Simple Steps To Get More Organized

   Organization by itself will not make you a better business person. But if you are not organizes to the point that you spend more time looking for things than you should, you know it�s time to find another way of getting things done. Here are a few suggestions that you can follow to help you get more organized. 

   Get rid of the junk � Throw out everything you don�t need.  Some people have a weakness in this area. They�re afraid that if they throw something away today, they�ll need it tomorrow even if they haven�t used it for two years. 

   Put things back where you got them � Keep track of your possessions.  This helps you keep track of the items that you work with. This does seem a little like the opposite of throwing everything out, which in a way, is true. If you look at a truly disorganized worked, you will almost always see someone who either cannot part with anything or who pays no attention to where things are placed. 

   Stop daydreaming � The key here is to focus.  If you want your organizational efforts to pay off, you have to remain focused on your objective. For example, if you need to have frequent telephone contact with customers about ongoing projects, you don�t want to spend half your day looking for their telephone numbers. It should take less than half a minute if you have your information well organized. 

   A Fail-Proof Filing System � Never let things pile up.  Your position may require constant organizing. If you deal with a lot of paper and you get a lot of mail, you will find that you need to have some place to put that paper every day. Otherwise, at the end of each week or month, you�ll have a huge pile and the last thing you want to do on any day is try to figure out how to dispose of all that information. Put documents where they belong the same day you get them. 

   Prioritize by Planning � Plan ahead.  Many businessmen think they can do more than they need to. Their ambition and energy are commendable but the fact is that, in the end, they can�t live up to their own promises because they are too disorganized. Their most difficult trait from an organizational point of view is a tendency to want to do everything now. The best thing to do is plan ahead by figuring out how long a project will take and allotting a reasonable amount of time towards accomplishing it. 

   In applying these simple steps to getting organized, I�m reminded of the saying that I use in each newsletter and that is that I encourage you to plan your work and work your plan. Implicit in that statement is that you must be organized.

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