Silver Clipboard

The Trouble With Getting Organized

The trouble with getting organized is that it shines bright, unforgiving light on the problems you’ve hidden in the dark. It’s easier to shove bills in a drawer than to deal with them. To a certain extent, hiding problems is a sensible strategy: the less aware you are of problems, the less stress they cause. Hiding problems does mean, however, they will occasionally grow into monsters that attack at inopportune moments.

So, one day you decide you’re done fearing that which lurks in the dark. You want to cast off the constant, low level dread. You become an organized person. Your life benefits: bill are paid on time, work is done, trust grows in relationships. However, if you are a standard employee there are some problems.

1) You can no longer ‘forget’ work.

You now realize a sad truth of some office work: if neglected for long enough, it will go away on its own. Either someone else takes care of it or it didn’t really need to be done in the first place. People ‘forget’ unimportant or uninteresting jobs all the time. But, now that you are the organized person and keep track of everything, you are also responsible for everything. ‘Forgetting’ an unpleasant or difficult task is no longer an option because it’s in your system.

2) Project requirements change at the last moment

In schools, the closer the deadline for an assignment looms, the louder students complain about the impossibility of the task (complaints are usually inversely proportional to work done). The teacher, if he is a bad one, will change the assignment or push back the deadline. This rewards the disorganized and lazy and punishes the organized and productive. In offices, project requirements that change during the last weeks of a multi-month project have the same effect — undoing the work of those who started early.

3) Other people will give you more work.

My father says, ‘If you want something done, ask a busy person’. If you really need something done who do you ask: the guy in the corner with mountains of undone paperwork on his desk, idly surfing the ‘net or the busiest person in the office?

The downside of being organized is you become that busy, productive person… and now others in the office turn to you for their tasks. You need to practice saying ‘no’ or people will bury you under their delegated work.

I don’t advocate being lazy. I don’t recommend being disorganized. Living with the constant vague feeling that you’ve forgotten something important isn’t an optimal solution. But there are moments, when surveying my long to-do lists or when handed extra work by my boss when there are idle coworkers near, or when project requirements change at the 11th hour that I wonder, is it always worth it?

For more reading on the benefits of disorganization, the The Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman.

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Header photograph by absolutwade
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Save Gigs of Space with Monolingual

Monolingual is a program that strips your mac of the extra languages installed on it by default. How much space could this possibly take up? Lots. As sample results, monolingual cleared 3.4 gigs from my MacBook Air and 2.8 gigs from my wife’s powerbook.

[Click here to save space with Monolingual]

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Header photograph by Gaetan Lee

Heaven on Earth: The Container Store

The last time I was in San Francisco I stumbled across a utopia of organization: The Container Store.

Leave it to San Francisco — a mixture of the free spirited and intensely productive — to have such a place. Outside the entrance to The Container Store, dirty hippies mumbled psudo-zen nonsense through the fog of drug smoke that surrounded them.

“Woah,” said one to the other. “They only sell containers? Like, with nothing in them?”

“Yeah man, emptiness is the product.”

“That’s deep. Like really deep.”

Having no patience for such things, I knocked down the hippies, rushing past them to satisfy my office-supply-fetish glee.

Inside, The Container Store was everything I hoped for: shelves filled with empty containers of all shapes and sizes. Each box whispered seductive promises of a life more organized if only I would take it home. Had I not just been passing through San Francisco on a road trip. I would have emptied my wallet and taken all I could carry.

It’s worth a pilgrimage to San Francisco for the organizational faithful.

[Click here to visit The Container Store]

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Header photograph by photohome_uk

Ubiquitous Capture Tip: Keep Your Notebook Cheap and Messy

Everyone loves Moleskine notebooks. The rounded pages that don’t fray, the faux-leather cover and strap that let you feel secretly pretentious. A new moleskine smells like a fresh library. For office supply lovers, they are perfection.

Don’t use them.

If you keep a Moleskine to jot down notes and ideas, your pen will never touch paper. The pages, (especially the first page) are just too clean and perfect. Using such a fine, quality notebook makes you feel that only fine, quality ideas can fill it — not what you really need, like ‘buy milk’.

The lesson: Don’t use nice notebooks for ubiquitous capture.

Your pocket notebook should be a little, 50-cent junker that you can easily rip pages out of. Don’t keep it neat. To make ubiquitous capture work, you need as little resistance to writing down your thoughts as possible. Otherwise you will not capture them all. By keeping the notebook messy, but accessible, you take advantage of productive mess. Keeping it neat will make you hesitate scribbling a thought across an entire page as you walk to work.

The messiness makes it easy to record that half-baked thought or reminder. Just don’t forget to process your junk note book to zero during your weekly review.

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Header photograph by Paul Worthington

Control Your Power Cords

Gina at Lifehacker.com has written a short but informative piece on how to get control over your power cords. No matter how many ‘wireless’ devices you buy, you still have those power cord to tame. Follow her advice and get it under control.

[Click here for ‘Optimize Your Power Strip’ at Lifehacker.com]

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Header photograph by Fiona MacGinty