 15 years ago, there were approximately 800 members. Today, there are more than 4,000.

“As a society, we are all drowning in chaos,” she laments.

And now the solution, folks

The important thing to consider is, what are the priorities of your work? “Energy follows thought,” Perrow says. “If you walk into a room of chaos, your energy level drops, which means your level of creativity drops.”

Your immediate goal should be to reclaim 15% of your desk — and brain! “Find your safe harbor,” she says.

But while you, like me, may already have an organizational system set up — maintaining the system is another story. I must confess that I have some fantastic filing space and drawers and… piles of papers in a basket that have been waiting patiently to be filed in said drawers for weeks now.

Perrow stresses there is no right or wrong way, just your way. “Organization is ever-changing because our workload is evolving,” she says. “So what may have worked six months ago may need to be tweaked to work today.”

True words, indeed.

Perrow is a firm believer that organization is more about energy management than time management. “Dr. Edward Hallowell came up with this great term, ‘doom dart,’ to explain those occasions where you are going along fine and then boom! You’re hit with a dart to the brain: ‘I have a meeting tomorrow morning I’m not the least bit prepared for.’ You go into instant stress mode.”

To deflect these potentially lethal darts, Perrow advises making a Top 3 list for the day ahead each day before you leave work. “With daily interruptions, things that come up, etc., you’re probably not realistically going to get more than three things crossed off your original to-do list,” she explains. “If you prioritize the three ‘must-do’ items, they’re much more likely to get accomplished than having a lengthy list of goals.”

So if you decide to get a head start on your New Year’s Resolution and tackle the chaos, let me know how you do by commenting below or dropping me a line at positiveyarn@goochandgooch.com. I’m off to tackle a desk drawer that’s housing some cassette tapes from high school. Wish me luck!

Tags: business, clutter, COSE, doom dart, FirstMerit, Hallowell, NAPO, organize, Perrow

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Business matters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.