When the best time to talk with Jeff Strong is while he’s on his way to an airport, you know you’ve reached a busy person. Managing a full schedule is a responsibility that Strong may have mastered as well as anyone. For several years he was traveling nearly two hundred days a yearboth domestically and internationally—as global president and chief customer officer for Johnson & Johnson. “Looking back,” he says, “I don’t think anybody could have survived that time without being organized.”
Strong, like many working professionals, has a family—a wife and five children—along with church and other responsibilities. Organization, he notes, helps him hone each area of life. “Regardless of how busy somebody might be,” he says, “the idea is to enjoy life more and be effective at work and at home. Being organized helps you do that.”
Although his new position as executive vice president of Sun Products is equally busy, he now spends a lot less time in the air—traveling only a couple times a month. Even then, planning flights, meetings, and a tight schedule takes major coordination.
“In simple terms, calendar management is massive,” says the 1988 Marriott School graduate. He also relies heavily on his iPad to keep notes and maintain to-do lists. Like traveling, getting organized requires planning and time—but in both cases, the payoff makes the journey worthwhile.
We’ve gathered ideas and tips from some highly organized and successful people that can help you organize your way to a more successful career and a better life.
A Clean Slate—or Desk
On the road to getting organized, it helps to start with a clean desk. Organized space allows individuals to focus on their work rather than on the surrounding clutter—hence increasing productivity. This clutter can be distracting and its effects far-reaching.
In a recent workspace organization survey, nine of ten felt clutter had a negative impact on their lives, affecting productivity, state of mind, motivation, and even happiness. Participants noted that it even went so far as to damage their professional images and personal relationships. Those who felt organized experienced opposite feelings: accomplishment, motivation, confidence, and relaxation.
Where does one start on the path to a clean desk? Lori Robinson, a self-made organizational expert and mother of four in Tucson, Arizona, suggests starting by removing everything off the desk and separating items into three piles: keep, throw away, and give away.
She recommends using three trays or drawers on top of the desk with the following labels: inbox, action items, and to be filed. The inbox is where all papers should be sorted through daily. Documents are then moved into the action items tray—items needing immediate attention. The to-be-filed tray needs its contents filed, recycled, or shredded on a weekly basis.
The key to staying organized, says Robinson, is to avoid piles. “You have to always be putting papers in the appropriate trays,” she says.
If organizing a desk seems insurmountable, Robinson suggests starting small. “Take one stack of papers or take one section of your desk and clean it.” Stay late one night after work, if necessary, to get the process started—or finished.
“Your office gives someone a first impression of you,” says Kimberly Blackburn, who works for the Maryland Small Business Development Center and graduated in management from the Marriott School in 2011. “It helps others have confidence in you,” she says.
The workspace study reinforces her sentiments. It revealed that 40 percent of respondents felt the occupant of an unorganized office must be struggling in other facets of the job too.
One way to ensure the desktop stays organized is by following Strong’s example; he developed a simple filing system to manage the constant flow of papers that land on his desk.
“Staying organized is a never-ending challenge,” Strong says. “I found I’m not smart enough to manage a lot of chaos. This system helps me keep things simpler.”
Strong has thirty-one hanging folders, each numbered to represent the days of the month. He’ll receive a document and, depending on its level of importance or due date, file it to the day he wants to work on it. For example, he might have a meeting on the twenty-first of the month, so instead of reading the meeting report when he receives it, he’ll insert the memo in the file labeled “20” so he can read the report the day before the meeting. This way the information is fresh on his mind when he attends the meeting. The system helps him not only to stay organized but also to use his time wisely.
Realistically Plan Your Steps
While having a methodical workspace can certainly be an asset, there are other aspects of organization that contribute to peace of mind and success both at work and home. Whether it’s conquering that messy closet or preparing an annual company presentation, segmenting work helps get the job done.
Stephen Stathis, a historian at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., has authored several books chronicling the history of Congress. When beginning a book project, he outlines his work so it’s psychologically manageable and then takes one chapter at a time.
For more than two decades, Stathis also managed several historians and political scientists in the library’s Congressional Research Service and spent countless hours under rigid deadlines reviewing and rewriting their work.
He says that the most challenging aspect was helping them to avoid becoming overwhelmed with the tasks at hand. Often what proved most effective was to have employees create outlines of their projects and establish deadlines for completing each section. With manageable benchmarks, they found their stress was significantly lower.
Stathis, who earned a master’s degree in history from Utah State University, says, “Completing smaller segments provides satisfaction and the reassurance people need to keep going.”
The concept of breaking up work is undoubtedly transferable to almost any task—something learned by Blackburn, who breaks her work into checklists.
As training and marketing director, Blackburn plans multiple trainings a week for small business owners in Maryland. She developed a six-week checklist to keep track of the details: everything from what days emails should go out to what days presenters should be contacted.
“The list even reminds me to bring pens and water bottles,” Blackburn says. “The meetings are what people see of our company and organization, so they need to be professional and run smoothly.”
Mile Markers to Greater Organization
One day while volunteering at her son’s school, Robinson, the organizational guru, overheard a distraught woman in search of car keys. “They’re the keys to my husband’s Porsche,” the woman explained, a painfully expensive, $400 set of keys. The woman walked away disappointed.
“Organization is all about having a place for everything,” Robinson stresses, especially car keys. Here are several ideas from her and others who have discovered strategies for improved organization to help save time and reduce stress:
Home documents—Robinson’s most important documents, such as Social Security cards, car titles, birth certificates, marriage certificate, passports, insurance policies, even love letters, are housed in an accordion-style folder. The folder is lightweight and easy to grab in case of an emergency.
Less-important documents—credit card bills, pay stubs, phone bills—are stored in a filing cabinet, something she won’t be grabbing in the event of a fire. “In fact, I really wish my filing cabinet would burn,” she jokes.
Cleaning—Strong, who earned his MBA from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2004, cleans up his desk at the end of each day. “That’s what
my mom taught me, and it stuck. I still don’t eat my spinach though,” he quips. Others, like Stathis, clean off their desks each Friday.
Regular list making—As Vince Lombardi said, “Plan your work and work your plan.” Stathis creates a list each Friday of what needs to be done the following week. That way he can walk in on Monday and know exactly what needs immediate as well as long-term attention. It’s also helpful to keep a pad of paper handy to record and check off to-do items.
Office supplies—Robinson suggests using an organizing tray to keep pens, pencils, paper clips, and other office supplies organized and within easy reach.
Email—Strong checks his email each morning. If an email is urgent and needs to be acted on, he’ll try to handle it right away. If it can wait or if it is too complex, he’ll suspend it so he can stay focused on critical work. He dedicates an hour at the end of each workday to power through emails and an hour or two each Friday. He catches any stragglers on Monday.
Electronic files—Besides categorized electronic folders for storing documents, other systems can help keep things simple. If a group is regularly updating the same document, old versions can easily get mixed with the new version. Pat Bluth, human resources operations director for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, created a share-point site to store and update documents, rather than having five or six different versions floating around in emails.
Correspondence—Organizing and communicating thoughts so they are digestible to others is a critical way to exude professionalism on the job.
Bluth, who earned her MBA from the Marriott School in 1986, recalls once having a boss who requested that all reports be seventeen lines or fewer—basically limiting the correspondence to only the most important details. When sending work correspondence, Bluth, who also worked for Procter & Gamble for twenty years, recommends writing or bulleting two main points, followed by a few descriptive sentences.
Calendaring—Maintaining a daily calendar—electronically or on paper—improves the chances that nothing important slips through the cracks. Some married couples synchronize their calendars to help family life run smoother.
Food/toys/other items—Robinson uses clear bins for everything—toys, snacks, toiletries. “Even though I think colored bins are cute, clear bins are the way to go,” she says, “because you can see what’s in them.”
Miscellaneous items—Robinson says everyone needs a junk drawer—whether it’s at home or at work. Even then, she says, the junk drawer should be organized. Group like things together in a compartmentalized tray—be it sticky notes or plastic utensils.
Enjoy the View
Stathis recalls a colleague, one of the nation’s preeminent constitutional scholars, who had hundreds of books piled up on the floor and desk in his office. “Frequently, I would ask him for a book that invariably would be at the bottom of one of his piles. Without hesitation, he’d reach down and hand it to me. He knew exactly where everything was,” he says.
What may be organized to one person, says Stathis, may be complete chaos to the next. Strong agrees that people have to find a system, a style that helps them to be productive and efficient.
Once you’ve attained a system of organization that works for you, it calls for celebration. Sit back and enjoy the view. Resolve to maintain the newly organized space. Do a little each day. Whether it’s daily cleanups or immediate paper filing, organization is a journey—one that could lead you to feeling more satisfied, relaxed, productive, and perhaps more successful.
Isn’t that a trip worth taking?
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Article written by Jennifer Mathis
Illustrated by Josh Cochran
About the Author
Jennifer Mathis is a freelance writer living in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband, Michael, and two sons. She earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism in 2000 and her master’s degree in mass communications in 2002, both from BYU.
