All who are knowledgeable in this area conclude that organization saves lots and lots of time and effort and it can be easy! (Anything done with an effective, skillful process is alot easier than doing things the other way!)
"Confucius say: Confusion not work. So, stop it, dude!"
"Sanity is order and organization. Insanity is complete disorder. Decide where you want to be on the scale."
The BuddhaKahuna
The cultural myths: "But, it's boring."
"It's so hard to do.
And the key questions:
1. How organized should I be? (How do I know when the payoff of my efforts
is still greater than the cost?)
2. How do I do it effectively and efficiently?
We answer those in this section and we prove that:
ORGANIZATION SAVES LOTS AND LOTS OF TIME - AND IT CAN BE EASY.
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CONTENTS OF PAGE:
THE BENEFITS OF ORGANIZATION VERSUS THE "COST" OF ORGANIZATION
THE ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES
ORGANIZE
YOUR OFFICE
YOUR HOME AND YOUR LIFE
YOUR INFORMATION
A SYSTEM TO "REMEMBER" TO GET/STAY ORGANIZED
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THE BENEFIT VERSUS THE "COST" OF ORGANIZATION
Getting clear on why to organize can change your life dramatically, as it will get one in gear to receiving the grand benefits - which have nothing to do with the organizatino freak who often overdoes organization.
As with everything, we must look to see that the benefit is greater than the cost (which equals the net benefit or net gain) and then also to see how this stacks up in priority to other opportunities that you can harvest with your time.
Time saved (people spend
Frustration saved
Errors and bad consequences saved (in some cases)
Ego protected, confidence enhanced
Back up reading: (If links still active, otherwise google the same title.)
THE ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES
HAVE A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING. Spend no time figuring out where to put it and don't leave it
on your desk!
HAVE AN INSTANT PLACE FOR THE MAJOR THINGS.
MOST USED, CLOSEST. Keep the most used the closest to you and the most convenient.
EVERYTHING REFERENCEABLE AND FINDABLE. Tabs in notebooks, outlines for how
organized files, everything in labeled files as soon as possible.
PUT EVERYTHING AWAY AFTER YOU FINISH (or even if you stop for a bit) and just write it on
your desktop tablet.
IF YOU SEE ANYTHING OUT OF PLACE, PUT IT BACK IMMEDIATELY. If you have two
minutes free, use it to instantly clean up or organize something.
ORGANIZING ONE'S COMPUTER FILES
It's inefficient to keep "hard copies" printed on paper. Instead, one can keep copies in the computer IF one has a decent organization and retrieval system. (If you have file cabinets, you would use a similar system, with similar folders.
Write down the overall subject/topic areas, listing also the subtopic areas, in what is essentially an outline format, with each lower area indented from the next higher level. For ideas, use Computer Organization Outline.
Then go to "open files" and click on that.
Go to "documents" section.
From there, you start creating the topics.
For each of the major topic areas (Material items, Self Development, etc.), click on "new folder".
Enter the name of the topic area. Press "Enter".
Double click on that file folder name you just created, to go into that file. It should be empty at this
point.
Click on "new folder" and enter the name of the subtopic area (such as under Material,enter
"Finance"; under SelfDev, enter "Psychology", etc.)
A SYSTEM TO "REMEMBER" TO GET/STAY ORGANIZED
Although there are "rules" to follow to stay organized such as each time you handle a piece of paper, you will need to schedule in organixation time to pick up any slack, which will occur for any being who is human.
RESOURCES
LifeOrganizers.com - Covers everything, with some simple to install systems.
Some notes for integration:
Incidentally, the best thing to do if you want to keep things to refer to is to create a "folder" and move the email to that folder, such as a "Keith" folder. To learn how to do that do a search "creating an email folder" or something like that. This is, of course, an organization item, reducing the clutter of unfindable pieces.
As far as when you've printed pieces to read "later" (which is tremendously psychologically burdensome), instead of printing them you could simply copy onto a Word-type document the link, which you could just do in order as you go or at some time organize them by topic - however, the topic, especially as I improve the directories is easily referenced, with all the items organized for you. You could always print the directories and then just check off which things you want to read (perhaps adding notations) - that way you would have everything accessible but not printed until you really need them.
