Staying both Organized and Productive — Yes, it’s possible
With our emails, task lists and to-do lists building up, it can often feel like we are losing track of what we should be doing, feeling overwhelmed and in the end, not getting done what we need to get done.
Keeping organized and productive is a careful balance. Spend a lot of time organizing yourself, and you are taking away from your productive time. On the other hand, if you don’t invest in the structure of organizing yourself, your time might not be used in the best way possible.
This structure of organizing can be in an electronic format (task list, reminders, calendar or a combination) or a paper format. The key is to choose a medium that you find comfortable to work with and can stick to.
Itemize the new work that comes your way. When projects and actionable items come your way, take the time to break them down into steps. Invest time to think about the item from start to finish and what steps are involved.
Prioritize your items on a scale from urgent to non-urgent.
Schedule your items according to their due date, and how long you think it will take you to complete.
Action the items, starting from the top of the list. Work on an individual item until complete, or until you reach a point where you need other’s input or you need a break. An item will either move to the next step (completed) or it will become a different action item. For example, “Finish Marketing Summary” might get updated to “Get Marketing Summary draft approved” as you progress.
Check off the item if completed — this is the satisfying part!
Review your progress often. Take stock of your list on a regular basis and make adjustments to both the priority and schedule of the items. Ensure that your list is reprioritized often, as new items get added and the urgency of the items change.
The key foundation of any system of organization is consistency. You must develop a strategy that makes sense and becomes a habit. One of the biggest mistakes that people make when trying to get organized, is to try something for a short period of time, and allow themselves to get overwhelmed, and then they give up on it. They move onto the next system with the conviction that the next system will be the one that must work.
It takes time to get used to a new system, and you must give yourself the opportunity to work through the organizational cycle and answer the following questions:
- Did this system capture all of the items I must complete? Was it clear to me what my priorities were?
- Was I consistently able to move things through the cycle? Did anything get stuck?
Think about your new organizational system in the above way and make adjustments, as necessary. Be slow and deliberate with any changes, allowing for several cycles of Review and Reprioritizing to occur before fully evaluating changes.
Changes to your system are no longer required when you have arrived at an organizational system that captures all of your items, prioritizes them correctly and moves them from start to finish in a way that makes you feel less overwhelmed and more empowered.
Happy Organizing!