Best Results Organizing

Most of time, we organize so that we can find what we need, when we need it, so we can zip along to the next thing on our list, lickety-split, so we have more time to get more done.

For most of our days, our weeks, our our lives, we zoom along like video game characters, basically PacMan eating up the dots, just trying to get to the next point in our lives. There are periods where we never feel like we have enough time.

(This video is 12 minutes. Please don’t feel obligated to watch more than a few seconds.)

Of course, there are also slow times, whether in business or in life. They fall during the chasm between Christmas and the New Year, surround long holiday weekends, and make up those lazy, hazy days of summer.

Sometimes, the days are slow because the kids have just started back to school but the rush and hubbub of after-school activities have yet to start; other times, we’ve slowed down because we’re recuperating from illness, and while too strong to take to our beds, we’re too fuzzy-headed to tackle a Zoom call. We don’t often get to pick when it’ll be slow, but slow times do come.

In fact, things might be slow for you right now. Perhaps your department just delivered a big project and is in a “pending” mode until it’s clear what the clients thing. Maybe you work for a company with a big European contingent and they start slowing down as the summer approaches (and pretty much shut down altogether in August), so there’s less (or no) urgent work. On the homefront, maybe maybe your kids are out of school and haven’t started all the activities to which you need to schlep them, like camp or summer classes.

The point is, if you’ve got a quiet slot right now (or one coming up), you’ve got three options: Freak out, give in, or find the middle path.

FREAK OUT ABOUT ALL THE FREE TIME

If you ever feel stressed about the prospect of having too much time, chances are good that you’ve gotten yourself deep into a sense of toxic productivity, a situation where you believe your value is tied to what you create, produce, or accomplish.

If that’s the case — if your friends are always telling you that you work too hard and your family (or even your manager) is pushing you to take vacation — then that’s exactly what you should do. Vacate! Take real vacation, one without email or social media, one away from your home and work obligations, and go where you can just soak up the sun and your surroundings.

So, if you’re agitated by the idea of having a slow period, put in your time-off request. Tell your bestie or your significant other to start planning a getaway. And read (or re-read) last year’s series on toxic productivity with a real accent on the essential cognitive flips (in part 2) and actionable tasks (in parts 3 and 4) that can transform your life into a more balanced, serene experience.

Toxic Productivity In the Workplace and What Comes Next

Toxic Productivity Part 2: How to Change Your Mindset

Toxic Productivity Part 3: Get Off the To-Do List Hamster Wheel 

Toxic Productivity, Part 4: Find the Flip Side of Productivity Hacks

Toxic Productivity Part 5: Technology and a Hungry Ghost

EMBRACE THE SLOWNESS AND VEG OUT

Maybe you are as burned out as the J9 toast in the grid below.

If you just made it to the end of the school year with one last nerve intact, you might feel like you have run a gauntlet. While we often talk about end-of-the-year stress and how people’s lives are overloaded from Thanksgiving up through the New Year, springtime can tip the scales as well. While introverts may be able to cocoon in winter, everyone’s expected to get more sociable as the weather gets warmer. Then there’s the stress of tax time. And, as always, there’s work.

So, if you’ve got the opportunity to veg out, sleep until mid-day on the weekends, and scroll your phone until bedtime, you might be tempted to do so.

The problem? Your summer will be over before you know it with nothing to show for it except a possibly shorter to-be-read pile (nothing wrong with that) and a tan line. Before you give in to giving in, take another look at my post Organize Your Summer So It Doesn’t Disappear So Quickly.

I’m not saying you have to set summer goals, but consider taking some time out to consider whether you want to accomplish something (anything) with your summer, and then absorb the advice in that post to move yourself along.

FIND A MIDDLE PATH TO DO MORE WITH YOUR SLOW TIME

The following suggestions aren’t designed to make you feel like you have to do more — again, we’re not aiming to generate toxic productivity. Do less of the things that wear you down. For example, embrace meals where you can toss fresh or pre-cooked items into one big bowl drizzled with a nice vinaigrette. Eat more cold things on these hot days and feel refreshed. The more time you spend outside, the less mess to be made inside the house, and the less housework there will be!

The following ideas are things you can do during the slow periods so that when work or life ramps up later, you’ll feel more enthusiastic and supported. Let’s look at how you can organize your heart, your head, and your hands.

Organize Your Heart — Show Gratitude

I’m not talking about writing the thank you notes after you get holiday or birthday gifts. (Though, if you owe those, send them now and you’ll feel like you’ve made a huge accomplishment with little effort). Get a cute box of note cards and a stack of nifty stamps from the post office, and the next time somebody does something you appreciate, dash off just a few lines. You’d be amazed what a real piece of mail in the mailbox can do for someone else’s mood and how that delight can spread from person to person. (Be the butterfly!) 

Praise and tag the author of the book you just read on social media, and leave kudos on GoodReads.

Email praise and CC: the supervisors of service providers or colleagues who go above and beyond.

Leave glowing online reviews for the companies and workers who’ve done an excellent job; your praise helps others find them.

Promote the podcasts and blog posts of the friends and colleagues who have promoted things you’ve created — and even the ones who haven’t.

Start, and keep up with, a gratitude journal, whether on paper or digitally.

There’s an abundance of research that indicates that showing gratitude helps us improve our mental and physical health. Actions related to showing gratitude release oxytocin, a hormone associated with positive emotions.

When life is going at full-tilt, you might not feel like you have the time to incorporate gratitude into every day, but if you do it in tiny fits and starts during slow periods (like summer), it will become natural and benefit you (and the beneficiaries of your gratitude) all year long. For more ideas, consider registering for Mayo Clinic’s free, virtual Discover Gratitude program.

Organize Your Head — Use Your Slow Time to Learn

I’m surprised I hear, “How did you know that?” from everyone from clients to Paper Mommy, and I’m always perplexed. Certainly, some flotsam and jetsam in my brain gets there by unknown travels, but usually, it’s because I’ve chosen to focus on a topic and read different approaches.

Most often, it’s not about learning a fact, but about understanding how thing interrelate, and I find that the point at which you have read just enough about a subject such that your brain goes, “Oh, right, I know that, and next they’re going to say…” is the point at which you know enough that you could explain the subject to someone else. That’s when you know things sufficiently.

Pick a topic. Google it. (If it’s a fast-paced topic in the news, use the “Tools” button to select only things written in the last year, month, or week.) See if there’s a Wikipedia entry. Ask ChatGPT to tell you the basics (but understand that it’s experimental and only has information from prior to mid-2021). 

Every time another blogger or journalist mentions a book or an expert, write down the title or name. Then get library books on the topic, so you haven’t added to your permanent clutter unless you find the resource useful.

Take advantage of online learning resources. If you want to learn science, history, or literature, jump into the amazing array of offerings at Crash Course‘s YouTube channel. (The World History course units are captivating, but if you prefer anything from botany to business, economics to linguistics, there’s something for you.)

You can learn to code for free at Codecademy or get ahead in the math, science, arts, and humanities your kids will be learning next year by visiting Khan Academy. And, of course, there are always podcasts and TEDTalks.

And all the while, capture your understanding in notes. Keep a notebook or use Evernote, but log the main concepts, the things that aren’t obvious. Whether you’re trying to learn a particular technological tool, or an aspect of history, or a technique for your profession, writing down what you’ve learned will help cement the finer points. Keep a learning journal!

The point is, there’s always the excuse that we don’t have enough time. But if things are (or get) slow, having these kinds of activities in your back pocket will allow you to be intentional with your newly available time.

Organize Your Hands — Tidy Your Tech

OK, technology isn’t actually your hand, but your tech is never far from your hands, whether it’s a phone in your palm or a keyboard under your fingertips. So much of your life is spent dealing with the clutter of these technological giants.

When work is slow, it’s a great opportunity to tackle organizing tasks that often get overlooked during busier periods. Whether you’ve got a quiet two hours while the rest of the afternoon yawns ahead of you or just keep finding pockets of time, the slow bits of your life are the perfect moments to clear out the aspects of your technology that normally slow you down.

Do one or more of these tasks in a chunk of time, or take five minutes when the phone isn’t ringing; it’s up to you!

Clear out your email inbox. 

Mail App photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash  

Do a search in your inbox for “unsubscribe” (sometimes it’s written in white on white, serving as invisible ink to keep you from saying goodbye) and unsubscribe from anything you find yourself never reading.

Create homes for emails. Set up a simple hierarchy of subfolders with names of major projects, client names, etc. Having a place for emails to safely, dependably live will encourage you to manually or automatically route necessary them out of your inbox. Don’t feel like you should save all emails. Unless you have to prove that the sender acknowledged receipt or authorized something, you can delete emails just say “Thanks” or “okey-dokey.”

Set up filters or use the Rules function built into your email platform to automatically sort mailing lists to one sub-folder, anything you’re always CCed on even though you know it’s got nothing to do with you to another, and so on. Get the non-essentials in your inbox out of it. 

Add emails with meeting links to your calendar, then put the email in a “Pending Event” folder in case you need to check something in advance of the meeting. When an email represents a task you have to do, add it to your to-do list or task app, then move the email to a folder related to that project or issue.

The less that’s in your inbox, the more managemable it will be but you won’t be as tempted to keep “checking email” or feel demoralized by clutter piling up.

Organize your digital passwords.

If you’ve got little bits of paper everywhere telling you how you can access your digital life, it’s slowing you down (and not letting you enjoy the slower times)! And if you’re using the same password everywhere, you’re slowing yourself to an eventual dead-stop if you get hacked!

Use a password manager like 1Password, Bitwarden, or Dashlane to centralize and organize your online login credentials. Then use your bits and pieces of slow time to update and strengthen weak passwords for the accounts you do you use and delete the ones that you don’t. (I started this recently and found dozens of login credentials for websites that don’t even exist anymore!)

Organize your digital files.

I’m not trying to suggest a major organizing project for your slow time; remember, the point is to make progress that will make your life easier without overdoing it.

Start with your cloud storage like Google Drive or Dropbox. Declutter by deleting anything that’s outdated and getting rid of duplicates. (I can’t tell you how often I’ve had three and sometimes even more copies of a PDF that was a “free gift” related to some online course because I attended different webinars by the same speaker.)

Once you’ve reduced your collection to what you actually want to keep, think about the categories into which they can be grouped. It’s funny, but no matter how organized someone’s hard drive might be, their cloud storage tends to be a Wild West of loose files and folders with mysterious names.  

Create an organized folder structure that makes sense to you — preferably one that matches what you’re already using on your computer — and when necessary, rename files that are confusing or mysterious.

Update your contacts.

Go through your contacts lists and purge duplicates. Check the accuracy, and make sure to save the numbers and addresses that hold the most information while dumping the ones that have only a partial piece of what you need.

Delete names you don’t need anymore. Going through my phone recently, I found a contact for “Andy Accident.” It took a few moments to realize that that’s how I listed the guy who rear-ended my car at a stoplight in January 2020! I definitely don’t need that number anymore!

The great thing about using your slow time to update your contacts list is that it reminds you of the people you know and like but haven’t chatted with in a while. Make note to call or text or email the people whose names you came across and thought, “Wow, I miss so-and-so!” and then actually DO contact them. They’ll be delighted, and it’s a great way to use those bonus minutes and hours that your slow time makes available.

Once you’ve finished with your contact lists in your devices, move on to pruning your social media accounts (including professional accounts like on LinkedIn). Delete the connections for the company you only followed to enter that one contest or people you linked with two careers ago (and only because you felt obligated). Add new contacts you’ll realize are missing as you remove the outdated or irrelevant ones. 

Eliminate app overload.

Your time has given you some breathing room, so why not make some breathing room on your devices?

The Pareto Principle says that 80% of our success comes from 20% of our efforts. That holds true in many ways; 80% of the time, we wear the same 20% of our wardrobe, kids play with the same 20% of their toys, and so on. We mostly use the same 20% of our apps. This is why letting things go from the 80% we hardly ever use makes us feel less cluttered and more productive, even though we anticipate we’ll feel anxious about having let them go, which is why they’re cluttering up our digital spaces in the first place.

Flip through your home screens on your devices and take inventory. (Just be careful not to get caught up in reading notifications or scrolling through social media!)

What apps did you download and never even try because they required setting up a login? What apps did you give up on because they were buggy? Those are the low-hanging fruit you can start deleting. Be like Elsa in Frozen and let them go!

Next, to see where you’re overusing the apps you don’t want to be using as much, check your Digital Wellbeing feature on Android or ScreenTime on iOS. Uninstall the ones that distract or drag you down.

If you’ve still got a pile of distracting apps that you can’t bear to uninstall, move them to your last home screen page to create more friction — you’ll be less likely to happen upon them when looking for your bank app.

Which are the apps you want to use all the time because of the benefits they bring to your well-being? Put them on your first screen.

Finally, organize what’s left. Drag and drop apps onto one another to make folders labeled for shopping, dining, social media, productivity apps, etc. You’re keeping those apps, just making them less obvious. This way, you’ll encounter an app only when you want to rather than when the little notification numbers pop up.

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Whatever you do with these upcoming lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, I hope you enjoy them. But if you do find long stretches of time and aren’t quite sure what to do with them, I hope the above post has given you some options to use your time well and set the stage for the next time life gets busy.