“Get Organized” day
Starting from tomorrow, I will not spend my Fridays sitting in meetings. Starting from tomorrow, I will spend my Fridays organizing…organizing my thoughts from all the meetings I sat through from Monday to Thursday, organizing and filing away all the notes and documents accumulated during the week, writing reports that I need to submit, setting my goals for the following week, making a list of tasks I need to complete the following week and setting the stage for a more efficient week.
I had to cancel out of a three day training this week at the last minute, due to project demands. But this suddenly left my Friday calendar open. As I get ready to go home, I glance at the mountain of documents on my desk. “I need to get these organized”, I think to myself. I wish I could spend tomorrow organizing my desk. But there’s never time. I look in my calendar, and alas, “I don’t have a single meeting scheduled for tomorrow!” Nothing. Nada.
As I got excited about the prospect of some ‘downtime’ to review, reflect on and act on all the documents on my desk, I thought to myself, “why don’t I do this every Friday?”
Why not? Such a simple concept. I will block out my schedule on Fridays, mark my calendar as ‘busy’ for the whole day. That way, I remember not to schedule meetings with other people on Fridays. Hopefully, meeting invites from other people for Fridays will be reduced. Fridays will be my “Get Organized” day. Why didn’t I ever think of this?
If anyone needs to optimize their time at work, it’s the working mom. Staying after regular hours to complete tasks that need to be done is not an option, at least not on a regular basis, because then my kids would languish in daycare. Not an option. My hubby does enough long hours and business trips for the two of us. I’m doing “Get Organized Fridays.”
I’m excited that today is Thursday, because tomorrow, I can put my plan into practice. If I can make this work, if I can take a step back from the frantic pace of work, I will probably meet my objectives quicker than when I’m flying by the seat of my pants. It’s taking a step back so I can take a leap forward.
I often hop from meeting to meeting to meeting with little or no downtime. I accumulate documents and they just sit on my desk. I’ve read of organizing techniques - touch it once and process it or dump it (or something of that nature), but that hasn’t worked for me. I need to review it, reflect on it, make sense of it, put it aside, try to make sense of it again until I figure it out. Since I don’t always have time for that in the office, I often bring them home (which is totally unrealistic since I never have time for that at home either), take them back to work untouched where they join the pile of older, half-reviewed documents. I wonder how I’ve been getting by. Well, I’m breaking the cycle tomorrow. And I will have a clean desk while doing it.
