Gerry Cueto

Part I | Part II

You’ve asked for it and it’s time to introduce the Having Fun Getting Organized part 2 article which stems from my most popular article on this site so far. Thanks for your feedback and I’m really excited to get to it later on in this post. I would say this is the only article so far with the most honest comments because they actually get a proper debate and discussion going.

Personal Reflection

Before I get to the main stuff, I want to write about how my life is going so far as getting organized is concerned. The ideas in part one have changed my life without a doubt that the people who’ve seen my house used to say it looked like a train wreck… now things are in order, but it doesn’t look at good as it could, and I’ve noticed that I’m not applying the techniques as often as I should. I’ve been so busy with other things, I found getting organized a little hard to keep up with, but when I’ve been doing it, it has been extremely fun nonetheless. I also want to refine the techniques from part 1 as well.

I noticed that when you organize your physical room, it also helps you organize your thoughts better. I still love the “commercial break” technique though and I don’t feel like I need to drop it, but I want to make it to work more efficiently. I’ve been applying it daily, and I don’t think I’ve had a day where I haven’t picked up anything for at least 2 minutes.

New Adjustments

The 2 minutes per hour technique is still in effect; however, for every hour not done add up the 2 minutes, so if you missed an hour, the next hour becomes a 4 minute job. Even if you missed an hour or two, the added time is still not that overwhelming. I would say on average I’m awake for 15 hours a day, within those 15 hours; they count as active organization time. Even if you’re out at work, out of the house at all, or partying, they still add up. If you’re gone 6 hours you know what to do; 6 x 2 = 12. So you have 12 minutes of cleaning which is not bad at all.

Tuning out Distractions

I don’t know how most people build up their work frenzies and focus but I have certain techniques I use when I need to do that. I guess some people like to go into spring cleaning mode where they start organizing for about an hour a week. That works for me on things that don’t have to do with cleaning however.

While extroverts naturally get distracted by people, I get distracted by web surfing, emotional problems from the past, and inanimate objects. Since I’m pretty introverted by nature, when I need to deal with people in social situations like calling for business or arranging a date, I’ll lock myself in my room and not be allowed to leave or use the computer until I’m absolutely certain I’m going to have a great conversation with the person. A parallel of this method might be good for people who take a clean workspace very seriously.

Starting vs. Finishing

I don’t really have that unfinished business type of problem because I don’t mind leaving my mess untaken care of. The 2 minute technique is designed for things that you don’t necessarily have the desire to do. If you find things like writing an article, organizing your workspace, or washing the dishes extremely high priority because without them, you can’t function regularly in your work, then use a more focused approach. I can work with a mess however; I think it has to do with different kinds of personalities. If you’re like me and don’t think being organized is that detrimental to your work performance; then you’ll love the commercial break technique. I believe starting a project is more important than finishing because planning to finish something usually overwhelms me from even starting in the first place.

Jarkko’s Boot-up Challenge

Jarkko left me a comment in the Part 1 article stating how he makes the bed while his computer is booting up, and I’m actually going to try that challenge when I boot up my computer from now on and see how much of the bed gets made while it’s booting up. That sounds like a very intelligent solution, Jarkko.

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

The Eleventh Edition of the Carnival of Improving Life

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

I decided to become an early riser recently because I figured I could get more done during the day than staying up all night on the computer. Ben Franklin and Aristotle both made a good point with connecting early rising with success.

Failed attempts

When I first started trying to get a handle on this situation, I got up at 5am for thirty days as a trial. The alarm would ring, and I’d wake up in a slightly unconscious state until 8am. My strategy was to simply set the clock back to 5am and go to bed anytime I wanted. I had read about this technique on Steve Pavlina’s blog; however, I didn’t find it that effective because I had to hold my eyes open for 3 hours until I was fully awake. I later realized I needed to figure out how to change my biological clock as well as the alarm clock.

Another thing I tried to do was decrease my wake-up time in slow increments. I noticed how slowly evolving from a diet to another actually helped my friends lose weight. So I thought, “Hey that could work for getting up early too!” At first I was getting out of bed at 2:30pm which was pretty bad. My goal was to wake up at 8am the latest, so I set the clock back 13 minutes a day. I went from 2:30 to 12noon successfully, but the hard part was trying to go below 12:00pm. I would always sleep in and get up at noon. The evolutionary method for waking up earlier was deemed a failure for me. I guess my circadian rhythm doesn’t reprogram itself that way.

Weird, yet slightly successful attempts

Due to the failure of the last attempt, this time I decided to become an early riser without any alarm clocks. I stayed up the whole night first night of this exercise. When the sun came up at around 7 or 8am, I went to bed and slept during the day. I cracked the window a little bit to make sure there was some light while I was sleeping, but not enough to keep me awake, just enough to keep me out of REM. So I slept during the day for 2 days. I noticed that after doing this, I went to bed the next night at around 10pm, and got up at 2am. Then I went to bed the following night at 10pm because I was extremely tired, and I woke up at 5am. What messed up the whole thing was that the third night, I forgot to set the alarm clock to a goal time and instead woke up at 10am, forcing me to go to bed at 2am the fourth night. This attempt would have been successful had I used an alarm clock.

I figured out this method from when I used to DJ at clubs and came home the next day. I would get mad and assumed I messed up my sleeping schedule, but actually I noticed it would reset my weekday schedule because I’d sleep during the day and lose REM, and then when Sunday rolled around I was going to bed early. Instead of building my sleep schedule from the top down, I was building it from the bottom up.

My breakthrough

Here’s how I became a consistent early riser. One day I thought to myself, “If I could only be able to keep my eyes closed during the night, falling sleep wouldn’t be a problem.” So then I grabbed a long, clean black sock from my dad’s drawer, tied it around my eyes like a ninja, and went to bed and kept it tied for 20 minutes. I then took it off because I didn’t need it and it became slightly uncomfortable; my eyes were shut closed, and it felt like the sock was on anyway. I had my alarm clock set to my goal time which was 7am, and woke up without a problem. I stayed awake throughout the whole day.