Organizational Influenza
Have you ever noticed that immediately after Christmas, retail America comes down with “organizational influenza?” All of the ads are filled with the latest storage containers, file folders, and the latest, greatest gadgets to help you banish the clutter monster. How about you: has the January organizational “bug” hit your house?
Some people seem to be born knowing how to organize and use space efficiently. Some of us have struggled with organization our entire lives, feeling like it is a foreign language to our brains! I think most of us land somewhere in the middle, intuitively knowing how to organize some situations, and struggling at other times to make the systems we have work for us.
This month, let’s take a few moments and look at what we’re doing in our home offices. Even if you don’t have an entire room dedicated to your business pursuits, take a look at your desk area and ask yourself these questions: What’s working well in here? What things do I need to change in order to make things run more smoothly? How could I arrange things in such a way as to require less effort from me and produce more of my desired results?
Are you happy with the way you’ve configured the furniture you need in order to get your business tasks accomplished? Do you have to get up and walk to another part of the room (or house) to get needed supplies on a regular basis? How could you re-arrange, or repurpose another piece of furniture in order to streamline your activities?
Most of us are using computers as an integral part of our business, so let’s start there. Is your work station physically comfortable to use? Does your chair height work with your desk surface so that you aren’t becoming a candidate for carpal tunnel? (Trust me: been there—done that—don’t go there if you can avoid it!) Is your printer in a comfortable location for you to grab paper off of it as necessary, or are you constantly contorting your back and neck to reach for something that’s just out of your reach? Where do you keep extra paper and ink for the printer: in a convenient spot nearby, or out in the garage where you have to interrupt what you are doing (and possibly get distracted by some other task) in order to replenish your supplies?
How are you dealing with all of your important papers? Is your filing system working for you, or are you panicked just thinking about the fact that tax season is just around the corner? Can you quickly pull together all of your important papers, or will it be a week-long process to sort through all of 2009’s records to come up with what you need to fill out your tax return?
If you’re not there yet, here’s my New Year’s challenge to you: spend 15 minutes each day sorting and organizing your papers and workspace area. I think you’ll be amazed at what you can get done in 15 minutes of seriously focused organizing, and in two weeks you probably won’t recognize your space. Give it a whirl and let me know the results on my blog: everydayeconomy.blogspot.com
Here’s what this process has looked like recently in my own life. I’ve spent the past few weeks volunteering in my church’s music room. The Minister of Music in my church is incredibly talented and highly creative—but from a realistic standard, there are almost no gray matter cells left over in his brain to deal with organization. His gifts simply lie elsewhere. For more than 4 years, little has been done to maintain his office or to organize the music and other supplies in the program. He was overwhelmed by the task, and had not known where to start—so he never did!
For one eight-hour day, three of us tackled the “bones” of the room. It would have been overwhelming for one person, but the companionship of three people made the process more manageable, and when friends work together, you create your own fun! We moved filing cabinets, emptied closets, sorted, purged, and threw away broken and useless things. We recycled everything we could and made a huge pile to give to charity. I invited other church staff to come in and “shop” the give-away pile, repurposing things within the church’s ministries before giving them away elsewhere. We constructed strategic piles for different sections of the room: this is handbell stuff, this is choir stuff, this is praise team stuff, etc. Because of the previous neglect of the room, this was an all-day project, but it put the structure in place for the room to function more efficiently.
It has taken an additional three weeks of hit-and-miss sessions of sorting, filing, and smaller rearranging to get the big organizational structure firmly in place. There are many more hours of micro-organizing to go, but I’m finally at the point where I can put out a call for help and ask for many others to invest in the upkeep of the room. This week several more of us will be rearranging the choral library; next week the handbell music library needs to be dealt with. Little-by-little, step-by-step, everything important will fall into place. The room didn’t become a disaster overnight, and it won’t be transformed overnight. However, we already can see a huge difference in how the room is functioning, and in the positive difference it is making in the lives of the church members who use its space.
I don’t know where you are in the battle for organization, but I do know that we serve a God who brought order out of chaos. (Read the first few chapters of Genesis to get inspired!) God gave us intelligence and intuition to create organizational systems that will help us use our time, talents, and businesses for his glory. God is a God of redemption, too, so regardless of how bad the mess is, there is a way out! Ask Him for help, ask your family members for help, humble yourself and ask a girlfriend or two for help if you need to “crisis clean,” as we did at my church.
2010 is a year that holds promise and potential for you to grow into more of the Christian Mom and Businesswoman that God has created you to be. Go ahead and deal with organizational influenza, but don’t forget to enjoy the journey!
~Dana Christensen-Udlock
Visit Dana’s website: http://www.thestoryofyou.cceasy.com/
Dana’s Blog: www.everydayeconomy.blogspot.com
Filed under: Small Business, Uncategorized, work from home
