I love books on how to organize one’s home or paper (e.g., files, mail, bills, etc.). I own many and have read even more. At this point, I suppose I should be highly organized, and although my life is leaps and bounds more organized than even a few years ago, I’m always looking for ways to improve my systems or create new ones. Of course there is a certain irony here. Randy jokes that I have a disorganized pile of organizational books strewn across the floor on my side of the bed. This is partly true as there are many on the floor next to my bed, but they are contained in two baskets. I should get points for that.
My latest book is “Getting Organized: Learning to Focus, Organize and Prioritize” by Chris Crouch, something I ran across on amazon.com. I’m only about 35 pages into it but I can see that this book is going to prove helpful. So far my favorite suggestion is using the 80/20 concept, the idea being that we only make good use of 20% of our time, that 80% of what we accomplish is done in that 20% of time. The author suggests setting aside 96 minutes (20% of an 8 hour workday) and focusing on one’s #1 priority and suggests doing it early in the workday before getting bogged down with e-mails, phone calls and interruptions. This makes so much sense to me and although I know it’s not a brand new idea, I’ve never heard it put this way. It was always more along the lines of “do something towards completing the one project that you dread most and you’ll feel better about it” or “any forward movement on a project counts, no matter how small,” both ideas which are true but don’t have a way of measuring success or completion.
For example, Randy often warns me that open-ended projects that I give him can frustrate him. In doing projects Randy is more of a sprinter whereas I am the long-distance runner (yes, the hare married the tortoise as God has a sense of humor about such things). The best example is cleaning our home. He wants to know when we’ll be done. What is the measure that we will need to reach in order for us to be done and able to move onto something else? (e.g., Do we have a time limit? What tasks need to be completed?) Although he is reasonable in his request, I have a tough time telling him what constitutes as “done” for that day. He wants to know how clean is clean enough? On the other hand, I want to clean and organize until we drop from exhaustion (the reasonable side of me knows this is ridiculous). Putting this particular project into the 80/20 perspective, I’m now more comfortable with the idea of having a limited quantity of time to complete a task. Spending more time on something does not necessarily mean I will do a better job on it. Besides, what’s the use of having a clean home if one can’t make time to sit back and enjoy it?
All this is to say, my organization books have changed my perspective on being a better steward of my time and energy. If I keep things clean, easy to find, and easy to take care of, I won’t have to spend as much time on stuff and will have more time and energy to spend on the people that matter to me. Sounds good to me.