Organizing Creative Professionals: Sorted

Getting your photos sorted

The idea for this post came from one of my prize students, Sally Hartman of the Norfolk Foundation. I helped Sally organize her desk almost a year ago for an article in the Virginian-Pilot. Sally took my suggestions and totally ran with them, and now she's organizing her family's photos.

I don't usually delve into home organizing stuff in this blog, but it occurred to me that many businesses probably have a lot of unidentified, unorganized, amorphous photos in their offices just like we do in our homes. Humans as a species tend to like to take photos, so this advice can apply to just about any situation. 

Sally, like most people, has physical and digital photographs. Fortunately, the steps for organizing both kinds of photos are similar.

1. Find them all. For physical photos, this means digging out all the packets you got from the developer, the boxes, the albums, even that collage you might have made for a retirement party. For digital photos, this means checking the servers for images (and that can be a pretty monumental task unto itself) and asking everyone to check their hard drives for pics they might have taken on their own.

2. Toss the obvious "no"s. The standard is the same for physical and digital photos: any photo that's blurry, whose main subject is a thumb, whose subject matter could cause a divorce or lawsuit. If you have no earthly idea who anyone is in the photo, or what's going on, feel free to toss it if it's for your personal collection. If it's for the family or a business, hold onto the mystery photo and ask some folks if they know what its story is. If they're clueless as well, it can be tossed. Sally has done a great job of culling her photo herd, and has found a way to spread some joy, too: she's sent her friends pictures of their kids that she had taken.

3. Sort them out. How you sort your photos is up to you; as always, use a system that makes sense to you and that you'll understand and want to use in the future. Photos can be sorted by date, by event, by project or by location, or some combination thereof. Try to keep your categories specific enough to help you find things, but not so specific that they overwhelm you. Sally has done just this by organizing her family's photos into branches of the family, events and stages in her son's life.

4. Solve the mysteries. There's no point in keeping a photo unless you know who's in it and what they're doing. Find out who everyone in the photo is and what event was being commemorated on film. Once you've learned the who and what, you can make further decisions about what's worth keeping and what isn't.

5. Label them. Now that you know who's in what photo, hold on to that information by labeling the photo. If it's a physical print, you can use a special photo-labeling pen to write on the back. (Also, if you're using an album to store prints, make a separate label to go into the album.) If it's digital, use the file's metadata (usually found under "properties") to store the labeling info.

6. Store them. Physical photos should be stored in acid-free boxes and albums; you can find them online or in basic home stores. (Sally found some at Costco and TJ Maxx.) Hold on to the negatives of your photos in case you need reprints; if they have sentimental or other value, keep them in a fire-safe box or safety deposit box. Digital photos can be stored on your hard drive (which you back up regularly, right?) and online through photo-sharing sites.

7. Repeat as necessary. If you take a lot of photos, make a semi-regular date with yourself to organize and label them. The labeling part is the most time-sensitive; the longer you go without labeling a photo, the more likely you are to forget who's who and what's happening.

Photo organization can be a major undertaking, and if the photos have personal or family value, it can be an emotional process as well. So allow plenty of time for it, be gentle with yourself and give yourself rewards for every minor milestone.

What about you? Have you been on the photo-organizing trail like Sally has? What has and hasn't worked for you? Let me know in the comments!

Getting It All Done: Do It

Hey-o, dear readers! This is the final part in a four-part series to answer the question posed by my friend Felicia in response to a call for blog topics: "A "getting it all done"-sort of thing?"

There are four options to get something done: delegate it, defer it, delete it or do it. Today, we're talking about the last one: just doing it. Of course, it's not usually as simple as "just" doing it, or you'd have done it. So we're going to talk about the approaches you can take to completing a task.

Systemize it. If you've got a recurring task, like cleaning the house or filing a weekly report, schedule a regular day and time to do that. I mean that in the formal sense: block off that time in your calendar, and try to keep that time free of any other appointments. That time becomes When You Do That Task, which means you don't have to create a separate to-do item for it. Four o'clock on Friday? Time to write your TPS report. Sunday morning? Time to shop for groceries, start cooking for the week and put your laundry in to wash. Once something becomes part of your routine, it becomes less of an onerous task and more of "just what you do."

Break it down. If the task seems large or overwhelming, that can cause some serious paralysis. Try to break it down into manageable chunks of work. I'm currently trying to program an iPhone app (despite having no programming knowledge whatsoever). Rather than have a task called "work on iPhone app," I've got "read & highlight Chapter 8 in iPhone app dev book." That, I can do in an hour or so, while the iPhone app itself could conceivably take the rest of my life.

Relax the results. I remember a minor revelation my mom had when I was 12: "I've realized that the saying 'If something's worth doing, it's worth doing well' doesn't apply to everything. In fact, it might not even apply to most things." Even as a callow 8th-grader, I could recognize the power that realization had given her. And she was absolutely right! Many tasks don't require a high level of achievement; they just need to get done. Your TPS report doesn't have to read like Proust; it just has to spell out what you've done. A toilet doesn't need to sparkle in the sunlight; it just needs to have the dirt cleaned off. Identify the tasks that merely need to be done to a baseline level of competence, and see if you don't approach them with more energy.

Find a way to want to do it. If you can't delegate, defer, delete, systemize, chunk-ify or expectation-ease a task, and you still can't quite bring yourself to begin it, you'll have to get manipulative... with yourself. As we discussed last month in "Where do you start? Part 2," finding a good reason to do something can give you the motivation you need to get it done.

It's important that your reason for doing something be phrased positively, or you'll have the same stressful result that a "have to" gives you. Saying "finishing this report will bring me closer to a good grade in the class, which will bring me closer to my degree" has a completely different feel than "if I want to get my degree, I have to get a good grade in this class, so I have to finish this report." In the first instance, you're deliberately moving toward something; in the second, you're being forced ahead by it.

And always be sure to reward yourself. I was going to list this as a tactic and call it "bribe yourself," but that seemed kinda limiting. No matter how you've managed to begin a task, be sure to reward yourself for completing it. Treat yourself like a good manager treats an employee, using praise and positive reinforcement. After all, people will do a lot more for a good manager than a harsh one.

So that's the general guide to "getting it all done." I hope you've found something in this series that has helped you. If so, please let me know in the comments. If not, please let me know in the comments. And always, don't hesitate to make requests about what you'd like me to write about. Thanks!

Getting It All Done: Delete It

Hey-o, dear readers! This is the third part in a four-part series to answer the question posed by my friend Felicia in response to a call for blog topics: "A "getting it all done"-sort of thing?"

There are four options to get something done: delegate it, defer it, delete it or do it. Today, we're talking about the third one of these, which can cause the most anxiety but be the most liberating: deciding something just plain doesn't need doing.

This item obviously applies more to the tasks we take on by ourselves than the ones we're assigned by a manager or client. But it's so easy to overwhelm ourselves with things we believe we need to do, never stopping to examine why we believe we need to do them.

In the introduction to this series, I asked you to begin thinking of the potential consequences for not doing each task. This is where that approach can really pay off.

If, for instance, you've tasked yourself with making an amazing dessert for a party you don't even really want to attend, consider the consequences for not doing it. If you just make brownies from a box, will there be any consequences, or will the attendees happily scarf up the brownies? (My personal experience dictates the latter.) Furthermore, if you decide to RSVP "no" to the party, will there be any consequences, or will you be free to enjoy an evening some other way?

Often the most powerful consequence we apply to ourselves is if that we don't do something, someone won't like us or won't approve of us. Not only does this fear tend to nudge us towards living our lives based on someone else's responses, it sells the other person short. If someone only likes you because of what you do for them, they don't actually like you; they merely find you useful. Hopefully, you have more genuine relationships in your life.

We also tend to add unnecessary to-dos to our lives because we feel we "should" be doing certain things to live up to an image that's often highly unrealistic. We create a "superman/woman" standard and drive ourselves to meet that standard, ignoring the much more important standard of being ourselves and being true to our mission(s) in life.

If you find yourself reluctant to delete some items from your to-do list, ask yourself if each item resonates with your individual mission, whether it's to write amazing books or lead a department at work. If you have that item on your list solely because you feel it's the sort of thing an archetype of a successful/upstanding/popular person would do, it's not really serving you. It can probably go.

At first, you might feel guilty about deleting items from your to-do list. If it helps, try to think of it as streamlining your activities; you're removing the extraneous stuff to give you more energy for the important things. Deleting items becomes more comfortable with time and practice, and soon you're likely to see it for the important focusing tool it is.

What about you? What items have you deleted from your to-do list recently, and how did it feel? Let me know in the comments!