I remember walking into a client’s offices and seeing a desk covered in papers, envelopes, and notes. He looked at it, looked at me, and said “such is the life of an entrepreneur, am I right?”
The truth is, most of us are drowning in paperwork and have no idea exactly where many important things are. When things get handed to us they end up in a pile on the desk. Right?
Raise your hand if this is you.
A light bulb goes off in your mind for reminders or concerns that you need to address, you put it on a Post-it note, stick it on your monitor, and forget about it.
Ouch…
The problem? Our minds are not so easily tricked into forgetting things. We have many untied “knots” floating around in our minds, distracting us at the most inopportune time to remind us about things that we have pushed off. This Brain Clutter stops us in our tracks, causes us to lose focus, and can become overwhelming.
How do we fix this? Is there even a solution??
As with most things, organization starts with our mindset and the habits that we create. If you keep telling yourself you are cluttered and messy you will never be an organized person.
You have to change your mindset about organization and its importance in your life; you also have to change your habits so that you become an organized, clean, de-cluttered individual.
Without organization in your life, chaos rules, and clarity cannot be attained with chaos or clutter!
I want to encourage you to start a new habit: when a something important pops into your head do one of four things:
- Do it
- Defer it
- Delete it, or
- Delegate it
A task or reminder pops into your mind and completing it will only take three minutes or less? Just do it.
If the lightbulb goes off for something that will take longer than three minutes you should defer it (schedule it for later, using the time block method that I discussed in my time management article), delete it (there are some things that you simply do not have to do but you still continue to do them), or delegate it to somebody else on your team.
You must believe that you can get organized, stay organized, and that your life will be better once you are organized, because if you don’t believe any one of those three things all attempts to become organized will fail. Why? You are not 100% committed to the task at hand.
Discouraged? Don’t be.
If you’ve read this article and feel you are incapable of getting to where you want to be with your organization skills, please reach out to me. I’m here to help!