How to Get Organized When You Don’t Have Time to Get Organized
Date Posted: October 14th, 2009
In a perfect world you’d be able to take all the time in the world to set up your stuff management system. But your world isn’t perfect. Every moment seems to be eaten up by important things. You certainly can’t find a block of time in your day any larger than 15 minutes. If that’s the case for you, and you’d still like to have some sort of system in place, then this post is for you.
I do have one big assumption: you aren’t currently making use of your in-between time. By in-between time, I mean the time spent waiting in line at the post office or while you’re driving to and from work or class or that five minutes between when you get home and your next scheduled task. These are the moments this techniques utilize.
I have another smaller assumption: you don’t have a deadline for when your system needs to be totally in place. If you really don’t have the ability to take a large chunk of time out in the beginning, you can’t expect to be off and running any time soon.
So, with that, here’s the technique.
Step 1: Day dream During those in between moments visualize what your system will look like. How it would make you feel to be using it. What elements will it have. Get excited about it. The more clarity you can get the better. You don’t need to write anything down yet, so you can do this anywhere.
Step 2: Read Getting Things Done This system is probably the best for the person who feels swamped. It’ll give you a method for doing things more efficiently so that you may have a few extra moments to do some long term planning. You can get the book from the library or your local bookstore in book form or audio form. If you get the book form, keep it with you at all times. It’s one of those reads that doesn’t take much to pick up where you left off. If you get the audio version you can play it during your commute or your run or whatever.
Step 3: Day dream Some more, maybe with a pencil Focus on clarity. What exactly do you want from your system. When you get the feeling you know what you want, take 10 minutes somewhere… anywhere… to jot it down. Set a timer if you have to so you don’t spend more time on this task than you want to.
The main question to answer here is, what supplies do I need to purchase?
Chances are you’ll probably need:
- A physical planner that holds 5.5inx8.5in sheets
- 8.5inx11in paper
- Three hole punch with movable hole punchers
- A paper guillotine (check to see if your workplace already has one)
- Nice Pen
- Nice Pencil
- Divider Stickers
- Heavier card-stock paper (8.5inx11in) for turning into dividers
- “Today” tabs
Step 4: Purchase items when convenient Keep your shopping list with you. Whenever you’re in the appropriate store where you could buy these things check to see if they’re there. Don’t make a separate shopping trip unless you have time to spare. Remember, there’s no deadline for getting this done. Do it when it’s convenient
Step 5: More day dreaming maybe with a pencil Same deal as before. Don’t spend too much time writing down what sheets you need for your physical planner. (Take as much time as you want to think, though. That isn’t wasting any time.) Action pages? Waiting for pages? Shopping list? Agendas? Figure this out. Then write down your list. Set a timer.
This might not be a bad time to browse DIY planner’s set of pages. Remember, you’ll want to print the 2-up version. It’ll save you a lot of hassle.
Step 6: Print, cut, and hole punch your pages Here you might want to set aside 20 minutes. But maybe you could combine this task with watching TV or something. You can also spread this task out over several days. Do the printing one day, cutting another, hole punching yet another. Again, there’s no deadline here.
Step 7: Fill in your planner during your in between time While you’re waiting in line at the grocery store, write down some tasks you need to do when you get home. Same thing when you’re waiting for a movie at the movie theater, or while you’re waiting for the all-staff meeting to get started. Use the minutes to empty everything stored in your head.
Step 8: If you can spare it, do a weekly review But maybe limit your time to 20 minutes. Only recopy pages that are mostly full. Or don’t even recopy, just add to it. When one’s finished you can get rid of it. Make it as sparse a review as possible. Using a timer’s a good idea to keep it from eating your day.
Using this method it’ll probably take you quite a while to get your system up and running. Maybe a month or two. But that’s OK because at least in a month or two you’ll have a working system. If you don’t do anything, 2 months from now you definitely won’t have a system. And maybe along the way you’ll find that you actually do have more time to spare than you realize. Maybe you’ll be able to get your system up and running way earlier than you expected to. 
