Archive for ‘Office’ Category
Cross-Training for Families: Organize for All Eventualities
WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH CROSS-TRAINING?
The term cross-training appears to have originated in the fitness and athletic world. One’s usual sport strengthens certain muscle groups and develops a specific set of skills; training in different disciplines, allows you to address other muscle groups, gain and sharpen different skills, and create a more well-rounded overall performance.
Photo by Marta Wave from Pexels
Cross-training in business yields the same kinds of benefits. Let’s say you work for a widget-making company. (“Hi! I’m <insert you name here>. I work for a widget-making company!”) Your job might be to oversee the complicated machine that cuts out the widgets; your friend down the factory line has a complementary job, making sure that the widgets are quality-controlled to meet international widget-production specifications.
If your company is run smoothly, each employee must be crackerjack at his or her job. But what if there’s only one person who knows how to do a specific thing? What if that person wins the lottery and quits, or gets hired away by a competing widget maker? Sure, the company can hire and train a new widget quality-control specialist, but until that happens, a manager with prior experience might have to step in, reducing the time the manager can, well, manage.
But what if the staff were cross-trained so that in addition to knowing your own job up, down, and sideways, everyone had at least a little training at other people’s jobs? Wouldn’t that make things better?
When I worked in television, I was a program director at local network affiliates. My assistant and I each had our separate spheres of influence, but the truth was that on most days, I was handling managerial tasks (research, contract negotiation, meetings with syndicators, etc.) and my assistant was handling day-to-day operations (maintaining the film vault, overseeing satellite operations, quality-controlling programming tapes — because this was in ancient times, before programming all lived inside computers).
Ours was a two-person department; without cross-training on the intricacies of satellite operations and whatnot, my assistant would never have been able to call in sick, take a vacation, or move onward professionally without things grinding to a stand-still. Cross-training saves butts!
Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels
Major advantages of cross-training in business include:
- Better efficiency, because the more people have a good handle on how to do any one thing, the better it will get done.
- Improved flexibility, because the organization as a whole can be nimble.
- Clarity for emergency response planning. Back-up plans can save companies and that can save lives.
- Better “coverage,” so that if there are greater needs in one area (like greater demand for boxing up widgets) employees from other departments can fill those roles.
- Better integration and institutional knowledge across the company. If you only know how your department works, and are fuzzy on the operations of the rest of the business, not only does it hold you back from spotting potential problems and making suggestions (for the company’s benefit), it keeps you from achieving personal growth by seeing what other possibilities exist for you.
- Better morale. The more you know how to do, and the better you are at it, the more self-confidence you’re going to have.
- More satisfied customers. If you are involved in client/customer-facing work, cross-training means you can respond wisely, deftly, and quickly to questions, yielding more confidence in the company and in you as an expert.
Cross-training in your family, especially with regard to essential paperwork, information, and rituals, has the same benefits. Think about what happens when one parent is the main caregiver for a child but has to leave for a business trip or to help an ailing grandparent. The other parent (or other adult in the household, if there is one) needs to step in and step up!
Cross-training in the family has the same benefits as with companies.
- Better efficiency, because the person who usually pays the electric bill, does the carpool drop-off, or renews the car insurance policies may not always be available without difficulty or overwhelm.
- Improved flexibility, because the family as a whole can be nimble.
- Clarity for emergency response planning. You back up your computer; shouldn’t you have backup for when you’re headed to give a career-defining speech and the school calls to say your child just threw up?
- Better “coverage,” so that when one adult in the family is overloaded, the other can pick up the slack without having to explain what to do, how to do it, what the pitfalls may be, and who may complain (about the color of the frosting or how the sandwich is cut).
- Better integration and “institutional” knowledge across the family. It’s not 1957; it’s unreasonable to expect that one member of the household is “in charge” of all things related to the kids or that one (other, or the same) person is “in charge” of all financial, legal, and organizational goings-on.*
*This is a really complex topic. Being a caregiver for children and running a household, even when one works outside the home for pay, involves not only the physical labor but the mental load and emotional labor of anticipating cognitive, emotional, and other needs of stakeholders (but instead of CEOs and shareholders, it’s tiny humans and life partners). I’m excited to note that my colleagues Regina Lark, PhD and Judith Kolberg have written Emotional Labor: Why A Woman’s Work Is Never Done. It was just released, and deals more specifically with this concept.
- Better morale. It’s a reality. The more active a part of your family you are (or your partner is), knowing everything from which lullaby scares away the monsters to which color notebook into which the teacher requires permission slips be inserted, the happier everyone will be.
- More satisfied “customers.” OK, your kids and your spouse/partner, and maybe even other members of your household (like aging parents) want to feel confident that you’re a full-fledged member of the family, that you know what you’re doing and that you want to be there doing it.
Cross-training rocks!
SO WHY DO PEOPLE AVOID CROSS-TRAINING?
If cross-training is so great, why do people groan and avoid it? (I’m so glad you asked!) The sticking points are the same at work as they are at home, though they are expressed differently.
Inertia
At work: businesses tend to focus on urgent priorities, so even if there are directives from on-high requiring quarterly cross-training sessions, management often finds a way to avoid taking time away from meeting deadlines to carve out slots in the schedule for cross-training.
At home: same deal. Your life is busy. Maybe you read a blog post like this, or your professional organizer calls your attention to a problem waiting to happen.
Baby & Teddy Bear Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
Or you hear a horror story about spouse who went on a business trip and the at-home parent couldn’t find the right sleeping stuffie, and so the child cried for two days straight. Or you hear about a widowed friend of your parents who didn’t pay the insurance bill because they didn’t know it came to the deceased spouse’s email address, not via mail. These are cautionary tales.
Focusing on the benefits rather than the inconvenience will help everyone acclimate.
Learning curve on new material
At home and at work, nobody gets everything right on the first try. It’s human nature to avoid attempting something if you fear you won’t do it well. In the workplace, Impostor Syndrome may kick in, and an employee may fear attempting something outside the usual skill set, fearing the inability to get it right immediately might lead to firing. And at home, someone might feel nervous about being slow to succeed at a task one’s partner already does well.
When you invite your partner to join in household cross-training, acknowledge that you have different skill-sets and you may not be equally adept at everything. The point at home isn’t to be perfect, it’s to be perfectly satisfactory as a back-up.
Job security
At work: If you’re the only one who knows how to do something, you may feel like you have job security. (Of course, the flip-side of this is that management will tend not to promote you if you’ve convinced them nobody else can master your area.)
At home: While most people aren’t afraid that a spouse will divorce them if they don’t pick up right away on how to use the digital password manager, we all feel a little anxious about being seen without our halos.
Fear of higher expectations, higher workload, and being taken advantage of
At work: It’s a reasonable fear that if you know how to do more, you might be expected to do more. To some extent, this can be a positive thing, allowing you to do your own rendition of “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!” This is your chance to step up!
But if your workplace tends to be firmly on one side of the continuum, anywhere from moderately dysfunctional to toxic, you’ll want to watch for signs that you’re being taken advantage of, and be prepared to negotiate for better pay and benefits (or depart for greener pastures with your newfound skills).
At home: Unlike in businesses, where capitalism is the basis of everything and mutual loyalty can be a dubious concept, families are based (or should be based) on love, mutual respect, and loyalty. The point of family cross-training is to strengthen the family, for the benefit of everyone!
Focus on how improving skill training and sharing knowledge will support the healthy growth of the partnership and create a financially and emotionally sound foundation for the kids, the parents, and everyone in the family.
AREAS FOR FAMILY CROSS-TRAINING
Your family is unique, so I won’t presume to know everything you should consider when cross-training. However, this list should get you started.
Organize financial paperwork together
Smead All-in-One Financial Planning Organizer
Get clarity on the status quo. Do both partners know the following:
- What household, credit card, and other bills does the family receive?
- What is the frequency of the billing? (Sure, most utility bills come monthly, but your water and sewer bills may be quarterly. Some insurance premiums are paid monthly, others quarterly; car insurance is often paid every six months.)
- When do the bills usually arrive? (The partner regularly paying the bills may have a gut sense of these dates and know there’s something wrong if the Capital One bill doesn’t arrive by the 10th; with the postal service continuing a massive slowdown, the other partner might be in for a shock if the bill arrived days or weeks late.)
- How do the bills arrive? Via U.S. mail on paper? Via email notifications prompting logging in? Are the bills auto-paid?
- How are the bills usually paid? If you were in the hospital and your partner sat down to pay the bills, not knowing that a particular bill is auto-paid could lead to an expensive double-payment.
- What’s the typical amount of each bill? If you don’t have a chat about these things periodically, you or your spouse might not notice an error in billing or a significant jump in costs.
This probably won’t be a one-time cross-training event. Discuss these issues, then consider spending one month with the partner who usually doesn’t handle the bills taking care of things and “reporting” back; alternatively, you can go through the process side-by-side. The key isn’t to micromanage, but to support one another for common financial goals.
Once your kids are tweens/teens, you might want to include them in some aspects of this cross-training so that they understand the complexities of household finance.
For more guidance on organizing financial paperwork, you might want to start with a classic Paper Doll post, Financial Filing—Scrapbooking snapshots of your money’s life.
Know your household computer set-up
Depending on your ages/generations, you and your partner might be a digital immigrant (a person born or brought up before the widespread use of digital technology) or a digital native. If one of you has discomfort with technology, you’ll need patience to approach these topics. If both of you are digital immigrants, consider hiring someone to help walk you through making sure you’re fully trained on how to achieve your computer-related goals.
Computer security image by TheDigitalWay from Pixabay
- How and where do you keep the essential passwords? It does no good for your partner to be willing to pay the bills if, in an emergency, they can’t log into the credit card or auto loan account.
- Are you happy with your password management system? (Do you HAVE a password management system?) Know where to find all the passwords that allow your household to run smoothly.
- Do you know (and know how to use) your computer backup system? From family photos to your browser’s bookmarks/favorites to all of your documents, everything needs a backup. I recommend a belt-and-suspenders approach, with local back-up to an external hard drive and cloud back-up via one of the popular backup companies. (I use Backblaze.) For more on backup, you might want to read a guest post I wrote for Alexa Bigwarfe’s WritePublishSell.com called 9 Ways to Keep Your Writing Safe.
- What about all your household tech? Do you know your DSL/Cable modem configuration URL (and the user name and password)? What about security settings for your internet router? If you (or your partner, or the internet tech) set up your Wi-Fi password eons ago, would you be able to find it to set up a new device?
Do you know the state of your estate?
From wills to beneficiary lists, from a Power of Attorney for financial decisions to your healthcare proxy, from your advanced care directives to how much (and what kind) of life insurance you have, chances are good that one person in your family took point and the other is only vaguely aware of what’s going on. Or, maybe you haven’t gotten around to squaring any of this away yet?
Either way, start with making sure you’ve both read up on the topics. You can begin with:
How to Replace and Organize 7 Essential Government Documents
How to Create, Organize, and Safeguard 5 Essential Legal and Estate Documents
The Professor and Mary Ann: 8 Other Essential Documents You Need To Create
Nobody ever likes talking about death. But talking about your estate documents, and maybe even working together to create them in the first place, is the first step to knowing that your family is safe and covered in case of the worst eventualities.
Other ways you can cross-train in the family
There’s obviously so much more than financial and legal paperwork and information to consider when cross-training. Your entire family might want to sit-down to brainstorm ideas. Some possibilities:
- Medical issues — Does everyone (or at least every adult) have a working knowledge of what to do in a medical emergency? My friend has Type 1 diabetes, and her 10-year-old has known, from an early age, how to help his mom by fetching a juice box to raise her blood glucose. Kids should know how to make a phone call to 9-1-1 and how to identify themselves, their address, and some basic information to relay about their parents.
- Medical care — Do you and your partner both know the pediatrician’s name and phone number? Where to find the First Aid kit? What medication you and your kids regularly take, so they can convey this in case of an emergency?
- Parenting essentials — This could be a blog post (or a book) all unto itself. From favorite sippy cup to which kids (and the kids’ best friends) have specific dietary requirements and preferences, from the name of the kids’ teachers to how to contact their friends’ parents (in case one of the tiny humans independently decides to get off the bus and go to a friend’s house without informing you), there’s a lot of essential information and skills that go into parenting. The grownups in the house need to share that wealth of information with one another!
- Laundry and household care — Are there sneaky tricks to getting household appliances to work properly? If something in the basement makes a weird, loud teapot-whistle sound, would you know that it was the sump pump having run out of distilled water? Does it do any good if your partner knows that and you don’t? (So much NOPE!)
- Auto care — Does one partner always handle the interactions with the mechanic? Maybe you need to share the knowledge so that you can speak authoritatively when you’re pressed to make a pricey decision.
Photo by MART PRODUCTION from Pexels
HOW TO PROPOSE FAMILY CROSS-TRAINING
You are the expert on how your family and household works. This post is just designed to give you an idea of how you can not merely share the load (and the information) but do it in a way that ensures your family’s immediate and long-term security. Whether the stakeholder is your toddler (who is sobbing that “that’s the wrong bedtime book”) or the finicky garden hose, the mortgage company or your partner’s grandmother, having a complete sense of what gets done — when, where, and most importantly, how — is essential.
I encourage you to share the concepts of this post with your partner. Talk about the benefits: efficiency, flexibility, clarity for emergency response, better coverage when one family member is overloaded, more integrated family “institutional” knowledge, greater morale, and a happier constituency of family members.
But don’t just talk about the benefits. Speak honestly about potential fears and reasons for avoidance (including inertia, worries about learning curves, the sense of “job security” and higher expectations). Ignoring them won’t make them go away, but talking may be just what you need to conquer those challenges and support your family team.
WHAT IF YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN?
I get it; not everyone has a partner. There are a lot of single parents, widows or widowers whose children are “grown and flown,” and just random singletons (like Paper Doll). That doesn’t mean that you’re completely on your own. Think about who you’d call in an emergency. To whom would you reach out if you needed someone to watch your tiny human? Who would you trust to log into your accounts and pay your bills for you?
These may not all be the same person. You may need to do cross-training with a number of someones: your ex, a sibling in another city, a best friend, a professional organizer trained in financial organizing (whom you can find through NAPO and AADMM), an accountant, an attorney, a hoc nanny, and others. The key is to start thinking now:
Who can be you when you can’t be you?
Rhymes With Brain: Languishing, Flow, and Building a Better Routine
Are you having trouble getting back in the saddle?
Yes, I know, this is not your first rodeo. You’ve had to get back into a routine before: after the easy pace of summer, after the winter holidays, after vacations.
But perhaps this feels a little different? Maybe you’re distracted because this is the first time you’re headed back into the office after a year and a half of working remotely? Or perhaps you’ve realized that you can’t keep working from your kitchen table anymore, and it’s time to really get back into a routine.
There are a few reasons why you might be feeling at loose ends. First, you might be stuck in the past. It happens to all of us. Last week, in Emerson, Angelou, Ted Lasso, Tashlich & Zen Monks: Letting Go for a Fresh Start, I walked you through rituals and mantras for helping you let go of past mistakes and frustrations.
A LESSON ON LANGUISHING
Perhaps the problem isn’t the past, but the present. Over the summer, the New York Times got a lot of attention for a piece called Feeling Blah During the Pandemic? It’s Called Languishing. (Depending on where you’re located, you might have more luck with this link to the piece.)
Some people have flourished as a result of the past 18 months; people who’d lost time with their families due to long work hours, commutes, and work travel were sometimes able to bask in the joy of remote work; others were able to put energy into side hustles that became true callings and got to leave careers that weren’t fulfilling.
Meanwhile, of course, many others have found working and just getting through life to be agonizing. This has been a period of distress, whether a constant onslaught or troubles that come in waves, worrying about keeping themselves and their families healthy, coping with financial strife, and being expected to work and act as if all of this {picture me waving my hands all around} was remotely normal.
So, for some, after the initial period in Spring 2020, life has been a collage of yoga positions and perfectly golden sourdough bread. For others? Let’s just say Edvard Munch could easily time travel from 1893 to 2021 and paint The Scream all over again. (Except he’d have needed to draw a mask.)
But in between flourishing and drowning, the Times article found that many of us are having trouble gaining traction because we’re languishing. It’s not depression or anxiety, but in an excerpt of the piece, we see exactly what’s making it difficult for many to get back into a routine:
In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Depression is the valley of ill-being: You feel despondent, drained and worthless.
Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental healtheither. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work. It appears to be more common than major depression — and in some ways it may be a bigger risk factor for mental illness.
The author of the piece, Adam Grant, is a organizational psychologist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and his TEDTalk really clarifies what languishing is, and how it negatively impacts our motivation and focus, and thus, our productivity. It’s definitely worth watching:
Cheatsheet: the best predictor of well-being (and thus, I’d say, productivity) is not optimism, but flow. We’ve talked a lot of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow recently in Back-to-School Solutions for the Space-Time Continuum and in the spring in Flow and Faux (Accountability): Productivity, Focus, and Alex Trebek (where you also learned how to pronounce Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi).
Flow is that experience when you’re completely absorbed in what you are doing. Time and space and your annoying neighbor and the fight you had with your teenager and the stresses you’re feeling all dissolve, or are at least held at bay, and you are completely focused, without distraction, on what you’re doing. It might be a creative endeavor like playing a piece of music or writing a blog post; it could be playing with your child or dining with your family; and if you’re lucky when you’re sitting down to work, it’s whatever you’re supposed to be doing.
Grant advises us to have some small, achievable goals to work toward to chip away at languishing and give us the opportunity to achieve flow. I have a few more ideas to add to his.
So, having looked at how to let go of past troubles in last week’s post, now let’s look at how we can make your near future an opportunity for flow so you can get back in the saddle.
FLOW FACTORS THAT RHYME WITH BRAIN
Abstain
There are all sorts of distractions, from within and without. Some come at you, and some you go out of your way to pick up. You know what leads you down a rabbit hole. Maybe it’s social media. (OK, yeah, it’s probably social media.) Maybe it’s the news. Maybe it’s one TikTok or YouTube video someone sent you that leads to you watching the next and the next, and suddenly you’ve missed lunch.
I’m not saying that you should eschew all social media or news reports or videos. But instead of reaching for your phone first thing in the morning when you wake up, or while you’re eating breakfast, making it more likely that you’ll be late to your desk (and in a less chipper and more distractible mood), consider alternatives activities.
Retrain
From bed to desk, whether that involves a commute or a stroll down the hall, your brain needs buffer time. You definitely can’t be expected to go from zero to 60 with work (or life) mere minutes after you were in La La Land. Retrain your brain by selecting different types of sensory inputs from your usual fare.
Instead of starting with the news and social media, how about reading a book, a short story, or a few non-news-related articles while eating breakfast? What if you read a poem before getting out of bed, and then spent your shower-and-grooming time thinking about what the poem means, both the words on the page and what it means to you?
I’ve covered a number of ways to have more opportunities to read:
12 Ways to Organize Your Life to Read More — Part 1 (When, Where, What, With Whom)
12 Ways to Organize Your Life to Read More — Part 2 (Reading Lists, Challenges & Ice Cream Samples)
How To Make Your Reading Time More Productive With Book Summaries
If you complain that you never have time to read, this eliminates that problem along with the trouble of a whirring mind. You’ll “make” time by trading a task that swallows you up (like doomscrolling) for one that can give you gentle practice at immersion and flow. And if your prep time in the morning requires a lot of hands-on work (packing lunches, walking the dog), an audio book or a podcast can give you that immersion in an auditory instead of visual way.
If you don’t think you can focus on words and meanings longer than a tweet, explore listening to a genre of music that’s new to you. If you like rap, try Broadway. (Hamilton blends the two.) If you only listen to country, noodle the dial to a jazz station. Retrain — shake up your brain.
Restrain
If you’re not unwittingly seeking out obstacles to flow, both in advance of getting things done and once you’ve started, it may be others standing in your way. Perhaps one of the parents in the pick-up/drop-off line wants to gossip and (no matter how entertaining) doesn’t seem to understand that you’ve got a deadline, a doctor’s appointment, or something else that requires your immersive attention.
Build some muscles for restraining that tendency to go along to get along. I’m not suggesting you wear dark glasses and a trench coat so you won’t be seen by Social Suzie, but perhaps you can cut her off at the pass and let her know for the next few months, you have to be on a daily conference call at “oh-will-you-look-at-the-time?!” If she’s someone you do want to hang with, schedule a phone call, a Zoom lunch, or a weekend walk (to get your steps in) at the park. You don’t have to eliminate people from your life, just be more deliberate about what part of your life (and schedule) they can take up.
Constrain
Restricting how much space you take up for your work and resources means fewer attempts to find things, fewer guesses where something might be, and more time to do the important work on your plate.
If you’re working remotely, your whole house may be available to you for work, but that doesn’t mean you should take up all of that space. Sure, you could work on your bed, at your dining table, and with your computer on the coffee table when you’re on the floor with your back against the bottom of the couch. But should you? Nope.
Create an atmosphere where a space is designated for a task. If you do expense reports in the bedroom, you’re letting your financial brain seep into the space that should be for sleep, rest, and intimacy, making it more likely that math-y concepts will pop up into your mind when you’re trying to, um, do something else in that space. If you work where you hang with your family or binge-watch Netflix, you lose that delineation between work and life, making it harder to leave work at work, already made difficult when you’re working from home!
Contain
If you’re back to working outside the home, you already have a space assigned to you, whether that’s a desk in an office, a counter in the bank, a conveyor belt in the cashier line, or the cockpit of a plane. (If it’s the latter, can you hook a girl up with some of those Biscoff cookies? Yum.) And if you’re working from home, it just makes sense to promote one space in your home to your ideal workspace.
But either way, limiting the spread of your stuff is going to make it easier for you to focus and get into flow.
So, as you move to contain the things round you, you’ll want to clear your desk of excess and keep your workspace for the project or tasks you’re working on now, or at least today. Read the Paper Doll classic article, Clean Desk Club to make your deskspace functional, hygienic, and secure. If paper clutter is the problem, read If You’re Drowning in Paper, Build a RAFT.
And for a detailed look at how to organize your home office so it’ll deliver opportunities for you to be comfortable and focused, explore the bonus-sized guest post I did for meori, Home Office Storage Ideas: From Dad’s Study to the Modern Home Office.
Containing and constraining aren’t just about tangible items. They’re also about how we schedule our time. If we have a long to-do list with nothing prioritized, no game plan, and no firm schedule, chances are, we’re going to spend more energy thinking about what we have to do than actually getting started.
Developing routines, where we can put the efforts of part of our days and weeks on autopilot, is a key. To help you contain your worktime and constrain your output to acheive the most good, start with the advice in these posts:
Playing With Blocks: Success Strategies for Time Blocking Productivity
Checklists, Gantt Charts, and Kanban Boards – Organize Your Tasks
Getting in the flow so you can get back to a (hopefully better) routine means setting boundaries in your time as well as your space. (That’s where that time-blocking post really comes in handy!) We all know that we never get enough done if we only do what we feel like doing. Most of us never feel like working out or vacuuming or writing monthly reports.
Just as our stuff has to have a place to live in our desk, our tasks need a place to live in our schedules. Merely giving them homes is a super way to jump-start ourselves back into the saddle if we were loosey-goosey with our schedules all summer (and even before).
We also depend on activation energy. Because the hardest part of what we do is the getting started, we have to incentivize ourselves to get going. There are all sorts of ways we can trick ourselves (a little bit) with rewards, like pretty desk accessories or a coffee break, but the problem is that action precedes motivation. We’re not usually psyched to get going until we have already started!
Action precedes motivation. We're not usually psyched to get going until we have already started, whether it's a runner's high or Csikszentmihalyi's flow. Share on XIf you are struggling to get back into the thick of it with your routines, the best way to “contain and constrain,” time-wise, is to borrow accountability support from others as described in:
Count on Accountability: 5 Productivity Support Solutions
Flow and Faux (Accountability): Productivity, Focus, and Alex Trebek
Maintain
One of the best predictors of future productivity is past productivity success. Stop and think about when and how you are good at maintaining your routines.
What is it that has helped you in the past?
- Interspersing short work sprints with breaks? Embrace the Pomodoro Technique.
- Deadlines? Borrow a friend as an accountability partner to give you some external spinal fortitude!
- Physical activity and/or time in nature to get your creative juices flowing? Block times for daily mid-afternoon walks. Research shows that shinrin-yoku, the Japanese concept of “forest bathing,” has a variety of benefits, including mental focus, increased energy, improved mood, decreased blood pressure and stress hormones, and boosted immunity.
Know where you excel. Every professional organizer and productivity expert will look at your systems and resources and ask some variation of “What’s already working?” The key is to build strategies on the foundation of your success and link future approaches atop them.
Attain (and Explain)
Remember how I said, earlier, that developing routines and going on autopilot helps? But I also said we should do it for part of our days and weeks. But we can’t be on autopilot all the time.
Our brains will atrophy if we don’t keep learning.
If you’re having trouble getting back into a routine, add something to your list that will energize your brain. For me, when I’m in the doldrums, practicing Italian with Duolingo peps me up. If I’m having trouble motivating myself to reply to a frustrating email or draft a blog post, a few challenging lessons in the Italian future perfect tense will have taken me out of the doldrums. (That’s a future perfect tense joke, readers. OK, yeah, more tense than funny.)
What can you do that will shake the cobwebs loose, improve your cognitive function, boost your self esteem, and get you revved up to sit at your desk and do the next important thing?
- Learn/practice a language.
- Look ahead in your child’s schoolwork and study the concepts (long division, the parts of a cell, the causes of World War I, the themes in War and Peace) so you can discuss them together.
- Find something you’re curious about and become an expert on some small element of it. You don’t have to know everything, but if you know one thing really well, it’ll give you confidence to explore all sorts of areas of your current work, and maybe help you consider bold, new options for work and life.
- Develop a skill, whether it’s silly or serious, visually creative or experiential.
Once you attain this knowledge or skill, you can share it with others. You really know you’ve learned something when you can explain it to someone else. And when someone asks you how you were able to get back into your post-summer, post-pandemic routine so easily, maybe you can answer them in Italian or in Ubbi Dubbi!
(Shoutout to all my GenX readers for whom “Zoom” will always mean “Boston, Mass 02134” rather than video conferencing.)
Gain
It’s impossible to get excited about doing the same thing every day, day in and day out. There’s a difference between being in a groove and getting stuck in a rut, between having a routine and things being routine. All these years later, I still feel sorry for this guy.
Gain momentum by jump-starting your enthusiasm. The easiest way to do that is to have a goal to look forward to or an achievement toward which you’re striving. As with learning a new skill, I know it seems counterintuitive to add something to your activity list when you’re trying to buckle down and commit to what’s already hard to accomplish.
Most of the time, I implore my clients to let go — of excess clutter, obligations that don’t meet their goals and values, outdated ideas that no longer fit who they’re trying to become. That’s logical; cutting down the excess lets you focus on your priorities.
We could eliminate excess, only work on the work tasks and projects we’re assigned (or which we’ve assigned ourselves), and keep our heads down and our noses to the grindstone. But with our heads down, we’ll never see the sun, and with our noses to the grindstone, well, I’m not sure, but I think we’d have sore, pointy noses.
But we’re not robots. Just as learning helps us expand our minds and gain confidence, having aspirations and goals gives our lives purpose. Consider the Japanese concept of Ikigai (sounds like icky guy), or “reason for living,” or Viktor Frankl‘s wisdom in Man’s Search for Meaning.
As humans, having something to aspire to in our work and in our lives, beyond a paycheck and the same-old, same-old, imbues our days (and thus our lives) with meaning. Think of something you’d like to achieve and build time into every week, preferably every day, as part of your routine, to move you closer to that goal. Maybe you want to write a book, plan the trip of a lifetime, train to be a Rockette — the what doesn’t matter, as long as it’s your what.
Embracing a gain in your life as you head back into a day/week/life of routines will be easier when you’ve planned space in your schedule for anticipatory joy.
Just be sure to reject perfectionism on the way to spelling out your gain. The key to improving your delight in getting back into a routine is that it will grant you space in your schedule to do everything that matters, including that aspirational entity that gives it all meaning. Think progress, not perfection.
Just want to say this thing I haven’t written is fantastic. Gets better and better the more I don’t write—it contains every conceivable line of inquiry yet has a single, easily understandable throughline. Prose is perfect. Can’t bring myself to destroy it by actually doing it
— ? (@samthielman) August 23, 2021
Take action every day. Get back in the saddle. Get back on the horse. It may not be your first rodeo, but it can be your best rodeo yet!
The Perfect Unfolding As We Work From Home
Readers, I beg your indulgence as I wax philosophical today about folding and unfolding as we work from home. (No, this isn’t about laundry. I’ve written about that before, in 5 “Real Simple” Reasons We Don’t Get the Laundry (or Paperwork) Done.)
This weekend was my birthday. Last year, I went out to dinner with a friend, and I remember that strange week, as everything was changing, but nobody knew what was to come. We tensely folded ourselves in toward the booth, away from our fellow diners. We were already being more circumspect, but it wasn’t until the next day or so before the reality of 2020 set in. (But this post isn’t really about that, either.)
The Folding and the Unfolding of the Lost Year
Over the past year, I’ve been thinking deeply about folding and unfolding as it relates to our lives now, both at home and at work. In most ways, our lives constricted 12 months ago. We were running around, blissfully living our lives, commuting to work, dining in restaurants, out there in the world. And then, almost overnight, we folded ourselves up, kit-and-caboodle, and took ourselves home. Crumpled into tinier lives in smaller spaces (at least smaller than the whole world we had at our disposal before), anxiety squished us into smaller versions of ourselves.
We’d packed up our work bags, our school bags, our schedules, and folded ourselves away in our houses, nervously watching newscasts and doomscrolling our devices as we perched on the edges of our couches and dining tables.
And then something interesting happened, though we couldn’t see it at first. We unfolded ourselves. We embraced freedom from sitting in one stuffy workspace, at one desk, between the same two co-workers. We unfolded the squished toes that had been crammed into the shoes we wore as part of our uniform to be taken seriously at work. We unpacked our projects and spread them out in the new spaces we had to create to work at home while avoiding feeling like we were living at work. (More on that in a bit.)
The Unfolding of New Opportunities
As some parts of our lives fell by the wayside, other new adventures eventually appeared.
I am proud to announce that I recently became Meori‘s first guest blogger. You might recall that I first wrote about Meori three years ago, in NAPO2018: Paper Doll Explores Meori & the Glorious Goodies Within.
When I was first contacted about being a guest blogger, I was enthusiastic but cautious, as I always am in these situations. As a Certified Professional Organizer®, I’ve built my practice on developing strategies to guide clients in creating systems for making their lives more organized and productive. I view organizing products as tools, always worthy of consideration, and I tell clients (and you readers) about how those tools can serve their needs. (And yes, I tell you about my favorite products.)
But I’m not a salesperson, and if they’d wanted someone to be a product spokesperson, I wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice. (I think we can agree that brevity is not the soul of my wit, and “pithy” is not in my wheelhouse.)
So, I was delighted when I first spoke with Deirdre Meyer, co-owner of Meori (with her husband Dirk) and Karen Oboy, Meori’s sales and marketing manager, about this opportunity. Deirdre made it clear that she wanted bloggers who knew about the necessary skills and systems of organizing.
And better yet, she wanted me to write a LONG post. (Readers? Can you imagine how hard it was for me not to jump through the Zoom window and hug them in their Seattle offices?)
In my premiere post, Home Office Storage Ideas: From Dad’s Office to the Modern Home Office, the great people of Meori gave me free reign to cover both the strategies (mindsets and systems) behind creating a peaceful, productivity-producing home office space and tactics (tools and methods) for making it all work. I encourage you to read the post at Meori’s site and let us know what ideas resonated with you.
Unfolding and Folding Products
Initially, I was intrigued by Meori’s growing line of fold-flat storage products for home and office, but I was puzzled by their name, as I’d seen that the labels on the packaging were in English and German, and Meori didn’t strike me as a German word. It turns out, they combined two Japanese words, “meian” for great idea and “origami,” to create meori as “the fantastic idea of folding.”
I got excited, because I like things that fold and unfold, or collapse and recreate themselves. I’ve written before about how much I love Origami Rack shelves, desks, and racks, which “unfold” much like one opens an accordion or an ironing board. From flat-pack to fully useful in a minute!
Long before the pandemic, I was singing the praises of my Origami 6-Tier bookshelf, shown in operation above.
(I’m not an affiliate for either Meori or Origami Rack, but it occurs to me that, like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, these would be two great tastes that taste great together!)
Time To Unfold Again
We all eventually found our temporary footing, dealing with each ad hoc bump in the road that was 2020-2021. But lately, as the one-year mark approached, I’ve heard more complaints. Sitting on Zoom calls, I’ve noticed more and more people looking tense, almost as though they’d folded themselves directly into those tiny Zoom boxes. People are rolling their shoulders, trying to get rid of cricks in their necks. They’re fidgeting. They’re hitting the pandemic wall. They’re experiencing burnout.
Does that sound like someone you know (or someone you became) in the past year? It wouldn’t be surprising if it did, because a study by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics shows that 41% of Americans were showing signs of clinical depression or anxiety disorders at the start of this calendar year, up from 34% last spring. As I’ve written many times in the past year, we need to give ourselves some grace.
There have been multiple articles about hitting the pandemic wall:
It’s Not Just You: A Lot of Us Are Hitting the Pandemic Wall (Huffington Post)
Why Kids Are Hitting the Pandemic Wall (CNN)
America Has Hit the Pandemic Wall (The Washington Post)
This article from Mayo Clinic, Job Burnout: How to Spot it and Take Action, was created in the “before times” but it’s just as apt now. They define burnout as, “…a special type of work-related stress — a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity.” Those symptoms sure sound familiar to my friends and clients.
Personally, after hitting a snag back in April, 2020, I felt like I was handling everything fairly well. After all, I’d been “working from home” (for administrivia) for most of twenty years, though it only make sense to organize at clients’ homes and offices, because that’s where the clutter lives!
“You are not working from home; you are at your home during a crisis trying to work.” pic.twitter.com/nsfb2ecTZZ
— Ethics in Bricks (@EthicsInBricks) January 2, 2021
But, as wise tweets reminded us, we weren’t just working from home. We were working from home during a crisis. I thought I’d handled the complexities of virtual organizing and “working from home” well until January, and then all bets were off. Focusing got harder; I blew through a soft deadline and had to explain to the nice Meori people that yes, I’d hit the pandemic wall, too.
Unfolding & Untangling Your Work Self and Your Self Self
It’s been my contention for a while that the biggest problem we experienced, just after we got a hang of working from home, is that we made our work lives so comfortable that we were now living at work.
One good thing about our old lives was that, for most people (who weren’t already working from home), it was easy to fold oneself up to fit in a work space and a home space. Before the pandemic, people who went off to work didn’t need the same kind of help as work-from-homers, such as I’d presented in R-E-S-P-E-C-T: The Organizing Secret for Working at Home back in 2015.
That post focused on how to show respect to yourself, and how to get others to respect the value of your time, when you’re working from home. Nowadays, that advice is more needed that ever.
Photo by rishikesh yogpeeth on Unsplash
If you’re feeling all-folded-up, maybe even tangled up, I encourage you to start with the following:
1) Separate your work space from your home space.
I know, that sounds ridiculous. You probably don’t have oodles of space You finally found the “good” lighting so you don’t mind having your Zoom camera turned on, so I’m not going to tell you to create two spaces, one for Zooming for work and one for Zoom-hanging with your friends. (But if you do have the space, your friends will love you just as much if you move the laptop or tablet to the couch, and look more like if they were on the couch with you, in an imperfectly-lit room, and less like you’re about to advance a Powerpoint slide at any moment.)
Basically, it’s been a year, and you’ve probably got a work space that works for you. (If not, that’s even more reason to check out my Meori guest post!) But maybe it’s time to create more space at home in which to live.
As the weather warms up, maybe move a chair onto your front porch and read 10 pages of a novel in the fresh air and daylight during your lunch break? Maybe make sure you’re not eating at your desk, even if your desk is your dining table?
2) Understand that downtime is good for you – and your career.
Usually, my advice is designed to make your work life more productive. For years, in the “before times,” I told clients to treat working from home as if they were working from an office. Run laundry or make personal calls at lunchtime, if you must, I’d say, but work when you are “at work” and do home things on your “personal” time.
Wow, how very 2019 of me!
This advice made sense when the struggle was ignoring inanimate sensory inputs (a pile of laundry, bills to be paid, dinner to defrost); now, the sensory inputs are tiny humans needing help, or a gentle prodding, with online school. You can’t, and shouldn’t, be all-work-and-no-play during the day.
According to research by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Zooming is helping us keep our meetings shorter, but we’re working longer. “We also find significant and durable increases in length of the average workday (+8.2 percent, or +48.5 minutes), along with short-term increases in email activity,” they found.
As the articles on hitting the pandemic wall acknowledge, we’re all experiencing overstimulation. We’re ALWAYS ON, so of course it’s hard to wind down. Just as the temptation to address home things during work hours must be guarded against, we struggle with doing more work during “home” time.
So, maybe don’t check work email while you wait for the pasta to boil. Pick up a book from your to-be-read pile instead of a report from work. Turn off your Slack notifications at night and on the weekend.
Embrace the idea that you are more than just your job. Perhaps read this New York Times article, Remember: What You Do Is Not Who You Are. A snippet I particularly liked, in (and following) an interview with Art Markman, a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, said:
“The brain needs a little downtime,” he said. “You can’t sustain concentration. Unless you can get away from the problems you’re trying to solve in your work life, you don’t give your brain a chance to reset and come up with a different way of characterizing what you’re dealing with. So even if your primary goal in life is to be as productive as possible at work, you need some time away to make that happen.”
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be invested in your work or not care about your career and the people you work with. That investment can be an asset, and being passionate about one’s work can help lead to better output. Rather, give that investment a ceiling.
3) Put the commute back into your day.
Inc. Magazine recently ran an article called The German Secret to Getting More Done While Working Remotely. Even though my job is to help people be more productive, inwardly, I groaned when I read the headline. Isn’t everyone already feeling guilty and dismayed by not getting more done, as if the purpose of life was to be more productive? (Paper Doll has a secret for you. I think the purpose of life is to ENJOY YOUR LIFE. Be productive so you can have more time to do that!)
Paper Doll has a secret for you. I think the purpose of life is to ENJOY YOUR LIFE. Be productive so you can have more time to do THAT! Share on XWhat did you do on your morning commute? Did you listen to a podcast? Talk to the people who sat by you on the train? Read? Maybe your “commute” was just driving your kids to school before turning around and heading home for the rest of your day. Are you missing those things? Your afternoon commute has similarly been blown out of the water.
For years, I’d recommended to clients who had trouble starting their work days to put on their shoes, even their coats, and go outside and then come back in before sitting down to work. Whether they went to a coffee house to procure overpriced coffee, walked around the block, or just went out the garage door and came back in the front door, this helped them trigger their brains that it was time to start the work day. Whether it’s our morning commute or our kids hearing the announcements over the PA at school (they DO still do that, right?), we need rituals to start our days.
Well, this fancy-pants Harvard professor – OK, I’ll be fair, it’s possible he has perfectly quotidian pants – advises much the same, though he focuses on the end of the workday. Per Professor Ashley Willhans, the Germans have a concept called feierabend. Google Translate merely says it’s “the end of the working day,” but apparent it’s more of “a daily evening celebration marking the moment when work is switched off for the day.” (And it apparently involves beer.)
In the old days, people sometimes went from work to the gym, and then home. So maybe this means our date with Yoga With Adriene needs to come at the end of our work day, and maybe that needs to be a bit earlier? Perhaps knowing that we can’t push dinner too terribly late (either for the comfort of our family or of our digestion) means that we’ll have to truly stop work so we can change from our work loungewear into our workout loungewear and work out at a decent hour so we can eat at a decent time?
My own end-of-day ritual is calling Paper Mommy. The idea of debriefing, recapping my work day, out loud (often during a 45-minute walk outside) is just what I need to unknot, detangle, and unfold my brain, my body, and my life. What kind of “commute” could you add to the start and end of your day?
Unfolding of Hope and Confidence
In the past year, my friend and colleague, Dr. Melissa Gratias, introduced me to the concept of the Shraddha Sutra she learned in her meditation class. (You can read Melissa’s take on it in her post, Are We Broken?)
śraddhā = śrad + dhāśrad literally means “that which gives you space and holds you in place” dhā provides nourishment for you to grow śraddhā conviction; faith; trust
However, my friend’s meditation teacher explained it more conceptually as “radical trust in the perfect unfolding” of one’s life.
Whoa.
Melissa and I have been discussing this concept a lot over the last year, as we look at how our spaces, our careers, our relationships, and our very lives have been evolving. I said it in my post, The Now Normal: When the New Normal Changes Quickly, and I have been surprised by how prophetic it was. (Whoohoo, Paper Doll!)
This March is not last March. We see sunlight instead of darkness. Every day, more of our parents and grandparents and friends are able to get the vaccine. More of us have a sense of what we want our lives to be (or not be) as we come out on the other side, as we unfold ourselves into new shapes and new selves.
Perhaps this probably didn’t sound very much like an organizing and productivity post. But please remember that the purpose of organizing, at least the Paper Doll version of it, is to have more space and time to do the things you want with the people you care about.
So, I don’t know about the radical trust part, but as we move forward, I hope that you experience the perfect unfolding of your life.
Paper Doll on The Truth(s) About Standing Desks
Are you sitting down?
That’s what we ask people when we’re about to share upsetting news. Well, if you’re sitting down, and if you tend to be sitting down much of the time, this may not be news if you’ve been paying attention the past few years, but it’s certainly upsetting.
Spending too much time at our desks, plopped down (and probably hunched over), is pretty bad for us for a number of reasons, including those illustrated in this adorable TED-Ed Talk:
Articles like Sit Less, Live Longer and Too Much Sitting May Thin the Part of Your Brain That’s Important for Memory point out the major physical and cognitive problems associated with remaining seated.
But this doesn’t get into the latest and perhaps most important research. According to science writer Gretchen Reynolds, a recent Swedish study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that when you sit all day, your telomeres (the tiny caps on the ends of DNA strands) get shorter. Apparently, this is NOT A GOOD THING! As telomeres get shorter, the rate at which the body ages and decays speeds up. Conversely, the study found “that the telomeres in [those] who were sitting the least had lengthened. Their cells seemed to be growing physiologically younger.” Obviously, we all want young cells!
The Push for Standing Desks
So, the experts have said, STAND UP! Why? Well, they figured that for each thing that sitting does to you that’s bad, standing can reverse it.
Let’s start with ergonomics and posture. You can still slump a little when standing, but not to the same extent as when you’re sitting in a chair. So, standing can help you strengthen your core, tighten up your glutes, and strengthen other muscles. There’s also such a thing as Upper and Lower Cross Syndromes, which, when you spend too much time sitting, can lead to tension headaches, shoulder strain, and that oogy feeling of becoming one with your office chair. When you stretch your leg and torso muscles by standing, you’re a bit more fit. Or so the theory goes.
Then there’s your cardiovascular system. Standing while working increases metabolism (vs. sitting down), and the theory is that just by standing, you can reduce your risk of heart disease by increasing your blood circulation. Well, maybe.
The physical advantages of standing vs. sitting make sense. But some researchers have posited that standing has other advantages related to productivity, creativity, and cognition.
With regard to productivity, studies note that while standing, more nutrient-rich blood, more mood-enhancing hormones, and more oxygen can get to the brain. More nutrient-rich blood and oxygen means more cognition, per The Economist, and unless you’re that Danish prince, Hamlet, more thinking means more productivity. (Hamlet, however, really needed a Disney vacation, or at least a mindless afternoon Kardashian-TV.) And more mood-enhancing hormones should, logically (and up to a point), yield more creativity. Whoohoo!
Finally, while a celebrity endorsement doesn’t necessarily imply wisdom, there have certainly been some famous desk-standers, including Ernest Hemingway (who famously said, “Write drunk, edit sober,” so you have to imagine him leaning more than standing), Vladimir Nabakov, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Benjamin Franklin. Good company to keep – though, come to think of it, a number of them were tipplers and likely leaning like Hemingway.
The Tide May Be Turning
Up until recently, everyone had gotten a bit rah-rah about standing desks. There’s money to be made from standing desks, and health and productivity to be gained from standing, per se, so why not try it? Well, standing is well and good, but there’s some doubt as to whether standing desks do that much for you.
Boston Public Radio rather dramatically declared Throw Away Your Standing Desk after interviewing Arthur Caplan, Director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center about the minimal benefits of just standing while working. (Enjoy the audio for some jokey byplay.)
Further, there’s some shocking reportage that standing desks could be making you dumber! Apparently, a recent study in the journal Ergonomics found that while “due to concerns about excessive sedentary exposure for office workers, alternate work positions,” were studied, but they found that prolonged standing may have negative “health and productivity impacts” and that while creative problem-solving did improve, “reaction time and mental state deteriorated.” Yikes.
So, the answer is, STAND UP, but don’t expect that standing desks are going to yield that many benefits.
The Best of Both Worlds
Use a standing desk if you want (but keep an eye out for muscle fatigue, swelling in your legs, ankles, or feet, and decreased in cognitive function). If your back needs more support, sit at your desk, but set a timer or use an app to remind you to get up from your desk every 45 minutes or so.
Take a brisk walk around the office, do some wall push-ups, or go outside to make a client call and enjoy some fresh air. It’s said that Aristotle’s followers, the Peripatetics, engaged in all of their philosophical discussions while ambling about the Lyceum in ancient Athens. Why not take a page out of their books (scrolls?) and propose West Wing-style walking-and-talking meetings with your colleagues instead of traditional sitting or recently-in-vogue stand-up meetings?
Chances are that movement, rather than just standing, will have a more positive effect, and a change of environment will jump-start your creativity.
Shopping for Your Solution
If you decide you must have a standing desk, Paper Doll has you covered. Really smart consumer sites like Wirecutter like the Fully line of adjustable standing desks, particularly the highly-rated Fully Jarvis Bamboo adjustable standing desk.
Of course, as with all furniture, prices range from high-end adjustable desks like those of Bush Business Furniture’s Stand 80 series to the DIY standing desk options and ideas on Pinterest.
Perhaps you’ve already got a desk you love. You could try what Paper Doll thinks of as a desk-topper (like a mattress pillow-topper), like HumbleWorks. The spine of the HumbleWorks has multiple slots, making it entirely adjustable. No matter your height, you can put your monitor and keyboard shelves at the correct ergonomic position for appropriate eye level and height.
The “spine” piece folds flat when not in use, so it’s easy to store.
Compare different versions of the HumbleWorks standing desk. For example:
- Stan 1 is compatible with Macs and PC laptops with screens up to 15″, is made of 18mm birch plywood, and is reinforced with steel suspension cables and pins.
- Stan 1.5 is compatible with Macs and PC laptops and desktops with screens up to 17″, is made of 18mm birch plywood, and is reinforced with steel suspension cables and pins.
- Stan 2 is compatible with Macs and PC laptops and desktops with screens up to 27″, is made of 22mm birch plywood, and requires reinforcement.
If you like the wood look but want an alternative that’s more portable (and more price-sensitive) investigate the StandStand, which weighs less than many laptops and can be assembled in minutes. Versions come in bamboo or birch with varying finishes, and in multiple styles (for laptop, laptop-and-mouse, or for two monitors).
Not sure how you feel about the whole standing desk kerfuffle? Not ready to plunk down money for something that may not have a profound impact? Why not start small?
Recently, friend-of-the-blog and Professional Daily Money Manager Nanette Duffey shared her experience with the Ergodriven Spark, a sturdy cardboard standing desk that will only run you $25! It’s not gorgeous, but it gives you plenty of room for your laptop, an external keyboard and mouse, and even a knick-knack or two.
What if you want the best of all worlds? Do you want something fairly portable and full-size? Then your best bet is Refold, a sturdy, stand-up desk made out of thick cardboard! At 14 pounds, it’s not as lightweight as the Ergodriven, but it’s a free-standing desk and will hold 187 pounds! The Refolds come in three sizes: small for petite types (5’2″ and under), medium for those from 5’2″ to 6′, and large for those tall drinks of water over 6 feet.
The Refold can have a cardboard or (for a teeny bit more money) a waterproof surface, can be painted or drawn on to customize it, and is fully recyclable. You can also purchase optional legs to turn it into a sitting desk for those days when you just can’t stand it!
One fairly significant note: the Refold is made in New Zealand, meaning that in addition to the $120-$190ish US dollars (depending on your product choice and the exchange rate), you’ll be paying some serious shipping charges.
Safety First
If you decide to keep on sitting, sit safely. Review these essential ergonomic tips for sitting, including:
- Sit with your feet flat on the floor.
- Keep your monitor at the same height as your line of vision.
- Sit so that your elbows are at a 90-degree bend when your hands are on the keyboard.
Finally, whether you decide to sit, stand, or work using a combination of both, make time to check that everything measures appropriately for your height. The NotSitting.com website has created an interactive sitting/standing-height desk calculator so that if you input your height, you can see the appropriate heights (whether sitting or standing) for your eyes and your elbows, and know how far your seat should be from the ground and how far your eyes should be from your monitor. For example, the following graphic shows what Paper Doll‘s ideal sitting and standing situation should be.
You’ve been reading this post for a while. Why not stand up, stretch, and take a walk to think about what you’ve learned?
Up Filer: A New Vertical Filing Solution
Got paper?
Of course you do. And most of your papers for your life and work probably live in some typical places: standing up in file folders in desk-top file boxes or step risers, or hidden away in filing cabinet drawers, or flat on your desk (and maybe piled all around it), with whatever is larger and/or on top obscuring whatever is below.
If you have lots of flat, non-bulky paper items, perhaps you’ve invested in a flat filing cabinet, with a variety of drawers to allow art projects, historical documents, and architectural designs nap in relative obscurity, often ignored or forgotten.
Or maybe you’ve embraced the vertical approach with creativity — have you piled a bunch of related papers on a series of clipboards and hung them on your wall?
@2013 ASpareAndAPairDIY.com
The problem is that many people find that it’s fairly hard to gain purchase on your projects when they are hidden away. If you’re in a communal office setting, sharing resources and working on projects requires that everyone can have access without having to knock on Joe’s door and interrupt a meeting (or his tearful third-fight-of-the-week with his sweetheart) just to get the updated specs on the current blueprints. While it may seem like more and more of what we do is digital, there is still so much flat, tangible stuff and it needs to be easily stored and fairly accessible.
A new solution from Denver-based Westerville Design is a cross between a file step-riser and an on-the-wall clipboard, with a dash of the old-fashioned library newspaper rack and a soupçon of inventiveness.
The Up Filer™ Original Vertical Wall File
Each Up Filer™ unit has ten nickel-plated steel hangers designed to hold whatever flat content you need to keep off your desk, like:
- file folders
- blueprints
- design layouts
- photos
- newspapers (remember those?)
The central spine of the Up Filer™ is made of solid maple hardwood, and the full size of the contraption, spine and hangers, combined, is 11.5″ wide x 34.5″ high x 2.5″ deep (29.2cm x 87.6cm x 6.3cm).
You don’t have to limit yourself to uniform height, weight, or thickness of papers or folders. Westerville says both the thickness of the content and the width can vary greatly (though they’ve not provided maximum measurements). The site notes that the height of the content depends on the thickness, but can measure up to approximately 16.5″ (42 cm) depending on the thickness (just as when too-thick file folders tend to stand a bit too tall in a hanging folder, beyond a certain point).
The Up Filer™ Original runs $149.99 and comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee.
If you’re looking for something with similar capabilities but a little more panache, Westerville Design has you covered.
The Up Filer™ Bamboo Vertical Wall File
The Bamboo version conforms to the same measurements and specifications as the original version, but adds environmentally friendly sustainability with style, and you can select one of three colors (arranged from lightest to darkest)
- Natural
- Light Caramel
- Caramel
The Up Filer™ Bamboo runs $169.99.
Westerville Design is currently offering free shipping on both versions of the Up Filer™ to customers in the United States and Canada.
Why is the Up Filer™ better for some flat paper and storage displays?
- It doesn’t matter how small or large an item is — the design ensures that it won’t obscure what’s behind it, and it won’t be obscured by what’s on top of it.
- The Up Filer™ saves precious horizontal space and makes use of the always-forgotten-but-so-magical vertical space. The Up Filer™ is wall-mounted, so your flat items get up and out-of-the-way of your workspace.
- It’s easy. The spine of the Up Filer™ holds the hangers, and the pivoting hanger design makes it simple to remove or add items. Just lift a hanger to pop something new into the system or grab what you need.
The Up Filer™ system is designed so you put labels at the bottom of each item. It may be unusual at first to see labels at the bottom, but it lets you quickly scan your eyes down the center and see everything at a glance. Nothing will be hidden or forgotten.
In the words of the people of Westerville Design:
It quickly became obvious that it wasn’t just good for designers but would be perfect for engineers, architects, fine artists, teachers or anyone who needs a filing system that keeps all the important stuff visible and at your fingertips.
Not having been able to examine the Up Filer™ up-close-and-personal, my sense of the drawbacks is limited to a few key items:
- The price is pretty up there. Granted, a flat file cabinet is even pricier, but most people and businesses are more likely to opt for a less gorgeous and more cost-conscious storage+display solution.
- Installation/mounting shouldn’t be difficult, but if you’re all thumbs, or have a cubicle, or your home office walls are really just flimsy sheet rock, the stability of this solution may not be adequate.
- Capacity is limited. Each unit has only ten hangers, and thus holds only ten “items,” albeit those that can get fatter or larger than what you can put in a filing cabinet or on a desk-stop step riser.
To get a sense of how the Up Filer™ works, peek at this short (and silent — seriously, none of that common plinking ukulele soundtrack) video.
Of course, if you like vertical paper storage solutions, the Up Filer™ isn’t your only option. At first, I recalled the Rackit File, a wall-mounted hanging file solution I reviewed back in 2011 in Paper Doll Adjusts the Vertical Hold: Space Saving Filing Solutions. (And, of course, that post is full of more portable approaches to vertical filing.)
So, readers, on the up-and-up — would you give the Up Filer™ a try?
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