Organization Skills
Getting Your Life in Order

Have you ever lived a day of your life, and at the end of it, wondered what you achieved for the day?

It’s a lousy feeling to know that you did absolutely NOTHING for a particular day isn’t it?

Organization skills is about knowing what you want, and then prioritizing your activities and planning your time around activities that will help you achieve those goals.

As Tom Landry said , “Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.”

First have the goal, and start organizing your life to achieve that goal.

And good organization requires good planning for your time, your work space and your activities.

Focus on tasks one at a time
We like to multi-task, thinking that we’re being doubly productive as we engage on two activities at once. But there’s this saying that goes,“ Multi-tasking – screwing everything up simultaneously!”

It’s funny, but it’s true. Our minds are not trained to handle so many tasks at once; doing so will only decrease the value you input into any task. Learn to write out a task list and then follow it. Do each task one at a time, one after another.

Prioritize your activities
As you write out your task list on a sheet, take a quick scan at the activities. In the light of your goals in mind, which activities are the most important? Do them first.

If your goal is to grow your organization in terms of sales, then your primary priority should be engaging in activities that lead directly to increase in sales.

Activities like talking to your salespeople and refining the sales process, or even going out there to make a sale with the purpose to understand the process, difficulty and challenges of your salespeople.

Organize your workspace
Organize your workspace to your preferences. If you are like most people, your work table looks like a battlefield after a while. Pretty soon, you’ll be spending time trying to find items that you misplaced somewhere in your table which is piled up with so much papers, notebooks and what not.

Learn to organize your place. Buy folders and trays if you have to. If you are using Outlook Express like me, take a while to observe how mails are being organized by the system.

They have an inbox (unread mails and things to do), outbox(things that need to be sent out) and flagging (things that need further action on).

You can use this format to organize your workspace too, tuned to your own preferences.

Set time aside for unexpected events
No matter how organized we want our lives to be, there are times where unexpected events will occur.

Someone needs you down at the meeting because there has been a conflict, or something in the company happens that requires your immediate attention.

Make provision for all these by opening up some time slots; perhaps 2-3 30 minute slots in the day for such events.

Use tools to manage your life
Tools will never motivate you to organize your life, but they are great tool for you to use to organize it.

Through my time as a leader, I have used a few tools to help me organize my life; namely a sheet on Daily Expenses that tracks my daily spending, a sheet on what I call Life Management which contains yearly goals as well as tracking sheets to check progress on them.

Also I use Post-it Notes Lite by 3M to remember miscellaneous activities that I have to take action on.You can download the Post-it Notes Lite from download.com for free.(Opens new window)

All these tools are meant to help you organize your life; so tune them to your preferences and use them as accordingly.

As you begin to acquire these skills to organize your life, you’ll find that you actually have more time for other activities such as spending time building meaningful relationships with your loved ones or just time where you can be alone and reflect.

Time that otherwise would have been wasted had you been drowning in your unproductivity!

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