Turn into a taskmaster
Amy Joyce

How organised are you?

If you’re like me, you make a list—at least mentally—of everything you have to do. I usually list the five or so things I really must accomplish by day’s end.

But those five things will become about 79 by the end of the day. One boss needs one thing, another boss needs something else. A few unexpected interviews creep up. The phone doesn’t stop ringing. A girl’s got to eat too. Colleagues stop by to chat. The e-mails ("I need a response right away!") keep coming. There’s a meeting I forgot to mark on my calendar. Then it’s 7 pm.

So much for that 9 a.m., boy-do-I-feel-organised sensation.

It doesn’t have to be that way, argues Kenneth Zeigler, an organisational consultant to companies. The author of ‘Organising for Success’ claims we can get two more hours out of each workday.

After speaking with him, I began to think it was true. But first I had to find my keyboard.

People are less organised at work than ever, Zeigler says. Downsizing has left many people simply overworked and overwhelmed.

Even if a worker isn’t taking on a job that used to be completed by four people, the onslaught of instant messaging, BlackBerrys, e-mail, voice mail and text messaging means employees are always on. That means they can’t get any one thing done without interrupting themselves to do several other tasks.

We must learn to cut into demands to have something done immediately, he says: If people realise you’ll get something done if they push you at the last minute, they always will. "What you need to do is move them away from that expectation, or they won’t plan ahead."

If workers say they can’t do something at that very moment, the demanding person will learn to plan ahead. "The corporate world is extremely reactionary,’’ he says. "We give the impression that we can go to another person and they will do something for us immediately."

Next, we need to learn to control ourselves. Zeigler recommends a ‘master list’ to control everything that flies at you every day.

The to-do list is the most used, and least effective, tool, Zeigler writes: "A typical to-do list might contain dozens of items that a person would naively hope to accomplish in a day."

A master list, on the other hand, is a weeklong slate of tasks that need to be accomplished, but it’s also a changing list to which we add ideas as they pop up, personal to-dos and notes from conversations. He recommends updating the list at the end of each day, when it provides closure and separation between work and home.

With a master list, a worker has to look at only one place for things to be done. It’s not a daily list that gets thrown out every day, or 12 post-its hanging around a monitor.

Along those lines, Jan Hawkins, a programme assistant, credits her e-mail system’s Outlook calendar for her successes. Her desk is a disaster, covered in paper. But her day? Totally under control.

Hawkins makes a list of tasks every day in the programme. She programmed the computer to remind her at 4 pm. of anything that is due and wasn’t taken care of that day. Anything left unfinished rolls over to the next day, in red. If someone asks her to do something, she immediately puts it in Outlook or she will forget it, she says: "It’s too easy to go in one ear and out the other."

She is so organised that her boss told her recently that she hadn’t seen the office run this smoothly in a long time.

"I’m always thinking about how to organise," she says. "Now if I even think I need to remember to do something, it goes right on the task list."

Zeigler calls for having nothing on your desk but the bare essentials.

But the argument is a good one. With all the piles on our desks, it’s hard to concentrate. We bounce from one thing to another, and it takes twice as long to accomplish any one thing. He likes to say we should become like a jukebox. A jukebox takes a disc out, and when the CD is done playing, it is put back. Then on to the next one. Do that, he says, and you "can put 100 per cent of you into that file folder."

But aren’t people afraid to put folders away because they might forget such-and-such a folder exists? Well, yes. To fix that, you should create a system that lets you know just where the present folders are and what is in them. The ‘future’ or ‘past’ folders should be tucked away in a reference cabinet.

"The file system in a desk should mirror an e-mail system," he adds.

— LA Times-Washington Post