The Blasted Crossing

In this article you’re going to learn about being organized, why it’s important to be so, and how it helps you. At the end of the article you should come away with a greater understanding and appreciation for the need to be organized.  You’re going to learn a lot, and you’re going to enjoy every minute of it!

Organization

“Clean up your room!”  I’m sure you heard this being yelled at you countless times during your youth, and I’m sure you hated every time you heard it, or even when you simply knew it was coming. You dreaded those words, because you knew it meant work, or at least some anguish at the coming battle that you will be doing with your parents. Oh yes, I bet you were a cheeky little bugger!

Can you remember having a messy room or a messy desk? Do you remember how hard it was to find anything under all the junk that was lying around? Do you still have that problem?  I’m sure you hated having to spend half an hour just to find your shoes, or 15 minutes just to find your pen so you could get on with your work.  Did you ever get agitated when you had to do work on a messy desk and never found out why?

It’s because of all that clutter! Whenever you thought of that mess your mind would begin going through all the stress and frustration you felt whenever you worked in a cluttered environment in the past. Flashbacks of losing track of where you were in your work would reoccur every now and then as you thought about your work, even if you may have never noticed these flashbacks, they were happening and your mood was being affected by it, whether you liked it or not.

Whenever you sat down to do some work in a cluttered and messy environment, your mind would automatically become preoccupied with all the clutter around you, leaving you much less mental capacity for the work you have to do. This can make even the smallest of tasks look huge, simply because your mind associates that task with everything currently running through your mind. Because of this, you will inevitably lose your focus many times throughout the time you spend there and your work will take even longer.

Does that sound enjoyable to you? No, I didn’t think so. If it did, I’m afraid you need more help than I can give you, perhaps a padded cell may be appropriate!

Read on to find out how you can cure this problem once and for all!

Why organize?

You may have always heard that organization and being organized is a good thing, yet you never heard exactly why it’s a good thing. All through your years you were provided with the solution to a problem you weren’t even aware of. How ironic is that?  Well I’m going to tell you exactly what being organized will do to you, and what profound effects it will have on your life!

Organization improves thought flow; I remember when I used to sit at a cluttered desk, papers strewn all over, pencils and pens everywhere and on the floor. Just getting started at working on anything was a major chore, and when I did start I would find it incredibly hard to actually get anything finished because I would keep getting distracted. I kept getting distracted because my mind didn’t want to deal with the current situation. My mind wanted to focus on something structured but the situation around me wouldn’t let it do that.

I decided one day that I was fed up with this, the clutter, and the inability to get anything meaningful done, so I began to organize my desk. I started with picking up the papers and just putting them in a pile vaguely resembling organization by topic. I think I gained a whole new desk out of that, just because I could now use the space that was previously covered up by mounds of paper. I picked up the pens and pencils, cleaned up the dust, and put away everything else that was strewn around into drawers just so they could be out sight, and out of mind.

Guess what happened to my work? It actually got completed in less time than it did for me to drink a glass of tea! Amazing isn’t it? With all that clutter gone, my mind was finally able to focus on the task at hand. The electrical impulses flowing around inside my brain began to coalesce into a great mass of pure productive thought. It was suddenly much easier to put a pen in my hand, put it onto the piece of paper, and actually write a piece that didn’t resemble the writing of a 5 year old kid on speed!

You r brain only has a certain amount of power at any one point in time for it to devote to any particular task. When you put mounds of useless information in front of it, it’s going to do what it’s best at and try to focus on it and do it, but this in turn robs you of power that you need for other important things.

Organization improves creativity; With your brain now free to focus on important things, you can now finally direct it towards matters of creativity.  Creativity, to create, is the process by which you turn semi-random thoughts and impulses into a work of art, a work of art judged by you to be so.

With your mind and workspace now organized, you finally have the mental capacity available to you where you can take the semi-random thoughts and impulses flowing around in your head and apply some structure to them, turning them from thought soup into a great masterpiece.

Organization improves productivity; This is partly a result of the above effects. Improving your thought flow and creativity increases productivity substantially. You also gain an improvement from simply being happier with your new workspace and newfound freedom(freedom from the evil oppressive powers of clutter!).

These results can all be yours if you simply put in the effort to be more organized and try to remove as much clutter from your life as possible. All it takes is a little effort and a little forethought every day.

Next article I’ll provide you with a plan to remove clutter from your life and to start becoming more organized. You will have all these improvements if you follow along.

Hope you enjoyed the article; leave me a comment if you have anything to share. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to the feed located at the top of the page! Subscribe!

Filed under: Everyday life, Productivity, Work | 16 Comments »

Woo, time for a fun Friday post! This will be the first of hopefully many more posts that contain humorous pictures, videos, stories…etc. that will help you wind down after a long week of hard work, and start to enjoy your weekend.

I chose the following video because I thought it might brighten your day, and also it has a few interesting things related to personal development, self improvement, and self help. At least I think so.

Enjoy! And don’t forget to subscribe to the Blasted Crossing feed, which you can find at the top.

Filed under: Friday Wind Down | No Comments »

“You have mail!”. Wasn’t this one of the catchphrases of the nineties? “You have mail!” was a sound bite in AOL that was played whenever you received a new email and it quickly grew to become an icon of the electronic revolution.

Email was touted as being one of the biggest productivity boosters when it first appeared on the scene. “No more waiting for messages”, “No more lost mail”, and “Send mail instantly!” were some of the more common catch phrases that were associated with it. As more and more people learned about it and started using it, the more messages were flowing around the wires. Today there are millions upon millions of messages floating through cyberspace, and I bet you anything that less than 0.0001% of those messages were of any importance whatsoever. Yet you can always hear somebody saying “but I have to check my email! There’s something really important I’m waiting for!”.

“You have mail!”. They drop everything and away they rush to the computer! They open their email program, type in their username and password and lo and behold! They have a new offer for Viagra! Wow, that was a close call! What if they had missed that email, what would they have done!? Oh the humanity!

Email as a productivity killer

Do you ever have that problem? Constantly being afraid what you might miss if you don’t check your email, and so you check it constantly every 30, 15, maybe 5 minutes? Or you might be working on something, writing a blog post perhaps, doing some banking, buying some stocks, finishing up some work for tomorrow, whatever it may be, then suddenly you get an email and you drop everything you were doing and rush to check it out.

After you answer it, you try to go back to what you were doing, but oh wait! You forgot what you were doing; now you can’t remember whether you were going to add or subtract that money from your account, you decided to subtract. Oops, you’re now overdrawn, your insurance eats away at your savings, you can’t pay your bills, you lose your car, house, dog, and you’re now out on the street!

Ok, maybe that’s a little too melodramatic. Let’s back up. You answer that email, but now you forget what you were doing exactly and you’re going to have to spend another 5 or 10 minutes trying to get back to where you were. I hope whatever was in that email was worth wasting away 5 or 10 minutes of your life.

This is a simple scenario, now imagine how it really is, you’re working on more than one thing, and you keep getting an email every half an hour or so, throughout an 8 hour day, if it takes you just 5 or 10 minutes to get back to what you were doing before that email arrived, and you get 5 or so emails per day, that’s 25 to 50 minutes a day you’re losing!

Increasing your productivity

Now obviously some emails absolutely cannot wait, and I understand that, but what about the rest of them? Are they really that important, or do you just THINK that they’re that important?

Try not responding to just 1 email and see if the world explodes. If it doesn’t, start cutting back on the amount of time you spend reading and responding to email. Check your email once every 4 hours or so to start with, just before your lunch break. After all, you have work to do too.

If the email truly is important and is a matter of life and death, then whoever sent it to you will almost assuredly try to contact you in a more direct manner, through the telephone for instance.

If someone thinks you are being inconsiderate because you are not answer your emails, then you can tell them that when they are prepared to give you 5 minutes of their life in exchange for 5 minutes of yours (the time it would take you to answer it and get back to what you were doing) then you will answer them as soon as the email comes in. Ask them if their work is more important than yours, or if their life is somehow more important than yours.

Stop wasting time and do what you are supposed to be doing so that you can finish up and enjoy some of your time that you have. Don’t waste it frivolously answer every single little message that comes your way.

That’s all I have to say for now. I’d be happy to hear some of your responses. And don’t forget to subscribe to the feed at the top (the orange-y-goodness button).

Filed under: Productivity, Time, Work | No Comments »