Term Definition Introduced In Chronic disorganization

Transcription

1 Control the Chaos and Clear out the Clutter Key Terms Term Definition Introduced In Chronic disorganization An individual's past and current attempts to become organized have failed, and therefore quality of life has suffered because of consistent disorderliness Module 1 Drag tasks A priority category that is of low benefit and requires high effort Module 4 Fill-ins A priority category that is of low benefit and requires low effort Module 4 Habitual disorganization An individual's tendency to be disorganized on a consistent basis Module 1 Historical disorganization An individual's disorderliness which was learned from the past; either from home, school, or early on in ones career Module 1 Magic box A file folder or other storage container to place miscellaneous information that does not have its own file folder and isn't ready to be thrown away Module 2 Major tasks A priority category that is of high benefit and requires high effort Module 4 Mini agenda An abbreviated version of the same type of agenda you might use for in-person meetings in order to keep focus during phone conversations Module 5 Quick-win A priority category that is of high benefit and requires low effort Module 4 Situational disorganization An individual's disorderliness caused by a sudden overwhelming project or personal issue which eventually will be resolved in the short-term Module 1 SMART goals An acronym used to create effective objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timebound objectives) Module 3 Social disorganization An individual's disorderliness which stems from a group environment and desire to look busy and important Module 1 Tickler system A time-sensitive system filing system for assignments that need to be worked on, but don't need immediate attention Module 2

2 CONTROL THE CHAOS AND CLEAR OUT THE CLUTTER MODULE ONE CLUTTER AND DISORGANIZATION Male: Clutter and Chaos. Why? Why do we go through such a challenge keeping things organized, keeping things under control? Why is there so much clutter and chaos in our lives? We re going to talk in a few minutes about types of disorganization that contribute to all of this. But before I even get there, I want to talk to another contributor to the disorganization, or the clutter and chaos in our lives these days, and that s the distractions that we have. We find it so much harder to focus because there are so many things to draw our attention away from what we re supposed to be focused on. And what I m referring to are things like drop-ins people just dropping by to say hi, phone calls, s all those have been around quite a while. But more prevalent today are things that go beyond the drop-ins, the phone calls, the s. We now and texts, Facebook posts, Linked-In updates, Tweets, not to mention every time you open up your web browser, do you have your home page defaulted to something like CNN or ESPN or something similar to that where you re bombarded with all these different inputs from sports to news to economics to the financial world? How are you supposed to bring up a web browser and not be distracted by what s on there? That s the whole point to the page, was to draw your attention to something. You might have just opened up your web browser to do something completely different. So it s these distractions that are keeping us from being completely organized. And we need to find ways to filter these distractions out, to keep them away from us. Because otherwise, we re going to struggle day in and day out to stay focused on what we need to stay focused on. And without the focus, we are stuck with clutter and chaos. The other thing I want to talk to you about is remember the Page 1

3 disorganization that we feel, the disorganization that we go through, is both physical and mental. We have the physical aspects of our lives, which get cluttered paper and equipment and all different things. But then we also have the mental clutter the things that are in our head that just don t seem to stop, these stimulations that don t allow us to stay focused on anything. So now let s get into the different types of disorganization that have been defined. The first one is situational disorganization. What they re referring to here is an overwhelming project or personal issues. In other words, you re disorganized because of some specific situation, whether it be a project that is due within a couple of days and is just overwhelming you, so you have a tendency to focus on just that, and the other things have a tendency to fall by the wayside, thus creating clutter and chaos; or personal issues. Maybe you have something personal going on in your life that is keeping you from focusing on what needs to be done. The good thing about this, though, is it s situational. It will eventually be over and you will be able to get back to getting things organized and in control. So that s kind of a good one. Habitual disorganization. This is just your habits. And this going to be a big thing we ll talk about throughout our time today is habits bad habits. What I m referring to here is that we have a tendency to have some bad habits, like we avoid tasks that we don t want to do. Or we have a tendency to overschedule ourselves. This is something we do on a consistent basis. It s a habit. And those are the things that we need to change. Those are the habits we will discuss throughout today on how to get those bad habits out of us. Then you have historical disorganization, which personally I think is similar to habitual. Historical disorganization is defined as learned. Whether you learned it from home, you learned it from school, or you learned it early on in your career in the business world, it Page 2

4 is learned. But I really would draw a lot of parallels - a lot of similarities - between habitual and historical because I think what you learn are bad habits. And then you have social disorganization. Social disorganization is really a situation where you re affected by the social environment. So in other words, your desk is cluttered and full of paper because in your mind, that s a sign of a hard worker. It s almost like a badge of honor to those others around you to say look how hard I m working. Look at how much I have going on. To that, you have that concept of keeping up with the Joneses. This is more on the personal side, I would say. But you accumulate a lot of stuff. And you buy stuff that you really don t need or want because you re sort of trying to keep up with the Joneses. You re trying to keep up with your neighbors. You re trying to keep up with your friends. And you end up buying things you don t really need, and it clutters up your house. Then the last one that they define here is a chronic disorganization. Now this is according to the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization. The definition of chronic disorganization is having a past history of disorganization in which self-help efforts to change have failed and an undermining of current quality of life due to disorganization and the expectation of future disorganization. In other words, you ve got a problem. And chronic disorganization, what they're basically saying is no matter how much you try, you seem to always stay disorganized. And that is one that is very, very difficult to get out of. So we re going to focus more on the top ones. How do we deal with the first four situational, habitual, historical, and social. We re going to look at systems to break ourselves out of this disorganization and get us organized and in control and get rid of the clutter and the chaos. Now keep in mind we have different types of things that get cluttered. I mentioned this earlier. We have the physical items Page 3

5 that get cluttered around our house, around our offices. We also have digital information that gets cluttered. Just like your office gets cluttered with files and papers, your gets cluttered with s or with just the same type of information as pieces of paper. Or your computer itself gets cluttered with Word files, Excel files, photos, videos, all those different types of things. And I would also say that there s a certain amount of mental clutter too many things you re trying to keep up in your head; too many things you re trying to remember, you re trying to deal with. And the way we learn not deal with each one of those will help you figure it out. The techniques we use to improve our physical environment can also be used for digital and mental. I just want to go through some of the thoughts that stop us from being organized, that stop us from being in control. One of them is you have no objectives or plans. You just kind of take life as it comes. Basically life controls you; you don t control life. Now I understand you can t control everything. I get that, and I m not saying you should try. But what I m saying is that you should try to get some control. Rather than just let life control you and dictate what happens, maybe you should try to create some objectives or plans to try and have control over what s going on. We also have - again we re going to go back to some bad habits. Here are things you may hear yourself either saying out loud or saying right inside your own head to try and keep you from doing what you know you need to do to be organized. I have to leave things laying around to remember to do them. Think about that. I have to leave pieces of paper or other things laying around in order for me to remember to do them. So I have to clutter up my office so that I remember to take care of things. You need a better system. That s what that means. You need a better way to keep control of what you need to accomplish. I put things on Page 4

6 my to-do list and I still don t do them. Okay, well you try and solve the first issue. So you re putting things on a to-do list, but then you don t get them done. You know why you don t get them done? Because you don t live with that to-do list. You don t review it on a consistent basis. Your to-do lists your lists of tasks and to-do items needs to be reviewed yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily. And we ll get into that in a lot more detail later. But in the end, you should live with it. You should always be updating it all throughout the day, and you should be referring to it all throughout the day. Or I can t get rid of this because it s special. You ever get that? That happens I think more at home than I think at work. But I can t get rid of it because it s special to me in some way, shape, or form. Also, I can t get rid of this. It costs too much. You don t use it. You don t need it. You re probably never going to use it. But you don t want to get rid of it because you spent a lot of money on it. I have to admit, I get caught up on this all the time. I spent so much money on it. It s hard to just throw it in in the garbage. But the truth of the matter is no matter how much you spent on it, it only has value if you re going to use it. So keep that in mind. I can t put it away. If I do that, I ll never find it again. That screams you need a new system because that means when you put it away, you don t know where you put it, which means you ve got to design a better system so that when you put things away, you know where you put them. Now we re going to move into the realm now of more being overwhelmed. I don t know where to start. I don t know what to do with all of this stuff. And that, again, can be home, it can be office, it can be either one. But the bottom line is you re overwhelmed by the clutter that is facing you. And rather than jump in and get started, you re looking for an excuse to not do it. So you basically say I don t know where to start, so forget it. I m not going Page 5

7 to do it. And that is a pattern, and that is something you need to break out of. And the only way to break out of that is just a little bit of discipline and push yourself to just grab a piece of paper, pull an , whatever it is and start doing it. [End of recording.] Page 6

8 CONTROL THE CHAOS AND CLEAR OUT THE CLUTTER MODULE TWO GETTING STARTED Male: Getting Started. One of the ways that we need to get started is first by setting up a place for everything. So we ve got to take our environment before we can clear up the clutter and get rid of the chaos, we need to put systems into place so that when we start to clean up, we have places to put things. And we start with our first concept and most important concept, which is you need a place for everything. Whether it be cleaning up your house, cleaning up your office, getting ready with paperwork, the bottom line is when you pick something up, you have to have a place to put it. You need some system in place in order to put that item away. And we re going to start this off with probably one of the most challenging tasks, which is your office paperwork. We seem to go through, even with computers and supposedly we were going paper free, remember that concept? Computers were going to make things paper free. Well, it s not. And we still need to figure out what to do with our office paperwork. So we re going to start right then and there. We re going to start with our office paperwork. And we re going to start with a filing system. Everybody knows you need some sort of filing system. It s been around for so long that we barely even think about it anymore. And that s sort of the problem. Everybody just thinks okay, I ll take out a manila folder. I ll write what I want to store in there, and I put it away. And I m done. The problem with that is you don t think it out. You don t plan it out. And just like with so many other things in our lives like projects and goal and tasks, we don t think about what we re doing before we do it. We just do it. And that s one of the biggest mistakes we made. We have to take a step back and look at what we re doing and figure out a plan for it. So when we talk about a filing system, we have to stop and not just start Page 1

9 throwing things into folders, and think through what we need to file and how it is the best way to file it. And to do that, I m going to ask the question this way how will you be looking for this in the future? So if I have a piece of paper in my hand, and let s say it s an invoice from a vendor. Okay, great. It makes sense. I ll just throw it into the vendor file. Or maybe I just throw it in the invoice file. But that may not be the best way to do it, and the reason for that is what if it is an invoice for something that was purchased for a specific project? So six months from now when you start to evaluate the project, are you going to be looking for that invoice? And are you going to have to look in all the different invoice files or all the different vendor files to find all the invoices that relate to a specific project? Well, that s what you d have to do. So the question is, how might you be looking for this invoice later? And I know you re probably going to say, well Michael, I don t know. Six months from now I could be looking for it based on vendor, I could be looking for it based on project. And I agree with that. But you have to kind of do some sort of I m not going to say guesswork, but you re going to have to make some assumptions. Statistically speaking, it s more likely that I m going to be looking for this based on the vendor name, or statistically speaking it s more logically I would be looking for it based on project. And based on the answer to that is then how I m going to set up my filing system. And I don t want to create more paperwork. But there could be an argument made that maybe you make a photocopy and store it both in the vendor file and in the project file. That s a decision that you re going to need to make. But do you see what I m saying? You ve got to think this through and plan it out, just like you d plan out a project, just like you d plan out your to-do list or your task schedules. You need to take a step back, think about it, and plan it out so that way when you pick up a piece of Page 2

10 paper, you already know where that paper should be going. You re not sort of making it up as you go along, because when you make it up as you go along, you have a tendency to forget what you did last week with that type of piece of paper, and then do something different with that exact same type of information differently this week. And then six months from now, you have no idea how you might have stored it, because you stored it at least two or three different ways. So stop, think about it, plan it out, and then build it. And building it is you have file cabinets, you have file drawers, you have hanging folders, you have manila folders. And that s the structure you should be building from. Now in our digital world when we have digital files, whether they be PDFs, Word documents, Excel documents doesn t really matter. How do we do that, how do we design a filing system for digital information? And I would strongly encourage you to mimic your physical structure with your digital structure. You build your folders the same way you re going to build your folders in your file cabinet. You just build digital folders. Again, starting with a file cabinet or the initial level of folders; then your second level of folder is the same as the fact that you re going to have drawers; your third level of folders is going to be the same as a hanging folder; and the final level of folder should be your manila folders. I really don t encourage you to go much beyond that. The more structure you put in, the more folders you put in, the deeper it goes. And we know in technology, I don t need to stop at the file cabinet drawer, hanging folder, folder level. I could go two, three, four, maybe even 50 folders deeper. But is that really going to be effective? Am I really going to be able to find anything? And that s debatable. So I would encourage you not to get too deep in your digital folders just because you can. And I actually would strongly encourage you to Page 3

11 match your digital folders with your physical filing system and folders. Now we ve designed this file system for the files that we know, or the information that we know we need to store. But have you ever noticed that as you re filing things away, again whether it be digitally or physically, you always get left over with something, and you re looking at it going it doesn t quite fit in my filing system. I don t really know that I need to keep this long-term, which is why I would put it in my filing system. But I m not really ready to throw it out. So what do I do with it? And what happens? It ends up sitting on the corner of your desk in a pile. And the pile gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and it just starts to give the office an image of being cluttered. And to some degree, it is a little bit. Well what do we do with those files? How do we make a system or a structure so that we work with those files? And this is an idea that I ve heard from others, and I think it s a phenomenal idea. It s called a magic box. And it doesn t magically make things disappear or it doesn t magically make things happen. It s just a box that we store these papers, these pieces of information that we don t really know where to go with them. So all it is, is very simply, you ve got a box a physical box, preferably paper-size. And when you have a piece of paper like I just described where it doesn t really fit your filing system, but you re not ready to throw it out you re just not sure what to do with it you put it in the box. And I would encourage you to put it in the box face down so that you end up with a chronological order going up. And then what you do is depending on how often you get these types of documents and how often you may need to review it, but on a regular basis whether it be weekly, monthly, or every three months, or every six months, you take that box out and you flip it over so that the papers come out with the oldest one on top and the newest one on the bottom, and you go through it. And you Page 4

12 make the decision whether or not it goes back in the box, goes into your filing system, or goes into the garbage. Has it been taken care of? Do I still need it? You make that decision at that point. And you do that on a regular basis. And that s the way to clean that out and not end up with piles on your desk because you put it in a box, and then you put the box underneath your desk. Now what about the digital environment? Do the exact same thing. You create a folder in your system. You create a folder on your desktop or in your file system. And you call it, if you d like magic box and you put the files in there and you do the exact same thing. You review it on an ongoing basis, and you decide whether you keep it or get rid of it. And another thing I want to talk about, another system I want to talk about is a tickler system. This is a time-sensitive system. This is so if I come up with something that I m not filing away for information, I m not putting it in my magic box, it s something I need to work on, but I don t need to work on it now. It s something that I may need to work on a few days from now, a few weeks from now, a few months from now, or maybe a year or two from now. So I want to do something with it that it reminds me at that time I need to work on it. So a tickler system is this. First of all, you get 30 folders one for each day of the month. I guess for those months you have 31 days, I guess you need 31 folders, huh. And then you need 12 folders for each month, and then maybe two or three additional folders for each year. What you re going to do is you re going to take those 31 folders and you re going to number them 1 through 31. Anything that is due this month on a specific day, like the 15 th or the 17 th or the 20 th you re going to put in the corresponding folder. If it s not due or it s not something you want to work on till. Next month or three months from now, well then you re going to put it in those monthly folders. And then of course if it s not Page 5

13 due or not something you re going to work on until next year, you put it in the yearly folder. Then what you do is obviously the daily folders are what you look at each and every day because in them have time sensitive information, or time sensitive items that you need to look at. And at the beginning of every month, you take out the new monthly folder. So if we re in May, on June 1 st I take out the June folder and I take everything and put it in the corresponding days. Likewise on January 1 st, I take out the yearly folder and I put it all into its corresponding monthly folders. Now I mentioned that we would put them into their due dates or the date you want to action them. I like the name tickler because I would strongly encourage you to not put these items into the folders for when they re due, but put them in the folder for when you want to start auctioning them. If it s due on the 20 th of this month, you may not want to work on it on the 20 th. You may want to work on it on the 15 th. And that s why I think it s not just a due date system. It s a tickler system. It s to remind you that you need to action it. But if you put it in the due date folder, you re not going to see it until its due date, and you may need to be working on it before that. So think about that. And digitally, you don t necessarily need all the folders, do you? Because you can make things date sensitive. So if it s Word files or Excel files or PDFs, yeah, you may need to do the same folder-type system. Just do it digitally. If you re using , then in Outlook, as an example, you can flag something for follow-up. So rather than having to file it away in different folders, I can have one folder, and then just mark that for follow-up on the day that I want to follow up. And that actually then saves me a lot of time because it will remind me the day that I m supposed to action it. And again, I emphasize the word tickler should mean when you want to action it not when your due date is. They should be Page 6

14 two separate dates. You ll see later when we talk about tasks and to-do items, this tickler date becomes even more prevalent. And you should have a tickler date along with a due date. Okay, so now we ve talked about office paperwork and office not just paperwork, but your s, your files on your computer finding ways to structure them better. Another thing I want to talk about is the general space in your office and your home. Again, we want to clear out the clutter. We don t want so much stuff hanging around. So we want to find a place for everything. So when you start straightening up your office or your home, you re going to start by devising places to put things. And here s what I want you to think about, though, when you do that. You need to try and anticipate your future needs. I know it s not easy to do. But if you are a book enthusiast and you read a lot of books and you buy a lot of books, then buying a bookcase and filling it up doesn t make you more organized, does it? Because as soon as you buy that next book, where are you putting it? And when you buy three books a week, where are they all going? So you need to anticipate your future needs. And that goes with your filing system we just discussed, it goes with books and bookcases, it goes with trinkets around your home, it goes with pictures on your walls it all adds together in the fact that if you don t anticipate some of your future needs, then you ll be clean and clutter-free today, but then you will be cluttered back up in a very short period of time because as new things come in, you have no place to go with them. Some will tell you to only fill up 90 percent of your space leave 10 percent for growth, as I ve been talking about with anticipating your future needs. I don t like this concept of 90 percent because it s too structured. I like the idea that you think about the situation. If I m a book enthusiast, well then I need more than 10 percent empty space for my books Page 7

15 because I buy a lot. If I m not a book enthusiast, or I use a Kindle, well then you know what? Ten percent may be enough because I m only going to pick up a book once every couple of months. So you have to think about that kind of scenario. Same with your filing system. You want to have more than 10 percent of free space to put files away, especially if you re in a company that still generates a lot of paper files. So think about that. Think about finding a place for everything and anticipating your future needs, and leaving open space for those future needs. Now do you do this one time? Do you do it regularly? That s your personality, I ve got to be honest with you. Because once you ve designed this system, and then you ve gone ahead and organized all your existing stuff into this new system, well if you re disciplined and you only touch it once, which we re going to talk about a lot in a little while, and if you are good at what we talk about later and you really only touch it once so as soon as you get it, you either, well you do one of the four D s, which I ll talk about in a little while. But the bottom line is you get rid of it. Either you got rid of it, you filed it, whatever you need to do with it. Then you know what? You don t need to regularly reorganize your house or reorganize your office. If you re like me where I have a tendency to not keep up on everything on a daily or hourly basis, then what I do is I regularly go through and straighten things back up. And what regularly means, it s up to you. It could be daily, it could be weekly, could be monthly it all depends on you. But I do believe that no matter how good you are, you re still going to need a regular point where you go through everything, as we talked about. You want to go through your magic box. You want to go through your tickler system at least once a month and reassign things into the appropriate folders. Then you really want to make sure that everything is put away. Page 8

16 [End of recording] Page 9

17 CONTROL THE CHAOS AND CLEAR OUT THE CLUTTER MODULE THREE ORGANIZING OUR PROJECTS, GOALS AND OBJECTIVES, TASKS, AND TO-DO ITEMS Male: Organizing our Projects, Goals and Objectives, Tasks, and To-Do Items. Let s start with goals and objectives, which is the basis for project management. So we want to define our goals and objectives. Why do we want to start there? Well, before we can really get control over our to-do items our tasks, things that we want to accomplish we have to know where we re going first. Again, as I mentioned earlier when we were talking about our filing system, we can t just take a piece of paper and say yeah, I should file it this way, because that may not make sense in the grand scheme. So sometimes we have to, again, take that step back. And that s what I m talking about here, is rather than just jump in and start doing my tasks and my to-do items, I want to take a step back and look what are my goals and objectives? What am I trying to accomplish? So we have to define those first because once we define those, then we can define the tasks that are needed in order to accomplish them. Bringing order, bringing structure to what we re trying to do, which will make us more efficient, more effective, and really will clear out this clutter and chaos that we re going through. Now goals and objectives they may be self-defined or they may be assigned to you. What I mean by that is, depending on your role either at work or at home, somebody may be deciding for you what your goals and objectives are. At work, your boss may be giving you a project that has clear goals and objectives. Likewise if you re like me where you re self-employed, you may be building your own goals and objectives. The bottom line is, though, you need them. So whether they re given to you or you develop them, they should follow a standard measure. They should follow a Page 1

18 standard an acronym that I call SMART. And it s a very common phrase that s out there SMART. What does it mean? For every goal and objective, it should be S Specific. What is it you re trying to accomplish? You need to be clear on that. M it should be Measured. In other words, when do I know it s done? Can I say it s done? If I say I m going to build a 50-foot bridge, well it s measured. Is it 50 feet long? Yeah. Okay. It also must be agreed upon. And that doesn t mean that I m going to get a bunch of people and we re all going to say, yeah, we all agree that this is what we should do. No. It should be agreed upon that we understand what the goal and objective is. If your boss gives you a goal and objective, then the two of you must agree what that goal is. Otherwise, you ll be doing something different than what he intended. So it s got to be specific, measured, agreed upon, and then R it needs to be Reasonable. Can you actually do it? There are things that are unreasonable. I m going to improve sales by 500 percent in three days. Chances are real good that s not reasonable, depending on your business of course. But generally speaking, that s not reasonable. To say you re going to increase sales 500 percent in a year or three or five, that may be more reasonable something that s actually accomplishable. And then it also must be Time-framed. There has to be a timeframe involved. It can t be just an ongoing process. A goal or objective has to be something that finishes. So again, it needs to be SMART Specific, Measured, Agreed-Upon, Reasonable, and Time- Framed. If you use those to evaluate every goal and objective, you will find that you have a better chance at achieving that goal and objective. When you leave off things like time-framed, or you leave off something like it s measured, well then you never really know if it s done. And you have a hard time if it s not time-formed or measured, Page 2

19 you have a hard time getting people to agree upon what it is it really is supposed to be accomplished with this goal and objective. Now once you ve got your goals and objectives, now you need to start writing up your lists your lists of to-do items or tasks. When it comes to goals and objectives, I like to call them tasks, not to-do items. People use the two words interchangeably and I understand that. For our discussion today, I want us to think of tasks as items for goals and objectives, and to-do items are separate, and I ll explain that in a second. So you re going to take your goal and objective, you re going to take each one separately each goal and objective separately and you re going to write out the tasks that need to be accomplished to achieve that goal or objective. And that s going to be your task list. Then to-do items. A to-do item for our discussion today I m defining as something you need to do that is not related to a goal or objective. There are plenty of things that we get every single day that is not assignable to a project or a goal or an objective. It s just a day to day thing that we need to take care of. So I call those to-do items. So then what we want to do is end up with a list of our tasks for our goals and objectives, and a list of our to-do items. Then those lists get merged together. This is where computerized tools will help you tremendously because if you re writing this up freehand, then you have to rewrite it all to put them all together. You re going to find tremendous benefit with technology. And as we move on to the next couple of steps, you ll see how doing this longhand can be labor intensive almost too labor intensive. So now I have my list of my tasks and my to-do items. And now I want to put together a prioritization sheet. What I m looking to do here is actually assign four different properties related to prioritization so that I can eventually schedule these items to be accomplished. And the first thing we re going to Page 3

20 put on there is a standard priority. Most systems, most people use some sort of priority, whether it be 1 through 3, 1 through 5, 1 through 10 depending on who you re working with and who you re interacting with depends on what the standard is. But you do need to have a priority. And you really should work with those that you re working with to define what a priority 1 is versus what a priority 5 is. Or if you re using a 1 to 10 method, what priority 1 is, what priority 10 is, and then everything else in the middle. So priority 1 should be a standard thing. It should not be I assign something a priority 1, which actually has a different meaning than my colleague who has a priority 1. They should have the same basic concepts. Then you should have your due date. That is the date that this is due to be done not the date you want to work on it, but the date that it s due, the date that you have to turn this in by. And the next is the tickler date, like we talked about earlier. This is the date that you want to action the item, that you want to work on this item. So you need a priority, a due date, a tickler date, and then here s a new concept which is called a priority category. What this is, in your handout we have a quadrant system. Along the bottom, we have effort, and along the left side going up we have benefit. So it s a correlation between how much effort do I have to put into it, and how much benefit do I get out of it? And I have basically four quadrants, or four priority categories. You should see this in your handout, but I m going to describe them anyway. A task or to-do item that has low effort and low benefit is called a fill-in task. A drag, or a drag task or to-do, has low benefit, high effort. It means I have to put a lot of time and effort into this, and it really gives me very little benefit out. Then I have what I call quick wins a quick win task or to-do. That is something that has high benefit, but low effort. I don t have to put a lot of time and effort into it. Then Page 4

21 we have our standard tasks, or our major tasks. Those are the items that take a lot of time and effort, but also have a lot of benefit to them so when we re doing this, when we start to work on building out a prioritization sheet for each task and to-do item, we re going to end up with a priority, a due date, a tickler date, and a priority category. And you re asking, why do I need so many different ways to look at the same task or to-do item? Can t I just say what I want to do first, what I want to do second? Yeah, you can. This is just how to schedule your items out more efficiently, more effectively. And what you re going to do is you re going to look at these items, and you re going to look at them based on these four categories in different views so that you can identify those items that fit best inside your schedule, and when to schedule these items. [End of recording.] Page 5

22 CONTROL THE CHAOS AND CLEAN OUT THE CLUTTER MODULE FOUR PLANNING AND SCHEDULING Male: Planning and Scheduling. Now that we ve put our list together and we have a list of our to-do items, our tasks, now how do we take that and how do we plan that out? How do we schedule it? Because I still now just have a jumbled list of things I need to work on and it s a list that can still be very chaotic. So how do I now put that into a schedule that puts me in control of what s going on? And the first thing we need to talk about is when to review the lists. What I talked about earlier, one of the barriers to getting yourself organized, especially when it comes to to-do items and tasks, is that I put it on my to-do list, but it never seems to get done. And that s because you re not reviewing your list on a consistent basis. So when should you review your list? And I m here to tell you I think your list should be reviewed daily. That s your task list. Your goals and objectives should be reviewed along with your tasks both weekly and monthly. So monthly you should take broader view of what do I want to accomplish? Which of my goals and objectives are we going to get accomplished this month? And then each week, you want to break it down further and say okay, which of my tasks of my goals and objectives do I need to get done this week to maintain or stay on schedule to get my goals and objectives accomplished for the month? Then every day, you ve got to work on those individual tasks. And you need to review the tasks that need to be done and schedule them out. What does that mean, schedule them out, Michael? I usually just have a list, and I ve got my priorities, and I work on my top priority first, then the second priority and the third priority, and I get that. And a lot of times, that is a very difficult way to go about it. What do I mean by that? Well, you ve got to factor in how long it takes you to get things done. You can t just do the number one priority because Page 1

23 then you re going to spend hours and hours and hours working on your number one priority while other things that may not be as high a priority, but still need to get accomplished, are left sitting on the wayside. They become the clutter, don t they? So we have to keep our viewpoint on everything. So how do we do that? We do that by sorting through our lists. If you recall in our last module, in our last section, we talked about we re not just going to give it priority. We re not just going to give it a due date. We re also going to give it a tickler date and a priority category. And once I ve done that, now when I start to build out my days, as I now start to plan my days, it becomes more obvious what I should be doing. Now one of the things that you may have thought about was, well Michael you said apply the tickler date. Apply the priority category. Sometimes that s not as easy to do. And I agree with that. Sometimes the tickler date is not something you can put in on a global level. Well, I ve got goals and objectives that reach out a year in advance. I can't take every task and put tickler dates on them. No, I agree with that. And sometimes it comes down to a monthly review, your weekly review, in order for you to start assigning those tickler dates. But it s during these reviews that we ensure that our priority codes are correct, our due dates are correct, our tickler dates are either in there and are correct, and our priority categories are correct, because now I ve got my list, I m comfortable with my list, I have all the information. Now I need to start sorting through it to figure out what I m going to work on. Now from a monthly standpoint, the first sort I would do on a monthly standpoint is I m going to go and sort everything out by goal and objective. What does that mean? Well, my to-do items are going to fall off, aren t they? Yeah, because in this view, I m going to look at my goal this specific goal or objective and I m going to look at the task associated, Page 2

24 and what s my status? Where am I? Am I ahead of schedule? Am I behind schedule? Am I making progress? Because on a monthly basis, I want to get a sense of where am I with this. Do I need to change the priority on some of these tasks because I m behind schedule? Do I need to change their due dates? And next I m going to sort it by due date and priority. And that is a way also to help you set up your tickler dates because based on its priority and based on its due date, that s when I m going to decide where am I going to action this? When am I going to action this? When do I want to put the first date that I m going to start looking at this item and working on it? Then I may sort it by the priority category so that I can reassign the tickler date. Michael, you re starting to confuse me. Why would you do that? Well think about it. If you have something that s a quick win, but based on its due date and its priority, the tickler date is set up for, I don t know, a week out, two weeks out. But when you sort it and you realize that based on its priority category, then it s a quick win. I could make someone real happy, and it s really not going to take me a whole lot of time. Well, I may want to change that tickler date and make it a couple of days out rather than a couple of weeks out because it s a quick win. It s a way that I can use a very little bit of time and get a large benefit out of it. So that s why you re going to use those priority categories then to possibly reassign your tickler dates. Then you re going to sort it by the tickler date to identify when the work is to be done, because now that I ve gone and looked at my goals and objectives and I ve looked at my due dates and priority and I ve looked at my priority categories, basically now my tickler date should be the day that I m going to actually work on this item. Am I done? From my perspective, no. A lot of people, again, could just work right off that priority list that list that we ve just done. And if you re sorting it out by Page 3

25 tickler date, you now have a real good sense of what you should be working on on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. But now you have to fit that into your schedule. Why, Michael? Well, you ve got to make sure that the tickler dates that you ve assigned, that you have not overwhelmed yourself. You have not given yourself more to do on Monday than you could really accomplish, or you haven t given yourself enough work to do on Tuesday. And then what happens when you don t give yourself enough work to do? And you say, well I get a break. Yes and no. There s a school of thought out there that says if you don t push yourself to accomplish things, you won t. So in other words, if you under-schedule yourself, you ll underperform, whereas if you overschedule yourself, you re going to overwhelm yourself and again, you re going to under-perform. It s about trying to find a nice, delicate balance so that you re as productive as possible. You re controlling your to-do lists. You re controlling what s going on it s not controlling you. So the next thing I need to do is take that list, sort it by my tickler date, and start putting it in to my calendar. Now once I start putting it into my calendar, I ve got to tell you. Your tasks, your to-do items, they re not the first items to go into your calendar. The first thing in your calendar should be your set appointments, meetings, whether it be recurring meetings with your boss, whether it be a special meeting on a project, whether it be a doctor s appointment these are date and time specific events that need to be in there. They re not movable. Others are involved. That s when you have to do those specific things. So you re going to put those in first. The next thing you re going to put into your schedule is your recurring items. And the first recurring item I m going to encourage you to put in there is your scheduling. You need to schedule time to schedule yourself. So you should have time Page 4

26 on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis to review your lists, review your schedules, and adjust or assign as necessary. Obviously your monthly review or schedule is going to take longer than your weekly, and your weekly is going to take longer than your daily. Now when do you schedule these? This is completely up to you. On a daily basis, some people prefer to do it the night before so that they organize everything for the day, they think about what they re going to do tomorrow, so when they come in tomorrow they just hit the ground running. Others, like myself, would prefer when I get in in the morning to reevaluate everything that happened yesterday, plan my day out and get started. It s a matter of preference. The next thing you want to schedule, the next recurring item that I encourage you to schedule, is taking time to do your s, your voic s, and your paperwork. Yes, you need to assign time to do that, because as much as we talked about goals and objectives and tasks and to-do items, nothing of what we discussed up to this point included the ability or the time that s necessary to go through all your s, listen to voic s, file paperwork and deal with paperwork, or return phone calls. So you need to schedule time. And I would strongly encourage you, do not underestimate this. And learn from your experience. If you schedule a half-hour a day to go through s, voic s and paperwork, but it s really taking you an hour and a half, well guess what? You better start scheduling yourself an hour and a half. Otherwise you re always going to be late, and what s the point? As much as you d like to get it done in a half hour, there may be just too much work. So schedule yourself appropriately. Don t underestimate. But like I mentioned also, you don t want to overestimate. Don t give yourself two hours to do something you know is only going to take you about an hour. Schedule yourself appropriately. Now how do I handle the rest? Page 5

27 Well now, we re going to look at my tickler date, and I m also going to go back and look again at my priority category. Why? Well think of it this way. Think of filling up your schedule like filling up a bucket. I ve put in my meetings. I ve put in my recurring items let s call those rocks. And now I m going to put in my major items, my major tasks. And those are going to be rocks as well, aren t they? Because you re filling up the space you need to take because you need two hours or three hours to work on this task. You need an hour or three or four to work on that task. These are the big items that you really need to find joined time time together. Because you don t want to spend an hour and then do something else, and then come back to it an hour later. The productivity loss is great when you stop and start, stop and start, stop and start. So you want to keep those contiguous. You want a task, and you want to work on it for two, three, four hours in a block. So those you want to put in next. And then you want to fill in the quick wins. If we re going with the concept of a bucket, and we put rocks in, now all the space in between the rocks is where I can put my sand. So even though a quick win is not due for two weeks, when I get done putting in two hours for this project, an hour for that meeting, four hours for this project, I might then have a half-hour here and a 20-minutes there. And in those spaces, I can then take a quick win that maybe is two weeks out, but I can get it done today or tomorrow. I can fit it in this week. So now you want to take those quick wins and fill them in. And then the last one is the fill in tasks. That s like putting water in that bucket, because now I have my rocks, then I have my sand, and I can still fit water in between all of that, can t I? And those are my fill-in tasks. Those are those little to-do items that don t take a lot of time, don t have a lot of benefit, but they just sort of fill in the time in between everything else. And what didn t I Page 6

28 speak about? I didn t speak about my drag tasks those ones that just drag along and they just have little benefit, but they require a lot of work. I m sorry to tell you, you have to work those in. And I would work those in earlier on when you re assigning your major tasks. And you ve got to be careful of these drag tasks because your tendency is going to be to avoid them. And those are the ones that have a tendency to come back and bite you because they don t have a lot of benefit, so you lower the priority on them. And they take a lot of time, so you lower the priority and try to avoid doing them. But then those are the ones that end up coming back to bite you because you ignored them so long, they become a major problem. They may not have a major benefit, but now they ve gone the other way and they became a major negative. So be aware of that and make sure you schedule those in there as well. And again, let s just go back to our bucket scenario. If you put your rocks in first, then your sand, then your water - major tasks, drag tasks, quick wins, fill-in tasks you have a better way to make an efficient use of that space in the bucket. And if you think about it, what if I put the sand in first? And then I put the water in? Is there much room left for the rocks? Not really. Now the rocks probably are sticking out over the top. You can t find blocks of time good enough to do those major wins and those drag tasks. Now related to that whole prioritization situation, I would also encourage you don t schedule 100 percent of your time. You should not fill that bucket all the way to the rim. Why is that? Because whether we like it or not, interruptions, as much as we try to avoid them, are going to happen. Your boss is going to walk into your office. You can t kick him out. You can t lock your door and not let your boss in. It s going to happen. So you ve got to schedule time, or not schedule time. You need to leave enough free time around for you to be able to deal Page 7