Organization Puts Projects In Fast Lane
Organization begins with an attitude. It’s a matter of knowing where you are, where you’re going, how you’ll get there and what you’ll do when you arrive.
Compare a disorganized life to a busy traffic intersection with no controlling signs or lights. Traffic tries to flow in all directions at once, accidents happen and no one really gets where they wanted to go. At times the only way to get back in charge is to be the traffic cop and blow your whistle, put your arms out and order everything around to HALT! Then, in a methodical way, you motion for one lane of traffic to move and gradually add more lanes until all are flowing in harmony. Once you’ve got the give and take pattern of traffic, it becomes routine to signal stop with your right hand while your left directs the flow on that side. Then the flow rotates and traffic moves all around you in an apparently effortless manner.
1. Begin with the end in mind. You know that you want the traffic to flow smoothly. That’s your goal. Any organizational effort has to begin by identifying what you want to accomplish. From the very beginning, each action has to be directed toward the desired end.
2. Once the traffic cop knows what the goal is, the next step is to figure out the best way to make it happen. He chooses a point to begin the process of starting the flow again and decides in what order to allow the traffic to flow. That’s how you prioritize.
You decide not only which actions will help you reach your desired goal, but which are most important in helping you reach that goal. If your goal is to write a major report, your priorities will be different from someone whose goal is to rearrange the furniture in the living room.
3. Unfortunately, the task of identifying your goal and establishing priorities - knowing that you want the traffic to flow smoothly and getting the control to make it happen - isn’t the end of the story. What happens if the traffic cop turns his back and walks away once all the cars are moving? Chaos will rule again. Follow-through is just as critical to organization as setting goals and priorities. The traffic cop has to keep waving his arms and blowing that whistle.
Part of the planning phase of organizing a task has to be to determine how you will maintain your goal once you have reached it. You want it to become part of your lifestyle, not just a brief flash in your organizational pan. Anyone who has gone through the effort to lose weight knows you can’t drop 30 pounds and return to your old eating habits and sedentary lifestyle.
If you have determined a project’s goals, priorities and maintenance, then there’s no need to panic when interruptions occur or changes are called for. You’ll be able to see the overall picture and devise a way to compensate for the setback.
Whether you are planning a family vacation, coordinating your business annual report, organizing household paperwork, managing a hectic schedule, streamlining a kitchen or uncluttering a linen closet, these are the basic principles that must be in place for your efforts to be successful.
Once you use these principles to master certain areas of your life, you’ll gain confidence in tackling others. The steps of defining your goal, establishing priorities and maintaining the result will come easier with experience. An organized mind is an expanding thing; it can handle many functions at once.
Now that you know what the steps in organizing are, you may recognize them already at work for you. You decide what sort of party to have, plan the components of decorations, food and entertainment, then follow through with that schedule.
You may also find that organizing is fun. Certainly being organized is more fun than living in chaos. It doesn’t mean you have to live in a sterile environment or have inflexible schedules and rules. Rather it means being comfortable, calm and dealing easily with interruptions and distractions. Being disorganized eats up precious time. Organization allows you to get directly to a task instead of losing time spinning your wheels trying to figure out which way to go first.
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