Organization Quest

How to: Prepare for class

As a Freshman in college, I thought I knew what it meant to “study.”  What I didn’t understand was when professors would lament on occasion that I was “unprepared,” (or once:  “woefully unprepared”) when we didn’t even have a test that day. 

Later, teaching Freshman Composition at a state university, I had plenty of opportunity to appreciate the irony of gazing at 22 puzzled faces as I asked how one could possibly come to class so completely, so totally, so . . . woefully! unprepared. 

So what does it mean to actually be prepared? Here’s a short list, roughly in decreasing order of importance:

• You’ve completed any exercises, assignments, studio- or lab work that is due at the beginning of the class period.
• You’re up-to-date on any reading assignments noted in the syllabus or mentioned in class, and you’re prepared to discuss what you’ve read and its relevance to the course of study.
• Decisions and research regarding the subject, focus, scope, or approach to an assignment or project have been made as requested.
• You’ve reviewed class notes from the previous class.
• Any questions arising from the reading or lecture, or questions about upcoming quizzes, tests, assignments, and projects are noted and ready to be asked.
• If you’ve missed the previous class, you’ve gotten class notes from a classmate, as well as notice regarding any changes the professor may have made to the assignments, projects, or the syllabus.
• You are able to correctly use the vocabulary words introduced in the reading assignment.
• You’ve made appropriate progress on any term-long assignments like notebooks, sketchbooks, journals, and the like.

Being prepared, like being fit, or being able to draw well or argue persuasively or perform lab work with skill and efficiency, is its own reward.  As with so many things, a positive momentum builds when you stop avoiding and start investing yourself and your time in what you need to do.

 

 

 

Resisting Resistance By Planning To Plan

 
This week was supposed to be Spring Cleaning Planning Week, a little trick that worked like a charm.  There's nothing like saying, "the idea isn't to do something" to feel like doing it.  So I resist my resistance to action by forbidding the action, and then use the momentum of the action started to keep going.  Pretty clever, huh?

I found a good place to get started was the supply cabinet under the sink, which would give me the chance to take stock of the supplies I have on hand while making tracks on this year's big Spring Cleaning Kitchen Chore, cleaning and organizing the kitchen cabinets. It was also a good place to start in that it was relatively easy; last fall, we had a leaky faucet that necessitated clearing everything out of the cabinet, thus learning the hard way what unhappy business it is to wait until an emergency to get things organized. 

Having gotten rid of 10 year old flea spray and other such relics in the fall, clearing out the stuff was pretty painless this time around.  I'd already washed all the rags and cleaning cloths the week before, so that didn't need to be done, either.  All told, it took me 48 minutes to clear everything out, wash and dry the liner I'd put in after the leak fiasco, wash the trash can inside out, wipe everything down and put everything back. 

 

 

 

Fighting the All-or-Nothing Approach

I once had a co-worker tell me that, while not suicidal, she couldn't wait to die.  "I just think it will be a really interesting experience," she explained, while I groped for a suitable reply. 

It was one of those conversations that you know, while you're having it, your brain is running through a quantity of cells in order to burn the moment in your long-term memory. When I'm 90, I may not remember what I had for breakfast, but by golly, I'll still be trying to figure out if the aforementioned colleague was a nitwit or really was a genius after all.

More recently, I had a conversation with a different co-worker, this one an unambiguous genius, that's given me plenty of food for thought.  I admitted that I've been down for the count on the Organization front.  "It's Just Too Hard," I said, quite as if going through a box of old papers or folding the laundry on a regular basis was akin to training for an Iron Man event.  At high altitude. In, like, July. 

Somehow, my organization efforts stalled out this fall due to what I call the "but first" syndrome: I need to organize my papers, but first I need to get a new file cabinet, but before I do that I have to decide where it goes, but first I need to clear some space, which would mean going through some papers. . . And just like that, I've painted myself into a neat,  little,impossible corner.

I tried explaining this to Emily, but she wasn't buying it. "Sounds like you have an all-or-nothing thing going on," she said.  In one sentence, she described exactly, precisely what's been going on, and why I've been stuck in organizational slo-mo for the last month or more. 

The All-or-Nothing Approach is offspring to that productivity killer, Perfectionism.  Does it really matter if I find exactly the same type of label for my spice jars that I used the last time I made new labels a couple years ago?  Must I really use the same font--or re-do all the labels as my punishment? Because that's what it feels like at times, punishment. What's the point of that? 

So this week's mantra for me  is: something's better than nothing.  "A little" is just fine; it creates a foundation on which progress builds, one step at a time. 

Photo by Alpay Ulku

The Universal Trait of the Persistently Tidy

 

A while back when I wrote about the whole dishwasher dilemma, I talked to--who else?--Stacy, the Designated Neatnik where I work.  I thought I'd get points for being all concerned and worried about how to effectively convey whether the contents of the dishwasher were clean or dirty, a fantasy that faded as Stacy furrowed her brow in bewilderment.  "What's there to 'convey'?" she said, a little petulantly I thought.  "Wouldn't it just be easier to put the dishes away when they're clean?"

Obviously, she just didn't get it. 

Or could it be:  I'm the one who doesn't get it?  And I realized that I'd stumbled upon the the Universal Trait of the Persistently Tidy:

Neatniks Are Simpletons

I know:  I'm misusing the word "simpleton"here.  Oops!  But you know what I mean:  Neatniks keep it simple.  They don't make e-l-a-b-o-r-a-t-e strategies for, say, indicating whether the dishwasher is clean or dirty.  They unload the dishwasher and move on.

They have a do-it-now approach.  They don't assume they will have "more time later" to do the task at hand.  In fact, they feel the opposite:  they don't know when they'll have another chance to do the task before them, so they figure they might as well do it now.

Neatniks are results oriented, rather than process oriented. They aren't interested in comprehensive "systems" or rituals that require time and energy to maintain. They don't have to have an item on their "To-Do" list (written on special paper!  or input and categorized on their Blackberry!) to do the chore. When bills come in and they have the money, they write out a check and deduct the amount from their account, simple as that. They don't require special pens or stamps or for their desk to be perfectly tidy in order to do the job. 

They don't backtrack:  if they do something that's not on their list, they don't go back and write it down so they can cross it off. The Naturally Tidy that I know aren't interested in keeping logs and lists, schedules and who-did-what-when-and-how-much record-keeping.  Because they keep things simple, Neatiniks don't build up a huge store of dread about doing what needs to be done, which in turn makes chores easier to do.  

Contrary to popular belief, Neatniks aren't perfectionists.   They value timeliness over so-called "perfection."  If they don't have time to shop for the perfect gift, they give a gift card.  If they don't have time to pull out all the furniture when vacuuming before guests arrive, they vacuum the heavily-trafficked areas nonetheless.  Neatniks avoid an all-or-nothing approach.  They figure something is better than nothing.

The idea that being organized is actually easier than being a slob is perhaps the hardest to swallow and yet that's exactly  what professional organizers like Regina Leeds promise.  Certainly if you are not among the blessedly, naturally tidy, you have struggled enough with this issue. If you're like me, maybe the break-through you need is to think of getting organized as finally abolishing pointless routines, non-value-added rituals, and over-stringent standards.

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Photo by Alpay Ulku.

Reverse Psychology or: How I Finally Broke Through My Organizing Rut

Funny how taking the pressure off suddenly makes things a whole lot easier, especially when it comes to chores and tasks you'd just as soon not do.  As soon as I gave myself "permission" to enjoy the summer and not worry about making tracks on various cleaning chores and organizing projects, I've been cleaning and organizing every since.  For instance, today I:  gave both bathrooms a super-through cleaning, cleared my desk and wiped it down with the holy Magic Eraser, organized five chest drawers, dusted and polished the furniture in the bedroom, tossed catalogs, did a load of wash, cleaned up after some kitten mishaps, and straighted a few drawers in the craft closet.  It felt like I got more done today than I have in months.  

Psychologists have long suggested that substituting "I have to" with "I want to" is essential for success in making progress towards goals.  I didn't "have to" clean the bathrooms today; I wanted to, the better to free up time this weekend to do fun things.  Last weekend I didn't do any chores, but I didn't enjoy the result--yucky bathrooms and an oppressive awareness that I was procrastinating.  It felt so much better to just bite the bullet and clean the bathrooms, which then supplied the momentum for the rest of the day. 

My To-Do list is still perilously close to triple digits, but you know what?  I'm gonna give myself a break and devote the weekend to scrapbooking.  It's supposed to be sunny, so maybe we'll take the bikes out and pack up a lunch and go to the harbor read, write, play backgammon, and feed the ducks. Perhaps in doing so, I'll continue to find the motivation to make progress on that To-Do list. Wish me luck!  And good luck to all of you!  Whatever you end up doing, I hope you enjoy your weekend!

A Birthday For The Quest, Along With Some Changes

In the last week or so, I've missed two birthdays:  a friend's and one of my niece's.  And then I missed the Quest's birthday, too, which was actually last Thursday.  This is what happens when you come back from vacation.  I know I should re-seal the kitchen sink and organize my junk drawer, but all I feel like doing is trolling scrapbooking sites, quite as if I don't have a growing list of To-Do's that just aren't getting done. 

But you know, it's kind of nice to kick back with a tall glass of ice tea and plan a few layouts, in-between doling out treat and tummy rubs to the kittens.  When life starts to feel like a joyless trudge through endless responsibilities, it's time to crack out the scrabble board, grab a leash or the phone, dig out the rollerblades, the fishing gear, the croquet set, the watercolors or embroidery floss, and let yourself have a little fun, if just for a little while. 

I'm gonna take my own advice and allow for a little more fun to slip into my life. I think a some R & R is just the ticket for reconnecting to so many things--whether work or dreams,  goals or plans--with a  renewed sense of purpose and vigor.  And so, for a while at least, I'm going to be cutting back a bit on my posts, aiming for 3-5 posts a week rather than my (pre-vacation) usual of 6-7. I still have a list of, oh, 732 topics to address here on the Quest.  It might just take me a little longer to get to them all.

Procrastination Experts to the Rescue! Finding the Time to Exercise (or do anything else)

One of my very first posts on the Quest had to do with procrastination--and referred to a book by psychologists Jane Burka and Lenora Yuen of the same name.  One of the fascinating ideas Burka and Yuen explore is the way procrastinators experience time.    They offer a number of strategies that are specifically designed to address common misconceptions, pitfalls, and time-wasting patterns that are common to procrastinators. 

One such strategy is the "un-schedule,"  a method developed by psychologist Neil Fiore and detailed in his book, The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play.  "The un-schedule is a weekly calendar of all of your committed activities," explain Burka and Yuen (B & Y).  One of its main advantages is that by honestly assessing how you expect to spend your time, you can see how much time you really have available to work towards any particular goal.

I've found that the "un-schedule" is  useful for things I don't want to do and am thus absolutely, positively convinced I have no time for--like exercising.  Convinced I don't have a single hour in an entire week to take a swim, lift some weights, or take a yoga class, I made a quick spreadsheet and started filling in the time. 

Following the direcitons in the book, I wrote down everything I could predict doing in the coming week, no matter how trivial. "If you always watch the evening news, Monday night sports, or other favorite television programs, put them down, " B & Y advise. I don't watch the evening news or any kind of sport, unless you count watching Patti Blagojevich, Sanjaya, and a couple of the Baldwin brothers hang by their arms until they fall in an attempt to get immunity on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!  "Remember, we are not asking you to write down what you should be doing," B & Y write, which means I can actually feel virtuous admitting my Celebrity addiction. True, this meant I had five hours a week to watch has-beens, also-rans, or, in the case of Patti, a never-ran, bicker and eat live bugs. So?

In the end, even after taking into account time toted up watching Celebrity, as well as surfing, sleeping, and the rather ambigious "fun weekend activities" in addition to working, writing, commuting, eating, and doing (rather minimal) housework, I still had a good 7 hours available to schedule in some exercise.  Guess it's time to start looking into that yoga class, after all.

 

Above: The shaded areas indicate potential time to work on a particular goal--i.e. exercising.

Below: Download  your own "un-schedule" (pdf reader required)

Download Unschedule blank

Follow-Through Project #1: Reclaiming The Living Room

Last summer, the arrival of the kittens coincided with getting a new desk for Alpay's study.  The kittens lovedthe enormous corrugated carton from the desk.  They immediately latched onto it--both figuratively and literally--and soon it became a combination hidey hole/scratching post, in which they would sink their claws with eye-rolling relish.  The more time passed, the more attached they became and the more difficult it was to envision our life without the carton's mammoth bulk and ever-present cardboard shreds.  We figured If the kittens were working on the carton, they were't working on the furniture.  That was the theory, anyway.

And so a huge, half-shredded carton sat in the living room for, let's see, eight months, because we couldn't bear to disappoint the kittens. 

The carton got the boot this weekend for perhaps the most efficient ratio of time spent/result achieved. 

 
Above: before. Okay, it takes up most of the wall.  But it's a small wall.  Below: after.

 

Getting Rid of The Kittens' Cardboard Box

This Week: The Importance of Follow-Through

When it comes to organizing, I often stop just short of my goal.  This fall when I wrote about this phenomenon, I called it the "10 yards left to go" syndrome, but with football season now behind us, I'd just as soon get literary and call it the Amarata Complex, named after the character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel, 100 Years of Solitude. Amarata is visited by an angel who advises her to sew a funeral shroud for herself, the more elaborate the better, because once she's done with it she'll die.  I can think of no better explanation as to why I'll spend a good 10 hours cleaning and organizing a room, only to overlook, ignore, side-step, neglect, forget, or otherwise blow-off doing the last little bit so that the room looks and feels "done."  Because you just know that once the last box of papers is shredded or filed, or once the last shelf in the kitchen is completely organized, God Himself is going to swoop down and say, "Well, shoot. Obviously your work here on earth is done."  And just like Amarata, you'll be pushing up daisies in no time.

This thus explains why I spent hours upon hours this fall organizing my study and even the craft closet in it, yet there are still collapsing piles of art supplies around, under, and yes, behind my desk.  My chrome shelving units are in a state of utter disgrace, and I've dumped, consciously or not, a mystifying stack of boxes, bags, and sundry supplies smack in the middle of my Fame and Reputation center according to Feng Shui.  Other examples of areas left un-done include the little aisle-way of debris that has collected by the bed and an enormous empty corrugated box that has been in the living room since June for no other reason than that the kittens enjoy playing with it.  Obviously, I need some kind of organization intervention. 

So that's what we're looking at this week--tackling the bits and pieces of projects, the last hour or so in a room or area, the final push before the optional finishing touches--that you know you have to do before you can say:  okay, this is done.   Because if you're like me, it's time to cross a thing or two off your list and move on.

Half the House Has Gone To Hell In A Handbasket

The Stash-n-Dash post I wrote the other day was really a reminder to myself.  With all the cookie excitement in the last couple weeks, the kitchen actually looks pretty darn good--having a small kitchen actually forces me to keep things up, otherwise I wouldn't have the space to work.  And since the area is so small, it doesn't take that long to clean up.  So I'm good on the kitchen front.  And the living room isn't exactly terrible.  The bedroom could be better.  The guest bath is sort of an embarrassment. As for the rest of the place: it's pretty much gone to hell in a handbasket.

I could, at this very moment, grab a bucket and the mop and get at least one chore out of the way before going to bed tonight, but I'd much rather speculate as to why a handbasket is the vehicle of choice for going to hell.  What could it possibly offer, aside from certain alliterative qualities? But then why not go to hell on a Harley?  Or in a Honda?  What exactly is a "handbasket" anyway, and how does it differ from the garden-variety baskets you get at places like Pier One and World Market?  Do you get to choose your own handbasket, or is that part of the punishment--to get stuck with some god-forsaken monstrosity that doesn't even have a liner?  Or worse:  a plaid liner. With a clashing bow.  And your name embroidered on it.

Once you get to hell, can you get rid of the handbasket already?  Or are you stuck with it forever, like a bad nose job?  And what if you get a second chance?  You never hear of anyone getting out of hell in a handbasket. This seems to imply a rather limiting, one-way quality regarding the navigational feature of handbaskets. What's up with that?  Can't you upgrade to a two-way model, just in case?  Or have I just identified a potentially huge market?  Because let's face it, it's easy to let things go.  But don't we all deserve a little redemption?  Don't we--and our homes--deserve a second chance?

Wordle This

Sometimes, quite illogically, I worry that I will become so consumed with, I don’t know, filing my tax receipts or some other equally odious task on my Dread List, that all other interests will spontaneously cease and my sad little life will become a cautionary tale for others:  you know, she used to be so normal before she got on that organizing kick. 

In order to save myself from such a fate, immediate action is imperative. It actually doesn’t matter what I do, as long as it doesn’t involve cleaning, disinfecting, filing, shopping, scrubbing, polishing, or otherwise putting myself at risk of being organized. This calls for resourceful evasive maneuvers.

Wordle has endless procrastination-worthy potential.  Type in a web address or a group of words, and a pattern emerges with point-and-click design options.  And so I present the organizationquest.com Wordle Dread List.  It’s okay, kids, you can try this at home.

How Long Does It Take?

Can you accurately guess how long any given task or chore will take?

Years ago, I came upon a book written by Jane Burka and Lenora Yuen, called simply, Procrastination. I hadn't before considered the connection between what the authors call the ability to "tell time"--or estimate how long a task takes--and procrastination.  In this regard, procrastinators tend to fall into one of two categories:  those who under-estimate the time it will take to get something done, and those who over-estimate it. 

Under-estimators minimize or disregard the complexity of a task; they fail to take into account the link between the task at hand and all of the related things that must be done in order to accomplish it.  "How long can it take?" they'll ask, not taking into account traffic, lines, the potential for mistakes or the necessity of learning curves.  Having allotted 5 minutes for a 30 minute errand, they run out of time and either abandon their plan or run perpetually late and harried.

In contrast, over-estimators tend to amplify a simple chore or errand into a project with so many antecedents, linkages, and if-then scenarios that soon become circular ("If I go to the hardware store, I should go to the library because it's on the way, so I'll have to find the library books, but I really should call Karen because her car is in the shop and she mentioned she needed drop off some books, but if she comes I should wash the car first, but last time the hose leaked so bad, I should pick up some duct tape at . . . the hardware store.")

I tend to be an over-estimator.  Not only do I overestimate the time something will take, I over-estimate the difficulty and the unpleasantness of the task--I don't know why.  And so one of the things I decided to do when I started this blog is to keep a log in my day planner of exactly how long things take.  How long does it take to wash the dishes? Clean the refrigerator?  How much time do I need to devote to laundry every day?  How long does it take to do any of the given items on my Dread List?  On the Put-Off List?  And if it really ends up taking much, much less time than I imagined . . . why am I putting it off in the first place?

And so, as I go through the items my lists, I will note how long I thought something will take, and how long it actually did; how hard I thought something will be before I started, and what I call the "sty factor", or how yucky, chaotic, exasperating, or just plain gross it actually turned out to be.  When applicable, I'll take before-and-after pictures, so you can see the results for yourself. 

Today I crossed an item off my list that I've been putting off for over a year. How much time did it take to do?  Seven minutes.

At this rate, I should be done with my entire 52-item list in . . . a little more than six hours.  But I still think it's going to take me a good year.