Update From the Office Disaster Zone

There’s an old adage in the consulting world that execution is more important than planning. The world is full of fantastic plans that just sit on a shelf covered with dust. But even an uninspired plan, if well-executed, can amount to progress.

Looking around my office at the moment, there’s an element of that consulting lesson to be seen. When I first started this blog, one of my goals was simply to clean up my space. I wanted to remove the towering piles of paper, magazines, envelopes, file folders and other sedimentary layers that have built up on the floor, my desk, my side table, the filing boxes, and just about everywhere else. My plan was to focus at a manageable level: sorting the mess in a quick and dirty way without getting to caught up in any individual item. A couple of months later, there has been some progress, but I’ve lost a lot my original momentum. But rather than harp on what’s gone wrong, here's a quick inventory of what has gone right:

• I can see some of my rug (seriously, that’s a major improvement)
• I have a big box of stuff to file, and I’ve gotten rid of three bags of trash/recycling
• I’ve hunted down some unexpectedly large dust bunnies that had been hiding out
• I found lots of stuff: From the useless (five-year-old bank statements), to the useful (a binder from a seminar I once took on grant writing), to the exciting (a list of the salsa dance moves I learned for my wedding)

The piles are smaller, but plenty is still there. So, I think I’ll call this a partial success. (OK, maybe a very partial success.) Time to build on what’s worked so far.

I’m going to cull just a few ideas from one of those perky books written by a professional organizer. (In this case, What’s a Disorganized Person To Do? by Stacey Platt.) Among the many, many steps she recommends, I’ve chosen just three.

1. Visualize your desired result: Have a clear endpoint as a grounding and motivating mechanism.
2. Choose an area of focus: Break the job of getting organized into small, manageable tasks, and focus on one small area at a time.
3. Clear the space: Give yourself a blank canvas to work from; as a first step, remove everything from the area you are organizing.

My vision is not a perfect office environment, just a functional one where the piles of paper have a little bit of order to them. For focus, I’d really like to get rid of the trail of envelops, unopened mail, receipts and the like from the space in front of the cushioned chair where I do most of my work and have a clear path all the way to the door. (No worrying about the rest of the junk, just create the pathway.) I’ve cleared the space, which certainly has Lani impressed. Now I just have to sort through the stuff I removed. Assuming this process works, then its lather, rinse, and repeat all the while trying to stick with the principle I started with: keep it simple.