SOS! Organizing When Visual Reminders Are Needed

“I need lots of reminders where I can see them. How can I keep things organized but still keep things out where I can see them? If I don’t see something I will forget about it.”

Let’s start off with a little experiment. Turn on the radio and leave it on. Turn on the stereo with your favorite CD and leave it on. Turn on the news. Can you make out what the headline stories are? Can you understand the words of your favorite song’s refrain? Can you tell when a commercial comes on the radio? With everything bombarding your senses, discerning individual details is difficult at best.

This experiment is analogous to the effect of leaving everything out as a reminder. Leaving everything out creates a lot of visual “noise.” The noise prevents any specific thing from alerting you – ironic considering the intent of leaving things out is to act as a reminder.

Leaving everything out is counter productive and memory by itself is untrustworthy. What’s needed is a system of reminders that alert a person at the right time. The system needs to be easy to use so the reminders can be entered quickly and consistently. The system needs to be easily gotten so it’s accessible to everyone.

The tool of this system is the planner. A planner is more than a calendar. A planner provides its owner a place to integrate tasks, objectives and goals with the calendar. The planner has a place to record daily to-do lists. Need to renew your driver’s license? Put it in your planner. Need to fill out an application? Put that task in your planner. The planner becomes the one place to record what needs to get done It’s simpler to have one place to check than an entire tabletop.

The planner is just one part of the system. The other parts are to provide homes for the planner. plus the items that are sitting out and to set up a routine of consulting and using the planner. Designate a spot to put the planner when you are at home and in the office. Nothing else belongs in the planner’s home but the planner.Having a specific home for things eliminates guesswork. Carry the “homes” principle to the papers you need to act on. An action file is a great place to file them. I’ve written about action files before: Organize Bill Paying.

To develop a routine of using the planner, leave it open so you can see what is recorded. Establish several times during the day to check the planner: morning, lunch and evening, for example. Carry it with you when you go to appointments. When the planner is your constant companion then you always have your reminders with you organized in a way that is doable rather than overwhelming.

One planner can replace a whole tabletop of reminders -- making your space a lot more clear and peaceful and your to-dos a lot easier to get done.

Karol has nominated the Leukemia Society for the charity drawing.

National Organize Your Home Office Day

Today is National Organize Your Home Office Day. About a third of the requests for help that I receive are related to the home office. Today we'll look at some of the common issues and what can be done to resolve them. There's a little treat for you at the end of this post.

Issue: Paper stacks. This is the most common issue in the office but it's actually a compound issue created by a couple of other issues - an inadequate filing system and cheap file cabinets.

Issue: Inadequate filing system. Many people label their files with little thought to how they need to file, access and use the information. When it's time to file, an inadequate filing system will leave them guessing which file to use and how long to keep the information.
Resolution: Consider using a packaged filing kit. A good kit explains how to file along with file labels. My personal favorite is FreedomFiler (www.freedomfiler.com).

Issue: Cheap file cabinets. They're rickety, have sharp edges, and the drawers extend only half-way. No wonder no one wants to file!
Resolution: Invest in a good file cabinet. Look for a sturdy cabinet with full-extension drawers. You won't believe the difference a good file cabinet will make and it will probably be less expensive than you think. You might even look forward to filing! One of my favorite brands is Hon which is readily available at any big box office store.

Issue: No office. Your space is so small there is no room for an office so the bills are on the counter, and the coffee table,  the school papers are on the dresser, and the tax papers are ... where?
Resolution: Create a portable office and assign a place to store papers that need action. A file box with an insert to hold desk supplies or a file cart with drawers can be stored anywhere and offers portability when it's time to sit down and do a little work. The files can be labeled by the category of the action (call, pay, research, read, etc.) or set up as a tickler system (check out my earlier post "Tickle Yourself Into Action") By the way, just file papers as soon as the action is complete. Putting the paper in a "file" file doubles your work.

Issue: Missed deadlines. Bills don't get paid on time. Projects are late or never get done.
Resolution: A better planner. A planner that marries the to-do list with a calendar makes it easy to schedule things so they get done. Break large projects into smaller tasks and record these tasks in the to-do section of the planner. Record deadlines and due dates. Consult your planner several times a day to keep on top of your plan for the day. My two favorite planners are the Taylor planner (www.taylorintime.com) and Planner Pad (www.plannerpad.com).

Issue: There isn't enough room on the desk to work because of the computer.
Resolution: Move peripherals off the desk. I like to use a shelf above the desk or a small table at a right angle to hold the printer. A keyboard tray will open up more desk space.


Issue: A stack of business cards - who are these people?
Resolution: When you receive a business card write down the date and the place you met on the back of the card. You might also consider jotting down why you might be interested in contacting that person in the future. Can't think of anything? Maybe you really don't need to keep that card after all. A Rolodex is a simple way to file the cards. Use one strip of tape on the left edge of the business card to tape it to the Rolodex card and you will be able to access the back of the card.


Having a little business card envy? The folks at UPrinting.com can take care of that for you by printing up some snazzy new cards. Uprinting.com is sponsoring a give-away so one lucky winner will receive some new business cards.

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Give-away will end at midnight (Central) Wednesday, March 24, 2010 when an entry will be drawn.

One entry will be given when you become a follower of this blog.

One entry will be given when you become a fan of the Clear Spaces Facebook Fan Page.

One entry will be given when you become a Clear Spaces Twitter follower @ClearSpacesLLC.

One entry will be given when you reply to this post with your office organizing challenge to be featured in Stump the Organizer Saturday! Can't think of a challenge? Tell me your favorite organizing tip. Let me know if you have done the other things (follower, fan, tweet) too.

Visit back on March 25 to find out who is going to get some snazzy new cards free. Now go out there and be productive!

SOS! Organize And Tickle Yourself Into Action

I went camping this past weekend with our Boy Scout troop. The event was called "The Freeze Out" and the weather was definitely cold. Since we're Scouts, we prepared by wearing layers and bringing the appropriate sleeping gear. My sleeping bag is rated to 15 degrees and I had a fleece liner which added another 10 degrees of warmth. By the way if you are an occasional camper always use a liner. Liners are easy to wash and keep the sleeping bag fresh. We enjoyed fresh snow, a beautiful - but brief - starry night, and lots of deer. (Oh, and much hot coffee for the leaders!) It was really lovely. Of course, there is no internet in the wilderness so I'm posting SOS! today.

LaRhonda asked "I have heard that tickle files are the way to get your office organized. What are they? Why are they so good?"

I'd like to preface the explanation by stating there are many ways to organize. There isn't a one-size-fits-all strategy for organizing. As long as a strategy works for you - that's super. Many popular techniques are, what I call, eighty percent techniques. The techniques work pretty well for about eighty percent of people, but they do not work for everyone. Sometimes it's necessary to try a couple of approaches before finding one that works well for you.

When it comes to organizing paper that needs action there are generally two ways to handle it: sort the paper by the category of action that's needed or sort it by the date the action needs to happen. I have discussed the merits of the former category frequently. When you set up files with names like "to pay," "to call," "to read," and "to follow-up" you are organizing papers by category of action.

But sorting paper by the date the action needs to happen leads us to the "tickler file." The other name for the "tickler file" is "43 folders" because a folder is set up for each of the twelve months and for each of the thirty-one possible days in a month. So if a bill must be paid on the twelfth of the current month it will be filed in the folder labeled "twelve" and that wedding invitation for June 5 can be filed in the June folder.

The tickler file requires the discipline to check the file each and every day. Daily action may seem like a lot of effort, but it probably will take about thirty seconds to check the file. Plus doing the same thing everyday means that activity will become routine - and that's good. Routine activities require less thought and energy than novel activities. Think about how exhausting it was to first drive a car. With practice, all the little things that are done to safely operate a car became routine, and driving required less emotional energy.

When filing things away remember that the due date is not the same thing as action date. The action date precedes the due date so there is enough time for the paper to go through the mail, or get processed by the bank or whatever needs to be done in order to be considered done. There may be a two to seven day difference between what you determine the action date to be and the due date.

Most of the clients I have worked with preferred the categorizing paper by action because it made intuitive sense to them. Tickler file systems seem to work well when there is a massive amount of paper to be processed. Whether you store your paper by category or date, it is vital that you provide a way to account for how you’ll process the paper. Although it’s nice to have tidy storage, the organization is pointless if you do not process the paper.

How to get the processing done? Schedule it! Put ten to fifteen minutes (or more, if needed) in your daily agenda for taking care of paper. That little appointment will “tickle” you into being in control of your paper flow.

Thank you LaRhonda for your question and the nomination of St. Louis Children’s Hospital Newborn Intensive Care Unit for the end-of-year charity donation.