Gerry Cueto

Part I | Part II

You’ve probably heard the cliché, “getting organized starts with organizing your mind.” I believe this to be true, so my goal is to come up with a mental solution for every feeling of disappointment, frustration, apathy, or boredom that could creep up to stop me from organizing my workspace. I used some of the concepts from my “Finding a Meaningful Career” article to help me come up with some of these ideas.

Figure out what’s junk and what’s necessary

I’ve had all these papers, from a college fraternity, lying around, and I wasn’t quite sure if I would need them later on. I realized that if I was ever to go back again, I could throw away the copies I have now and get new copies whenever I decide to rejoin. Sometimes a little critical thought about the junk lying around can make a huge difference in optimizing your workspace.

The “Commercial Break” Technique

I did a 30 day trial for organizing my office awhile back in which I would clean for 30 minutes a day, for 30 days, as a test to see if I could install a new behavior pattern in my daily routine, following the time boxing example on Steve’s site, but as days went by, it became rather overwhelming for me to stop everything I was doing just to clean up my workspace. So I came up with a new concept that’s the opposite of time boxing, great for tasks which you feel are not that important.

Take a radio station for example, they’re having all the fun for an hour playing music, and then they spend 2 minutes each hour doing their work by collecting money through advertising and commercials. So every 2 minutes of every hour, I’d get to work on organizing my workspace while I was there. You can start by picking up anything: a shirt or shoes on the floor or any random object that needs to be attended to. You’ll notice that as the hours add up, you’ll turn a cluttered work space into a spacious room. When I started using this technique, my room was so cluttered that everything would sound flat, but by the end of the day, there were echoes all over the room when I’d talk.

Even if you watch TV all day and you want to organize your home, you can watch TV for an hour then during the commercial break, organize stuff and be back in time for your show.

Prioritizing

Whenever I wake up, I want to get right to work regardless if my bed is made or not because I see writing articles as a higher priority than making my bed. The problem with this, however, is that some days it never even gets made, but with the “commercial break” technique, I can write an article and make the bed in the last 2 minutes of the following hour, that way important work gets its prime time slot and the minor things like sorting out the knick knacks in my room and making the bed can be done during the 2 minute breaks.

Organizing Knick knacks

Because of the lack of drawers in my room I realized how convenient the blank CD cups were and how they could be used to hold pens, cables, and other knick knacks lying around. Now I know where all the pens are and where all the cables are supposed to go. The more jumbo-sized blank CD cases I get, the more space I have to put stuff lying around, and it looks pretty cool and original.

Emotional Blocks

Emotional problems can be a major stumbling block in organizing your workspace. For instance, you get into a bitter argument with the family and cleaning your room is the last thing you want to do. A simple solution that has worked for me in that situation is to get on the computer, open the sound recording program, and start rambling about what’s frustrating me over the microphone. Do a 30 minute set and play it back, within 10 minutes you’ll be yelling at the screen, “shut up! You’re so annoying.”

When you hear somebody complaining, you want to make them shut up, but when you’re complaining, you want other people to hear you out. Playing your audio back on the computer helps you realize that your problems aren’t that big of a deal. It puts you in the second person’s position to help you realize that you’re getting frustrated over nothing, and a lot of little nothings can build up and cause you to not want to organize your workspace.

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This article was featured in The Eighth Edition of the Carnival of Improving Life

May 22, 2008 - This article is now part of a series. If you’d like to see the series extended, please post your response in the comments section.

Part I | Part II

Tags: emotional, fun, mind, organized, prioritizing

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Time Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.