Organizing Creative Professionals: Sorted

Got 15 minutes? Get organized! Part III

(This is yet another Inside Business column, but I've broken it into three parts.) It sometimes seems like organizing your work setup is a major undertaking, a project that will require a few hours, at least. And who has that kind of time? Fortunately, you can do a few things in 15 minutes that will make a major impact in how you work.

Option 3: Give yourself the basics of a filing system. 

Don't worry about filling dozens of those empty dark green hanging files in your desk drawer. This option just does the basics, and doesn't even have to leave your desktop.

Designate desktop trays or hanging folders in a box on your desktop as “In,” “Out” and “To File.” Make “In” the place where everything goes first—and promise yourself you won’t put anything back into “In,” that once you touch something in that box, you’ll find a home for it. Give yourself some space in “To File,” because chances are that various piles on your desk have been serving that function.

Then create some action folders for stuff that always comes up. These can be hanging file folders in a drawer or a box on your desktop. The categories will be unique to your work and circumstances, but it’s the sort of thing that keeps coming up in your work: “To Read,” “Invoices To Pay,” “Data Entry,” “Possible Purchases,” etc. If you have to do the same task every month or more frequently, give it a folder and put the necessary information in that folder.

Just spending 15 minutes giving the papers you use most a home can give you some major time rewards.

What about you? What 15-minute fixes have you found most useful in your own life? Let me know in the comments!

Got 15 minutes? Get organized! Part II

(This is yet another Inside Business column, but I've broken it into three parts.) It sometimes seems like organizing your work setup is a major undertaking, a project that will require a few hours, at least. And who has that kind of time? Fortunately, you can do a few things in 15 minutes that will make a major impact in how you work.

Option 2: Set up your desk for success. 

Toss out all the pens that don’t work anymore (you know you've got them), sharpen the pencils that need it, check your highlighters to see if they still work and otherwise prune any writing implements that no longer fulfill their purpose.

Then tackle your writing surfaces by choosing one target for notations: one notebook or one source of scrap paper. Designate that one thing as your only place to make notes and remove all other possibilities from your desktop. Keep a spare in a drawer or on a nearby shelf, but keep it out of your immediate vision.

If you don’t have a trashcan, a recycle bin and a shredder within easy reach of your desk, now’s the time to move them there. If you don’t have a personal shredder, but use a company-wide device or service, you’ll have to create a holding location. Designate a desktop tray as “To Shred,” or put that label on a hanging file folder and put the folder in the front of a file drawer you use frequently.

Take a minute to put your phone on the side of your nondominant hand, and to clear some desktop space on the side of your dominant hand. Put your writing implements and paper on your dominant side as well. (And if you've got a minute or so left, take everything off it and give the surface a good clean with something in a spray bottle.)

This is one 15-minute fix you'll probably have to do every few months, just because paper and pens keep running out. But it makes a noticeable impact for such a short time. Next time: Fast filing.

Legs and hands

(I shudder to think about the searches that might lead to this post...)

I recently got an email asking about organizing an L-shaped desk. The person who sent it also had a printer to accommodate on the desktop and was wondering about placing various desk-y items for maximum ergonomic benefit.

For organizing an L-shaped desk, think about which hand is your dominant hand (yes, that again). Then divide your desktop tasks by dominant and nondominant hands. For instance, getting stuff off the printer is a nondominant-hand thing; so is answering the phone. Writing is a dominant-hand thing, while working on the computer involves both hands.

Since an L-shaped desk has a leg for each hand (which sounds really weird, but you know what I mean), you can put the appropriate stuff on the appropriate leg. For instance, if you’re left-handed, put your writing stuff on the left leg of your desk; the printer and your phone can go on the right leg, and the computer can go in the middle, where the legs join.

That sounds a little cumbersome, doesn't it? Here's a visual of it:

 

I put the computer at a 45-degree angle on these illustrations because it involves both hands. Some people love having a computer at that angle; some folks absolutely hate it. If you're one of the latter folks, you are absolutely free (and, in fact, encouraged) to shift the computer to the leg that has less stuff on it so it's facing you directly.

What about you folks out there whose desks have gone to L? (Sorry.) What's your experience been with a desk that has two legs in addition to the usual four? Let me know in the comments! 

How I did it: My car

Throughout the spring semester, I am proud to say, I never once had that unnerving feeling of "Oh, crap, I left my book at home," or the even more unnerving "Dude, where's my parking permit?!" And that wasn't an accident.

Two days a week, I attended classes at a campus 50 miles from my house, and four nights a week, I attended classes at a campus 25 miles from home. (Fortunately, both were in the same direction.) I knew from the outset that I'd be driving a lot, and I recognized the crucial role my car would play in organization as well as good ol' transportation.

I decided that my books would "live" in my car to reduce the chance of leaving one of them at home. If I needed to take a book into the house (or coffee shop) to read and take notes from, I'd consider it a furlough and get the book back into the car as soon as possible. (Sorted principle: Stuff lives where you're likely to need it.)

To hold all seven courses worth of books, I got a backseat car organizer. The product seems geared toward kids, what with the water bottle holders and the rigid top to facilitate game playing. I ignored both those features and used it as a big box that a seat belt could go through. 

Of course, a milk-crate-type box will also work fine, as long as you can get the seat belt through it to hold it in place. If you drive like I do, the last thing you want is a big, heavy object sliding around the car.

I also did a kind of triage in deciding which books would get taken into the business school building from the car. For instance, the book for my Business Law class was one of the heaviest objects I have ever encountered. Seriously, I think they used an aqueous coating made of the remnants of a white dwarf star to coat all 1297 pages.

Therefore, the Business Law book did not get put into my actual bag to attend class. Instead, I read my assigned chapters and took organized notes on them at home, before class. This not only kept me informed and up-to-date; it saved significant wear and tear on my back muscles. (Sorted principle: consider the impact on your comfort and health when determining if you need something.)

Because I treated my car as a sort of backpack on wheels, I always had access to the books I needed when I needed them. Giving my books a designated home ensured that I'd return them to that home. Same thing with my hanging parking permit: it stayed in the little cubbyhole under my radio when it wasn't dangling from my rearview mirror. There was no reason to put it in a bag or even the glove compartment where it might be forgotten. 

Of course, I was fortunate in that I didn't have to share a car with anyone and could essentially use it as a rolling school locker. But hopefully you might find some tips in here to help you use your car as an organizational tool.

What has your experience been with cars and organization? Let me know in the comments!

Give your stuff a home

"A place for everything, and everything in its place."

That old adage might make you flinch instinctively. And I can't blame you if it does; it was originally posited as a prevention for "every degree of evil" (?!?) by an Ohio minister in 1827. While I certainly don't advocate assigning a moral dimension to organization (it's a loaded enough issue as it is, y'all), I do like the axiom itself on a purely practical level.

That said, I think the first part of the saying gets ignored sometimes. It's certainly great for everything to be in its place, but first of all, it has to have a place to be. It has to have a home.

Check out this desk. Nice, right? Lots of open space with nothing interrupting it, plenty of room, none of the usual office-supply crap to break up all that space.

So... where do you put stuff? When you've done as much as you can with a project for the day, where do you put that project's folder? Where do you put the information you need to have on hand three days from now? Where do other people put stuff they want you to look at so they know you'll look at it?

If you're like most human beings, you put all that stuff "to the side," and we all know where that leads: piles. Before you know it, all that lovely open space is a distant memory as your desktop has been taken over by stacks of stuff.

A desk doesn't have to become a warren of cubbyholes and stacking baskets to have a home for everything, either. Most desks can get by with just an In/Out/To File sorter, a tickler file and a desktop box for action files. Like this desk, currently being enjoyed by my client Gail:

There's still space for her to spread out and work, but there are also homes for the stuff that's bound to pile up in the course of her work.

So as you sort through the papers, piles and other stuff around your workspace, be sure to create a home for everything you're keeping. (And remember: if you don't feel like creating a home for it, why are you keeping it?)

What sort of home-building experiences have you had as you organize your workspace? Let me know in the comments!

The power of the Inbox

I saw this video of David Allen's office system on Unclutterer earlier this week, and it reaffirmed to me how essential the Inbox is.

I've already written about the In/Out/To File sorter and how it functions as part of the Sorted Seven, but I don't think I've gone into what a difference the Inbox can make in your work and life.

In the video, Allen has quite a few information gathering tools (he calls them "buckets," which I've never liked for some reason): his PDA, his notebook, his voice recorder and his briefcase. But he has only one Inbox. There's a reason for that.

If you have a lot of places to look for new stuff, you're going to expend more time and mental energy looking for that stuff than using it. And the more sources of new stuff you have, the more imperative it is that they eventually go to one place.

It does take a few extra seconds to take the receipts out of your bag, to take the pages from the notebook, to fish out the recorder or PDA and put them in the Inbox. But you'd need to do that anyway if you were using them with no Inbox. And this way, you know exactly where they are. It's just that it takes a bit of extra effort to build up the habit of putting stuff in the Inbox, at first, anyway.

Another essential habit to build is visiting the Inbox several times a day and doing your best to empty it every day. As Allen says in the video, he sometimes has to keep stuff in the Inbox for a couple of days, but it's much easier to finally clean it out if the couple days' worth of stuff is the only stuff in there (and not the days' or weeks' worth of stuff that preceded it).

So yes, there is some initial effort and some very minor maintenance effort involved in maintaining the Inbox. But that time investment has some great returns:

• You will know where all your new information is rather than wondering if it's in that other folder or briefcase.
• You will have the resources you need to enter new information into your electronic or paper files rather than pausing to dig out your PDA.
• You won't have to ponder "What next?"; it's right there in your Inbox.
• Once you're comfortable with the system, you can explain it to other people so they'll know where to set new stuff in your office rather than risking it being buried in a pile.

One box (and one system, and the habit of using it) can do all that for you. It's a pretty good deal.

What about you? Have you embraced the Inbox, or have there been problems along the way? Let me know in the comments!

Organizing your desk? Talk to the hand

I'm going to be working with a local reporter on an article about desk organization soon, and one of the desks to be made over belongs to a very proud leftie. At first, I reviewed my desk organizing tips to make sure none of them were right-hand-centric, but I soon realized that while there might be some lingering anti-leftie sentiment in society at large (i.e., "sinister" comes from the Latin word for "left"), organizing principles are quite neutral when it comes to hands.

No matter which hand you use the most, you can customize your desktop to suit your natural inclinations.

1. Leave open space on the side of your dominant hand. Whichever hand you write with will need space to ... well, write things. If you're working on a computer and need to jot something down, it's much easier and faster, and less disturbing to your workflow, to extend your dominant arm a bit than to turn in your chair and write something on your nondominant side.

2. Have paper and writing implements on your dominant side. This kinda follows from point 1 there. The easier it is to capture a thought, the more likely that thought is to be captured thoroughly. 

3. Put your phone on the side of your nondominant hand. This leaves your dominant hand free to make notes (or play video poker) while you're on the phone, and saves you the trouble of transferring the handset and its cord over from your dominant side.

4. Keep your most important and frequently accessed files in the file drawer on the side of your dominant hand. If you go into certain file folders more than once a week, the time and flow interruption you'll save by keeping them on your dominant side can really add up.

5. Desktop files can go on either side. Personally, I find that keeping my In/Out/To File sorter and my SwiftFile on my nondominant side works well, but there aren't any hard and fast rules for this one.

I recently found a guide for purchasing an ergonomic computer desk that has some great diagrams showing the extent of most people's easy reach and grasping reach, and that info can serve as a guide for how far back on your desk to put the items you need the most. You can check it out here (the diagrams are halfway down the page).

As with any organizing principles, these can be modified to fit your needs. Remember, organizing is very personal; what matters is that your system works for you. So play around with the position of your desk items until you find the best arrangement for your hands and your working style.

Are there any lefties out there who've been frustrated by rightie-based desks? Let's talk hands in the comments!

In defense of the office

In creative fields, it's not completely unheard of for a professional not to have an office. Perhaps you do your creative work on your laptop in bed, or on the kitchen table between meals, or in a corner of the garage. And it's worked, mostly, so far... although the paper piles are starting to take up an entire side of the room along the floor there. And the shoebox of receipts has finally split a seam on one corner. Hmm. Maybe it's not working that well after all.

There's a strange idea among folks who like to create that having a designated work space will stifle creativity, kill spontaneity, turn creating into Work. But if the space is well planned and part of a supportive physical environment, the very opposite can be true: your creativity will be nurtured in a space where it can grow, your spontaneity won't be shut down by constant searches for the items you need, and when your environment supports you, creating becomes less like work and more like the stuff you were put here to do.

The office, in general, has gotten a bad rep. (My dad used to refer to his workplace as "the orifice." My mom Did Not Like That One Bit.) And in all too many cases, offices are badly designed, badly maintained, overstuffed... you get the point. But it doesn't have to be like that! And when you deliberately create your own workspace, you can ensure that it motivates you to do your best work -- and gives you the space you need to do so. (This is exactly what The Birth of an Office service provides.)

If you could design your ideal office space, artistic studio, workspace, etc., how would it look? How would it function? What would you include, and what would you most definitely leave out? (Note: these aren't rhetorical questions; lemme know what you think in the comments!)