How to Organize Yourself

Simple Ways to Take Control, Save Time and Work More Efficiently

John Caunt

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780749484804
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

How to Organize Yourself will help you to dramatically improve the way you work. With great tips on how to determine your goals, prioritize your tasks and manage your time, it also includes practical advice on how to: focus on the things that produce results; overcome distractions; build positive work habits; avoid information overload and make effective use of technology.Updated for 2019, this 6th edition now features even more practical exercises, useful templates, and top tips to help you get organized, as well as content on how to deal with the ubiquitous presence of smartphones and adapt to the ever increasing scope for interruption and procrastination in our 24/7 lives. How to Organize Yourself will enable you to take control of your workload, reduce stress and fatigue, and free up time for the things that really matter. The Creating Success series of books...
Unlock vital skills, power up your performance and get ahead with the bestselling Creating Success series. Written by experts for new and aspiring managers and leaders, this million-selling collection of accessible and empowering guides will get you up to speed in no time. Packed with clever thinking, smart advice and the kind of winning techniques that really get results, you'll make fast progress, quickly reach your goals and create lasting success in your career.

02

Organize your time

Time is unlike most other resources in that it is shared out equally. We all have the same amount of it each day. The differences between us lie in how we choose to spend it and how far we try to stretch it.

Your aim in managing your time better is either to reduce the number of hours you spend working, or to achieve more in the same number of hours. It is a matter of ordering priorities. When you say, ‘I just haven’t got the time for this’, you are really saying, ‘Something else is more important to me than this.’ The problem is that, through inadequate planning and monitoring, we lose control of our schedule and fail to distinguish between the high pay-off and low pay-off demands on our time. We find ourselves saying, ‘I haven’t time for this’ to an important commitment because we have already spent too much of it on trivia.

In this chapter, then, we will look at techniques for planning and tracking the tasks that we need to spend time on. First, however, let’s consider how you currently spend your time.

How you use time now

It is helpful, before embarking on a new time-planning regime, to give attention to how you are currently spending it. Some personal organization programmes propose that you start by maintaining a rigid time log for a couple of weeks, but for those plagued by disorganization and low productivity, this may seem a wholly unreasonable starting point. I’m not going to recommend anything so demanding, but I do suggest you carry out a simple monitoring exercise for a minimum of three days.

Monitoring exercise – task importance

The purpose of this exercise is to heighten your awareness of the relative importance of the tasks which go to make up your day, and to signal those areas on which you may concentrate your efforts for improvement. On a blank sheet of paper, draw three columns and label them ‘Task’, ‘Time’ and ‘Assessment’. You might also like to make a few copies, as you will be using several of these sheets in the coming days.

Keep a sheet to hand throughout your working day and note in the left hand column every activity that occupies some of your time. Give a rough estimate of the time you spend on each item in the adjacent central column. It’s essential that you are honest with yourself and include everything that goes to make up your day – the important and the trivial. An accurate picture of how you are currently spending your time is vital if you are to make progress in using this limited resource more effectively. You don’t need to enter much information into the ‘activity’ column – just enough that you will remember what the item in question was.

At the end of the day, review your activity record and enter a number corresponding to the four categories of activity we encountered in the previous chapter:

1. Important and urgent.
2. Important but not urgent.
3. Urgent but not important.
4. Neither important nor urgent.

An example of how some of these entries might look is given in Figure 2.1

Figure 2.1 Monitoring task importance

The matrix includes task examples, the corresponding time a task is accomplished and the number that corresponds to the task category. Under the label Task, examples are: attending irrelevant meeting – time: 2 hours, task category number 4; Planning timetable for new project – time: 30 minutes, task category number 2; Responding to urgent request for information – time: 30 minutes, task category number 3; and Preparing for tomorrow’s progress review – time: 1 hour, task category number 1.

Complete a sheet each day for a minimum of three days (preferably five) and compare them, asking yourself the following questions:

• Did I have any difficulty in distinguishing between those tasks that are important and those that are unimportant?
• If so, what steps do I need to take to remove this confusion?
• Roughly what proportion of my time is currently being spent on unimportant tasks?
• If this proportion is excessive, what could I do to reduce it?
• Was enough of my time spent on tasks which are important but not urgent?
• If the answer to the previous question is ‘no’, how can I increase time devoted to these tasks?

If, in the course of this exercise, you find yourself discarding or delegating tasks you would normally have carried out, that’s fine. It’s the start of organizing your time better.

It isn’t always as easy as it might seem to distinguish between the important and the trivial, but your main reference point should be your objectives. Provided they have been well constructed, and you have taken care to break their achievement down into manageable stages, then tasks that conform to your main purposes should be quite readily identifiable. Where confusion remains, it may be necessary to re-examine and edit an objective or its constituent elements. There are, of course, different levels of importance, but I would suggest that initially you confine yourself to a simple important/trivial distinction. If you find this an inadequate means of prioritizing your time, you may wish to introduce grades of importance, but my advice would be to keep this as simple as possible (an ABC three point scale perhaps). Sometimes, despite your best efforts, a task which appears to be important subsequently turns out not to be so. Don’t worry too much about this possibility. You can only make decisions based on information you have at the time.

Several of the possible strategies associated with reducing the time spent on unimportant tasks are outlined later in the book:

• Dealing with procrastination – later in this chapter.
• Maintaining concentration – Chapter 3.
• Delegating – Chapter 5.
• Overcoming distractions and interruptions – Chapter 5.
• Learning to say no – Chapter 5.

The important/urgent distinction doesn’t need to be reserved solely for your professional activities. You can use it constructively in respect of your leisure time too. Many of us fritter away our free time in minor chores and distractions and discover that, as a result, our most important life-enhancing goals remain unfulfilled.

Technological applications to assist with time monitoring

If you’re looking for a more technologically driven approach to monitoring your activities, you might like to consider an application such as RescueTime (www.rescuetime.com). This web-based time-management tool sits in the background and monitors your computer interactions, providing an analysis of the various applications, websites or documents you are using and offering an assessment of your productivity. If you choose to upgrade from the basic free service, it can also help you to track non-computer activity, as well as giving you the chance to voluntarily block distracting activities or to set yourself daily limits for certain types of activity and be reminded if you exceed them. Of course, what this application can’t do, is make a judgement on the actual importance of the work you are undertaking. For example, you can spend an hour fiddling about on the word processor, and not producing anything of value, but RescueTime will still rate this time as very productive. So, while the application and others like it can give you an accurate reading of where your time is being spent, some input from you as to the importance and urgency of various tasks is still required.

Planning your activities

Having examined how your time is currently being spent, the next step is to adopt a workable system for planning your activities through the days, weeks and months ahead.

To plan effectively, you need first to determine your objectives and identify the steps needed to achieve them. Then it’s a matter of breaking projects and assignments down into their component tasks and making an estimate of how long you expect activities to take.

This can form the basis of a master list from which you can plan your future activity. Compiling such a list is a significant undertaking and my experience suggests that it is one people often approach in a flush of enthusiasm, devoting so much time and energy to the compilation process that they are rapidly disenchanted when it comes to implementation. Seeking to incorporate too much detail in your master list at the initial stage may also result in excessive rigidity. I would suggest that it is generally better to maintain some flexibility, to review your objectives, sub-goals and tasks regularly and to be prepared to change and update them when unfolding circumstances demonstrate a need for additions or adaptations.

‘To do’ lists

Lists of tasks to be carried out are fundamental to most people’s organizational activity, and whether a list is scribbled on the back of an envelope or flashes up on a screen, its essential purpose is the same, and so are its potential drawbacks. It can be a simple yet powerful tool or a meaningless exercise. The difference lies in how you apply it, and there are some points to bear in mind if ‘to do’ lists are to work for you.

As already indicated, the first question is: where does your list come from? It’s not going to be a huge amount of help if it consists of just a collection of items that pop into your head each morning or at the start of each week. Such a list is likely to focus too heavily on attractive or urgent but not necessarily important issues. Drawing your immediate task schedules from a master list will certainly benefit your planning, but don’t expect the master list to provide for all your needs. There are bound to be unforeseen commitments, small scale chores and requests from others that will need to be addressed.

Separate your master list into different categories to keep it manageable and in order that you can construct, view and edit particular areas of activity in isolation. Such categories may take the form of major projects or significant areas of your work. Some task-management apps come with pre-formatted categories. If you are using one of these, get rid of the irrelevant categories, and set up new ones as the need arises. I would suggest that one of your categories should be the self-development project of becoming more organized, and that it should incorporate objectives you have already identified, and others you will add as you work through this book.

Clearly, the items that make up your master list will have very different characteristics. Some will come with fixed deadlines that may incur financial or reputational penalties if not met. With others you will want to build in your own time constraints to ensure continued momentum. There is also a distinction to be made between items that can be readily completed and crossed off, and those issues you may need to focus upon for days or even weeks. Wherever possible you will have broken these down into manageable stages, but in some situations, such as w...

Table of contents

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• Creating Success Series
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 01 Know where you are going
• Reasons for disorganization
• Attitudes towards organizing
• Setting objectives
• Balancing the different elements of your life
• 02 Organize your time
• How you use time now
• Planning your activities
• Activity tracking
• Scheduling your time – estimating time requirements
• Procrastination
• Meeting deadlines
• 03 Understand the way you work
• Schedule tasks at appropriate times
• Maintain concentration and motivation
• Mobilize the power of habit
• Organize your decision making
• 04 Organize information
• Identify the important information
• Adopt a systematic approach
• Avoid overload
• Read more efficiently
• Manage your memory
• 05 Organize the way you work with others
• A strategy for meetings
• Delegate
• Overcome distractions and interruptions
• Learn to say ‘no’
• 06 Organize your space
• Tackle disorganized workspace
• Eliminate paper piles
• Clear clutter at home
• 07 Organize filing systems
• Organizing computer files
• Manually filing paper documents
• Digitizing paper documents
• 08 Use technology to assist
• Know when not to use technology
• Software choices
• Useful tools
• Rapid input of data
• Organize internet research
• 09 Organize yourself at home and away
• Working from home
• Organizing yourself away from the office
• 10 Keep up the good work
• Review your objectives
• Find ways of staying on track
• What if old habits reappear?
• Copyright