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Staying Organized at Work: Achieve Your Goals, Prove Your Value

Guest post by: Alex Revai

Article Overview: What's your confidence in getting a job done by someone with a messy desk? How do you trust a person, who is consistently late for meetings? How do you depend on a team member, who is regularly missing important deadlines? Demonstrate your value to your peers and superiors by being punctual, reliable and well organized.

Staying Organized at Work: Achieve Your Goals, Prove Your Value

We all know (and live) the painful reality of the work place of today. Too much to do by too few resources. Email, information and interruption overload. Everything must be done right now, if not yesterday. No time to think, only to react. Stress, anxiety and burn-out. With all this whirlwind around you, how do you stay focused, calm and collected? How do you perform exceeding expectations? How do you prove your value and contribution to an organization?

There isn't a single, magic bullet solution. However, by implementing and following best organizing principles and practices, you will be way ahead of the game. Below are a few of the most important tips:

1. Create an effective filing system for all paper documents you must deal with. The goal is to keep all papers off your desk, other than the ones you are currently using. In order to accomplish this you need:

a. A permanent In-box, emptied out each and every day;

b. A filing drawer for temporary storage of all papers, which require some sort of an action by you. Label these hanging folders by the nature of the actions, such as "Read", "Write", "Call", "Pay", "Discuss", etc. This is also the place for your active project folders.

c. A filing cabinet for storing your files, which you keep for future reference;

2. Have a prioritized task list. All your to-dos must be captured in one place, ideally in the MS Outlook Task/To-Do list.

3. Your (Outlook) calendar must reflect all your time commitments, correctly and realistically showing the actual time period required for the particular tasks, calls, meetings and other planned activities. Remember: You cannot control time! You can only control what you (want to) do in a given time period. If it's not in your calendar, there is 75% chance "it" will not get done!

4. Plan for tomorrow, tonight. Look at your priorities (in your task list). Decide what you want or must do and allocate time in your calendar for its completion. Remind yourself in the calendar as to the file name of the action folder, which holds documents relating to a task in question. "Out of sight" - is the document hiding in its temporary folder, but NOT "out of mind" - because of your note in the calendar.

5. Create recurring calendar entries for processing your email, voicemail and paper-mail (In-box). Allocate specific time(s) in the day during which you will do nothing else, but decide what to with the information and where to store it. Remember the 4D-s of processing any information: Delete, Do, Delegate or Defer. Also remember: the only thing you are allowed to Do (during processing) is what takes < 2 minutes.

6. If you are using a PDA, such as a Blackberry or a Smart Phone, make sure to synchronize it with your Outlook every time you leave your PC (or the office). If you don't use such devices, print out 3 pages from your Outlook Calendar: Day-at-a-glance, Week-at-a-glance and Month-at-a-glance. Take these with you in order to be able to follow your activities and/or making new entries.

7. Develop the daily habits required for the above and the discipline to let your priorities and corresponding calendar entries drive your days. Not the email, not the phone and not the interruptions. The latter is a subject of its own. Suffice it to say that interruptions, by and large, occur to the extent you allow them to occur. If your job, company culture or boss is such that you are expected to be interrupted, you must leave (unallocated) time periods in your calendar for interruptions. I.e.: build in the padding, which allows you to complete your priority tasks, even if you were interrupted.

What messages are you broadcasting, when you follow the above recommendations?

Clean desk:

This person is organized and focused on the task in front of him. It's safe leaving documents in his/her in-box, as (s)he will deal with them daily.

Prioritized task list:

This person knows his goals and objectives and prioritizes tasks accordingly.

Calendar reflecting planned activities:

This person manages his time effectively and delivers commitments on time. (S)he is reliable and dependable.

Synchronized PDA:

This person is professional, and on top of her/his time and activities, even when away from the computer.

Staying organized and broadcasting the corresponding messages will ensure that you will be recognized as a valuable and dependable contributor to your organization. Hopefully, your career will progress accordingly.

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Article Tags: career advice, clean desk, discipline, effective filing, habits, planning, priorities, Staying organized, task list, time management



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