Organization Quest

Making the Most of Expert Consultations

After writing that the two times I was recently complimented for being organized were for two totally different things, I realized I was wrong: they both involved organizing information.  While not as pressing as day-to-day routines that keep a household running, organizing information makes efficient use of resources, such as when you consult with an expert.

The particular expert doesn’t matter.  It could be a consultation with a physician, attorney, accountant, or designer.  It could be in preparation for a parent-teacher conference, a business meeting, or a visiting a professor during office-hours.  It’s rare to go to any such meetings without any questions.  What’s important is that those questions are written down and prioritized so that if you can’t get to them all, or at least the most important ones.  This seems self-evident, but I spent a lot of years wasting experts’ time figuring they’d run the show.  I was wrong.  When you call for an appointment, you run the show with your questions.

An Example

By way of explanation of the illustration above, I recently found myself in dire need of a linguist. After years of intermittent self-study in Turkish, and a fun-but-casual community-center class, I had a huge store of questions.  A few weeks ago, I finally looked up a local research university, found a professor, and emailed him, begging him for any leads on possible Turkish tutors who were grounded in linguistics.  When he replied that he could help me, I practically swooned for my good luck.  I got out my grammar book and looked for all the places I’d scrawled a big, frustrated question mark in the margin.  There were many, so I started a table, noting the page in case we had to refer to it our session.  While I tried to be succinct, I was careful to fully write out the question.  It’s important to prioritize the questions so that the ones causing the most problems get answered first.  Group similar questions together so that the responses can build off one another and thus save time. In terms of formatting, I find it helpful to leave plenty of room under each question to note the response. For the sake of legibility, type the list and  print an extra copy of your questions for your expert, so that he or she can follow along. 

I know it’s unlikely you will ever care about location words in Turkish; there’s a reason why I didn’t title this post, “Making the Most of a Consultation with a Linguist.”  But the steps above work well for any kind of expert consultation, and hopefully provide a simple and effective template to get your own expert-directed questions answered.

 

Clothes Shopping Made Easy

Twice in the last week, on occasions that couldn’t be more different, people expressed admiration for me being “so organized.”  This doesn’t happen often, so I thought it might be useful to try to figure out what I’d gotten right.

The first occasion entailed some dress shopping.  I’m of two minds when it comes to shopping for clothes: either I feel like it, or I don’t.  Mostly, I don’t.  My early years as a Shopping Optimist (this is fun! I’ll find something great!) have been replaced by a Shopping Pessimist, so that I’m sure anything I actually like will be in the wrong color or size and will go home, crabby and defeated. 

Last week, I didn’t have the option to wait until I felt like going shopping. I’d been invited to an event that required the purchase of my first, real, bona fide cocktail dress; a day-to-evening shift wouldn’t do.  After looking at styles at various places online, I stumbled upon something that sets Nordstrom’s site apart:  you could sort by “store availability.”  (Other sites have “store availability” buttons for any given item, but don’t have the pivotal “sort” function.) Thus hundreds of dresses were winnowed down to what I could actually see and try on--in my size and preferred color--at a local store.  I made up a list of possibilities by style number and color which I handed to the sales associate. That’s when she said, “Wow!  You’re so organized!” and I knew that even if I didn’t desperately need a dress, she would have made a sale.  Nothing butters me up more than someone claiming I have organizational prowess.

For my new focus on equating organization with ease and simplicity, the style list passed the litmus test: it was fast to do and made things a lot easier in the store.  Instead of wading through hundreds of dresses, I had a tight list of those that I’d seen on models, could guess at how they might fit on me, and were all my size.  I was in and out in less than an hour, thus re-igniting my Shopping Optimist.

Left: and the winner is: style number 239393!

Regrouping After a Stall

In the last year, I’ve been somewhat/sort of-kind of/mostly/mostly not/not-quite-but-maybe-getting there/organized.  Yep.  That pretty much sums it up.

What happened?  In the middle of last year’s Really, Truly, This Time I’m Gonna Do It! spring cleaning pledge, my resolve flamed out.  There have been times that the Quest has spurred me on and made me determined to tackle a particular challenge so I could share what I’d learned from the process.  At other times, writing, editing, and illustrating the Quest took me away from the goal stated in my tagline:  making room for the important things in life.  Instead of jumping in and doing what I could in bits and pieces until I was done, I got bogged down in things like before-and-after pictures and timing tasks so I could report how long such a project takes. Instead of streamlining, making things easier and faster to do, I’d created conditions that loaded on more steps and slowed me down. The system was broke and I didn’t know how to fix it.

I’m still not entirely sure how to fix it.  I’m still the organized-wannabe that I was when I started the Quest nearly four years ago.  Some of the positive changes I made have stuck; some are up for a re-do.  I haven’t given up, and I think that’s important: that when you want something for yourself or for your family, you ride out the bumps and keep moving forward.  During the last year, there have been times I’ve had insights I’d like to share, or took pictures of some fun project, but then I’d think, “I could just post these pictures of this really cool wire management system, but how random would that be?”  I’m writing to tell you, dear readers, that things might be a little random but I'm moving forward.  Quest on!