The National Associate of Professional Organizers has designated January as Get Organized Month. Makes sense. It’s always a good idea to begin the new year in an organized manner — that’s common sense career success advice.
Tweet 88 in my career advice book Success Tweets says, “Get organized. Organize your time, life and workspace. Sweat the small stuff. Success is in execution. Execution is in the details.”
As I was organizing the book shelves in my office the other day, 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
- 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.
- 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 Today, information comes so quickly that much of it is outdated shortly after you read it.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Break large projects into short segments. This will keep you motivated to finish the entire project.
- 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.
- Schedule high brain activities during your peak energy time and low brain, mechanical tasks during your low energy time.
- 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.
- 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 career success coach point here is simple common sense. 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.” You can get a head start on managing your time and life well by following the advice Paulette Ensign presents in her great little booklet 110 Ideas for Organizing Your Business Life. You can pick up a copy at http://www.tipsbooklets.com. Get Paulette’s booklet and follow her common sense advice. It will give you a leg-up on your competition and lead to your life and career success.
That’s my career advice on getting organized this year. What do you think? Please take a minute to share your thought with us in a comment. As always, thanks for reading my daily thoughts on life and career success. I value you and I appreciate you.
Bud
PS: If you haven’t already done so, please download a free copy of my popular career advice book Success Tweets and its companion piece Success Tweets Explained. The first gives you 140 bits of career success advice tweet style — in 140 characters or less. The second is a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail. Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy. You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.
PPS: I opened a membership site last September. It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations. You can find out about the membership site by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.
Speak Your Mind