Career Success: Tweet #88

I discussed the importance of managing your time in Success Tweet 88.  However, time management, while important, is not the only key to personal organization.  The other day, I was looking for something on my office book shelf and I came across one of my favorite booklets.  It’s called 110 Ideas for Organizing Your Business Life.  Paulette Ensign is the author.

Paulette has packed a lot of common sense advice into this 16-page booklet.  I’m going to share my favorite ten nuggets with you here.  If you want the other 100, you can purchase the booklet by going to www.tipsbooklets.com.

10 of Paulette Ensign’s Tips on Organizing Your Business Life

1. Create your own systems based on your common sense needs.  Modify whatever you read, hear or see (including these tips) to accommodate your personal requirements.
2. Set a toss out date for publications and reports.  If you haven’t read something by the date, your life has probably continued fine without that information.  Today, information comes so quickly that much of it is outdated shortly after you read it.
3. Decide if you really need a hard copy of everything you have electronically.  Most times a backup disk is fine.  You will save money, time and space – not to mention a few trees – by printing a hard copy only when you need it.
4. File paper by asking “where would I look for this item?” not “where should I put this item?”  The putting part is easy – it’s the retrieval that can be difficult.
5. Write the date and circumstances of the meeting on each business card you collect.  The frame of reference this provides will be very helpful in follow-up conversations.
6. Break large projects into short segments.  This will keep you motivated to finish the entire project.
7. Schedule regular time for reading.  Usually lunch time or the end of the day is best for reading.  Scheduled time will keep you up on what’s happening in your business and life.
8. Schedule high brain activities during your peak energy time and low brain, mechanical tasks during your low energy time.
9. Use a phone headset to free your hands while you are on the phone.  This will facilitate note taking, and finding items important to the conversation.
10. Use a conference room, library or unoccupied office to do work where you need to concentrate and be free of interruptions.

These common sense ideas for organizing your time and life are only 10% of the ideas in Paulette Ensign’s booklet 110 Ideas for Organizing Your Business Life.  Try them.  If they help you become more organized, buy the booklet to become even more organized and productive.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  Successful people are outstanding performers.  Outstanding performers are well-organized; they manage their time, life and stress well.  Follow the advice in Tweet 88 in Success Tweets.  “Get organized.  Organize your time, life and workspace.  Sweat the small stuff.  Success is in the execution.  Execution is in the details.”  Manage your time and life well by following this advice.  Engage in “not important and not urgent” activities like web-surfing in your leisure time only.  Complete “not important but urgent” activities quickly and move on.  Focus on “important and urgent” tasks.  Get them done well and in a timely manner.  Create time to work on “important but not urgent” tasks.  This will give you a leg-up on your competition and lead to your personal and professional success.