It’s important to note that to get organized is not necessarily the same thing as becoming super-tidy and having a bare household or office, with virtually everything in its proper place and absolutely no clutter. In fact you can overdue your efforts to get organized if you focus too much on methods and not enough on accomplishing things in your personal development strategy. (View Highlight)
“As you plan your life, resist the temptation of becoming overly organized – it’s an effectiveness killer…Running around with a stopwatch and keeping a totally clear desk isn’t going to accomplish what you want in life.” He makes the point that as we establish guidelines for organizing our lives, it is important to recognize them as “guidelines rather than hard and fast rules.” Inflexibility will actually work against our attempts to get organized. (View Highlight)
Setting priorities and utilizing the power of focus are important components of getting organized. One of the characteristics I found fascinating About Steve Jobs in the recent biography by Walter Asaacson is that Jobs’ approach was to focus on a few key priorities, rather than using focus, as most of us would, as a means of deciding what particular tasks to get done out of the hundreds of tasks we deemed essential at the time. (View Highlight)
One of the biggest roadblocks in an attempt to get organized in our personal development is procrastination; and I can speak with authority on this because by nature, I am a procrastinator. I could try to convince myself that I am really setting priorities, but it is procrastination. Putting things off can interfere with any efforts to get organized because it is avoidance of tasks or goals, and, instead of contributing to our organizational progress, holds us back from organizing and implementing our priorities and getting things done. (View Highlight)
Perseverance therefore is very important in getting major goals organized and completed, and often the best approach with major goals is to break them down or organize them into bite-size chunks and work on them one at a time, thereby making them more do-able than it would be facing a huge goal or task all at once. This idea is certainly not new and is part of practically any program or set of guidelines designed to help people get organized. But, it is an easy principle to forget if we try to move ahead to quickly in a desire to make rapid progress in our personal growth plans. (View Highlight)
Any plan or strategy to get organized will not be easy to implement. It will take continued research and diligence in application to be successful. But if personal development were easy and intuitive we would not need all the books, blogs, and websites that are available offering us assistance. (View Highlight)
In fact, by having too much on the go at once we run the risk of doing a maintenance job on many items rather than a quality job on fewer, but prioritized goals. If you use the 80/20 principle, 80 percent of the tasks are likely to be not all that important compared with the 20 percent that can really make a difference in improving our lives. Again, this principle is not new but it is easy to get sidetracked in trying to organize too many things at once. I struggle with this myself, as I tend to be eclectic by nature and have to work at remaining focused on activities that can “make a difference.” (View Highlight)
It is also hard to become organized if we confuse efficiency with effectiveness. The two are vastly different. I can be efficient at accomplishing a vast number of tasks in my work, for example, or in managing a household, but if I have too many tasks, I am not necessarily being effective. Better to be effective in getting organized with a lesser number of goals, for example, than being efficient in handling a larger number of low priority matters. (View Highlight)