Organize Your Space, Manage Your Time

    Clearly, the benefits of having an organized office are numerous and what shows, your commitment to having a place for everything and being able to find information quickly, can impress your colleagues. But the clarity it provides is really priceless. For many of us, it's not necessarily our ability to think strategically or even our knack for getting things done in a certain way that makes of relatively successful on the job. It's our skill at managing time that gets us through the day. A colleague recently made this point. And while in some ways it's quite obvious to me that my ability to squeeze in as much activity can make or break a project there are a few tricks that if put to good use can help me achieve what sometimes feels like the impossible.
    This sort of moves away from the physical aspects of organizing your office, but I think if you put some of these tips together you can really make a dent in managing not just your stuff but your time, too. In many ways, there's really just one common denominator and that is to do what I call "cherishing and honoring your work space." Okay, I can totally hear some of you snickering at my point of view here, but that's okay; I can take it. Sometimes I snicker at myself.
    But anyway, just as you might clear away the papers you no longer need (even if it actually hurts as you feed the sheets into your shredder or crumble them up in your fists) you need to decide which interruptions help you get your work done and those that absolutely must be avoided. We can always control those interruptions however. But with caller ID and email we're in a much better position than we used to be when it comes to managing our time. It takes a lot of self-discipline of course, but with practice you'd be amazed at how effective you will become at maintaining an organized space. How can that be? I think the two are related. If you can control the flow of paper then you can influence the stream of information, too. Naturally, that won't apply to everything, but that's part of prioritizing. I mentioned in an earlier post that I'm constantly toggling from one task to another. It's the nature of what I do. But if I need to focus on something for an hour before I migrate to another task, then that's what I do (most of the time). If the decks are clear (the surfaces around me and the flow of information be it a phone call or email) I can get through that hour more smoothly and probably get even more done than I originally had planned. For a nanosecond, I'm a winner and then it's on to the next challenge.
    So that's what I'm trying to do to enhance my productivity instead of wishing I simply had more time. Sure, time waits for no one but wishing for more of it rather than simply using it as wisely as I can rarely works to my advantage. How about you? Is there a relationship between the way you manage your time and organize your stuff? Please let me know.