Life of a working woman
I ordered a 3 layered desk organizer last month from E office planet.
But guess its lost amongst the piles of papers I stacked on my desk just
the other day. By the way, that pile came from an attempt to clean off
that chaotic desk I started off this story with...huh!!
I
over - heard a "working woman" shout out to her "executive husband"
just the other day, in an apartment right next door, " go find your
pair of socks on your own. My uterus is not a tracking device that you
keep asking me to find all your missing stuff ... and better still, let
me know if you find my red scarf that I wore to the corporate meeting
the other day, in case you get lucky while searching for your socks".
Hilarious !!
This is not a unique story, a lot many
around me feel the same - and go through the same ordeal. And a lot many
of us feel the need to be better organized as well. I think at one
point, we have tried those very smart looking solutions like " write it
down", " make a list", " put things back from where you picked" sort of
things ... has failed to work after the few initial honest attempts.
Here
are a few things that have worked for me - and are practical as well.
They take you a long way in helping you be organized -
1. Do one thing at a time
Multitasking
is cool, but puts a great amount of stress on you as a person at the
end of it all. As rightly put in by Dave Crenshaw in the very title of
his "Multitasking : How "Doing it all" gets nothing done". The effort
should be to complete the task in hand, rather than jumping on to
multiple chores at one go. And yes, the effectiveness is the reward of
doing one thing at a time.
2. Sustained Focus on tasks
Like
they say, dig deeper to get gold. And for that, you need intense
focus. A frivolous approach will only make you abandon tasks mid way,
and get to something else - only to be dropped mid way again. So all you
need to do is to consciously attend to what you are doing. Easier said
than done from a person whose attention span is worse than a
toddlers.Yet, worth trying, it is working for me.
3. Delegate at work / Hire help at home
You
cannot possibly do all things on your own. I like to control the
reigns, and cannot trust anyone with execution of even small tasks. I am
a project manager ( and maybe a bad one), who should be getting work
done through others. But most of the times, I used to hold things with
myself, and allowed very few or none, to interfere with the critical
tasks. Situation at home was no better , and I was dead tired in the
process. Take it easy. Perfectionism, just like multitasking is a futile
achievement, and only drains you off. Apply the brakes on your self,
delegate tasks that you can in office, and come back to advise and
polish the outcomes. You will be known very soon to be a great mentor as
you will allow others to learn by doing things themselves. At home,
hiring help for smaller chores for small stipends will free up your time
to organize bigger and better things - for eg. your overall life and
what you want to do with it :)
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