Getting Organised at Home

(or "How to Conquer the Paper Mountain and Reclaim a Sense of Order in your Life)

Ever heard the adage “a place for everything, and everything in it’s place”? It is often cited as the key to good organisation, but I disagree. Getting organised begins one step back. It begins with properly understanding why you have the “thing” in your possession in the first place.

Much of the clutter around us isn’t because we don’t have a place for it.  The reason runs a little deeper.  Once we understand this reason the solution is not as difficult as you might think.

To illustrate the point, consider this common example.  You may have a bills file for bills waiting to be paid. On your desk, though, are a couple of particularly urgent bills. You’ve chosen to keep them on your desk as a visual reminder of their importance, worried that if they’re in the bills folder they’ll be too easy to forget. 

The trouble is, once you get more than a few of these visual reminders lying around they begin to compete with your brain for your attention.  You start to feel overwhelmed because there is so much to do, and it is all sitting there screaming at you “Do me! I’m here because I’m important and I NEED TO BE DONE!”

Often they can’t be done right now, and this adds to the stress. The bills are sitting there because you’re waiting for pay day so the money is there to use to pay the bills. So, the clutter pile continues to grow, along with the guilt and worry that comes with so much undone work staring you in the face.

A good organisational system does have a place for things, but many tips for organising concentrate on “what” the thing is instead of “why” you need to keep it.

Training your brain to firstly think “why” instead of “what” is the key to keeping on top of paperwork, email, memos, post it notes, and the many other varied forms of information that come to us each day.

What you need to get organised

Organising your life does not need to cost a lot of money.

You basically need a diary / calendar, a notepad, and a place where you can easily file things (filing cabinet, expander cases, whatever, but it needs to have a fair bit of room).

You also need a physical place to store new, incoming material. It might be a basket, or a plastic “in-tray”, but don’t just use a bench top. Use something which contains things rather than spreads.

How to make it work

First, let’s look at what normally happens when some new material enters our lives.

1. we do a quick scan
2. if it is immediately identified as rubbish we chuck it out
3. if we’re not sure if it is useful or not we put it somewhere to remind us to think about it
4. it gets lost in the “think about” pile (or worse, one of many think about piles)

Now let’s look at a more productive approach.

 

Rule up the first page of your notepad as a contents page. This is your “to-do” tracker.

In creating a contents page don’t use headings like “bills”, “assignments”, “housework”. Instead organise your to-dos by location, the places you are when you do things. Some fairly common ones would be “office”, “shops”, “home”. You will probably add others. For example if you are a student you might add locations such as “library”, “computer”, etc.

If you have small sticky-note tabs, you may find this an even easier way of marking the pages, rather than a contents page. Some people find the tabs get in the way, it is a personal choice. So long as you can easily locate each of the "place" pages.

You are now all ready for a more productive approach to that same new material arriving:

1. deal with it now, or put it in your in-tray to open and think about later.
2. when you deal with it now, or retrieve it from your in tray, if it is obviously junk then chuck it out
3. if you think you need it, ask “why”

Is it for future reference or interest? File it. This may be a file called “interesting things to read some time”, or it may have a more specific file such as “Receipts for tax time”.

If it isn’t just reference but requires you to act on it in some way either do it now or put it into your to do tracker, on the "place" page which refers to where you need to be to do something about it.

If it must be done on a particular date (eg an appointment) put it on your calendar.

When you write a to do or appointment, record relevant info such as phone numbers or reference numbers OR jot a quick note reminding yourself where you’ve filed the paper so you can quickly grab it in the morning when you leave.

Once you’ve defined what needs to happen, and where or when it needs to happen, you can safely file the original piece of paper, secure in the knowledge it won’t be forgotten about.

Each time you go to the office, shops, library, or whatever other common locations you are now using for organising to do items, quickly skim the page of your notebook to see what other things you can get done while you’re there.

Once a week have a quick skim of all the locations in your notebook, to see if anything urgent should be planned for in your calendar. Also have a quick look through the next fortnight of your calendar, to see if anything needs to go in your to do tracker (eg. a birthday party coming up, so add "buy present for Greg's party" to the shops page).

While this article has mainly focused on paper work you can just as easily organise your email inbox, text messages and more by asking the questions “Why?”, “Where?” and “When”, then adding things into your to do tracker or calendar.