The Organization Paradox

Posted by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Nov 18, 2007 in Business Theory, Fun, Inspiration, Personal | 5 comments

I’m disorganized.

Yes it is true. I am disorganized and proud of it. As I grow older I tend to get less organized too. When I was younger I tried to get organized. I tried several systems, bought filling cabinets and folders and dreamed of an organized life. Now I know better. A few things changed and I’m going to tell you how I live with disorganization and still manage to move forward.

Email
Managing email is a lot of work so stop doing it. Yep, that is how simple it really is. When I first started working with email I had a subfolder for every person I knew and filters to file each message from and to these people in their own folders. This caused problems when mail came from companies or I sent email to several people at once. I also spent time on setting up folders and rules and browsing through folders of names looking for this one folder with the one message I was looking for. Then I met a guy who showed me his mail application. He only had a few folders and they were titled ’2001′, ’2002′ and more. He just had a lot of messages in his inbox and every now and then he selected his whole inbox and filed all the messages into the folder for that year. Simple, elegent and efficient. I adopted this new system right away and that was that.

Appointments
A manager at a big firm once told me he didn’t keep a calendar. Well, he had one but barely looked at it. Once a week he glanced at it and that was it. I asked him if he missed a lot of appointments and he explained that yes, he did forgot about quite a few appointments, but only the unimportant ones. The really important meetings you don’t forget and don’t need an appointment for. It is the unimportant meetings you agree to and then regret when you are there. He said ‘Appointments are taken way to seriously’ and explained to me that he used his memory to make sure that he only did the really important stuff that really mattered in his life. A lot of managers around him resented this because he was so hard to make an appointment with but h DID get all the important stuff done and did very well within his company. I didn’t adopt his way of work but I did become more relaxed about my calendar. Every now and then I forget a meeting and then profusely apologize but also realize that sometimes more important things can come in the way of a meeting.

Documents
I collect a lot of documents, articles and magazines during a normal workweek but don’t always get a chance to read them. Then I read a story in Wired magazine about a guy who threw away his complete library of carefully selected and filed documents which he had collected over 15 years. He found out that the old information he had so carefully filed was generally out of date and that searching for the old information all over would give him more insight and produce more information than just picking one document out of his archive. He started using a new system: read every article you get within 24 hours. If you haven’t read it within 24 hours you never will so throw it away or even better; give it to someone who you think is equally interested in the subject. People will start to appreciate that you are always giving them these interesting things to read and if you are lucky will give you an report about what was so interesting about the article afterwards. You could even tell them this story as you give them the information and suggest they either throw it away or pass it on within 24 hours themselves. Either way, you keep your bags, closets and desk free of paper and people will love you for sharing all this information with them.

So, these are a few tricks I use to keep organized without actually organizing anything.

I also once started reading a book called Getting Things Done. It changed my life. I only read the first chapter and then realized that it is more important to be happy than being good at organizing everything. Right there and then I decided to stop worrying about my disorganization and implementing yet another organization scheme and simply concentrate on what I was good at. I gave away the book and felt very organized, and happy, ever since.