Work that will never get done

A recent Blondie comic strip was quite funny from the organizational skills point of view. Dagwood is explaining that he is dividing his workload. He says, "The first pile is for this week, the second pile is for next week, and the third pile will probably never get done."

I wouldn't recommend this method for explaining your organizational skills to your boss, but I think it is worth sharing just from the humor standpoint.

Visit the Blondie site for more smiles and chuckles.

Learn to adapt - The egg timer quit

I have never been known as someone who brushes his teeth well. My parents taught me to brush in circles, but I didn't do that well. At least my childhood dentist always said, "You are not brushing good!" when I had a bunch of cavities at my checkups. Later a dentist taught me to brush straight back and forth. Then I heard we should be brushing at least two minutes. So I timed myself and that seemed like a long time. Obviously I wasn't brushing very long before that. But my dentist says now my teeth and gums are looking a lot better.

At my wife's latest checkup, they told her to brush at least three minutes, and gave her two egg timers to use, one for her, one for me. So I have upped my brushing to three minutes, and sometimes even go a little beyond the egg timer limit.

Then one night, the egg timer quit. It got stuck about 2/3 of the way through it's only and very important job of timing. I've never heard of an egg timer quitting before. But I adapted. Obviously I'm not still in there brushing my teeth!

This may be a somewhat silly way of pointing out that we have to learn to adapt. When we are doing our organizing, something may just not be working, so we have to adapt. Try something different. Change tactics. Think of something new.

So let's say I'm working at my computer desk and I notice a pile of "important" things is getting a little too big. It's the place where I keep those things I want to check before filing, or some figures I want to add to one of my many statistical spreadsheets.

The "pile" is part of my organizational process. I don't want things laying all over, so I keep them neatly on one pile where they won't get lost. Apparently that's not working if I think my pile is getting too big. So I have to adapt, try something new. I remind myself that I shouldn't deal with something more than once. "Organize by dealing with it once!" was the title of my very first post on this blog. So either I've forgotten that great piece of advice, or I need to adapt it a little more to make it work, or perhaps try something different. It's not that my organizational efforts are all bad. I just need to adapt a little.

So if you find something in your organizational process is not working quite right, don't be afraid to change it. Adapt. The problem is not that your organizational efforts aren't good, they may just need tweaking once in a while.