Organised, Not Agonised
At times we must have experienced that we are overwhelmed, overpowered, overcome and over extended by everything that we want to do. As a result, chaos reign in our life. We do not know how to organize and sort things out. Naturally so as none of us is born organized. This entails the creation of a simple, sensible step that may satisfy your needs.

In his article, Ten Tips for Organizing, Holly Tashian lists down the following tips for us to follow:

i) Get rid of excess clutter.
ii) Give every item in your home or office where it belongs - keep only what you need.
iii) Maintain a clear desk.
iv) Make a list each day of what you want to accomplish - prioritize the list.
v) Write all your notes in one note book. Put a clear mark on the “to do list”.
vi) Do it now - do not procrastinate.
vii) Plan ahead for big projects.
viii) Delegate jobs to others according to their skills - You don’t always need to do all the work by yourself.
ix) Take a ten minute break every hour during concentrated work.
x) Reward yourself- with something that you love.

Disorganization is to be avoided and eliminated totally. A disorganized person is one who is regarded as having no control over his life. This kind of people leaves almost everything to destiny. On the other hand, organization means we have better control over ourselves, and leave less, if not nothing to destiny. When you are in control, people around you think positively of you by mere reason that you have control over your time, able to fulfill commitment and maintain order in life. At the opposite end, disorganized life and persistent habits like shuffling papers and looking for misplaced or lost items only add to the misery and pressure of modern day living.

In the workplace, no matter at what level we are in, we cannot run away from managing ourselves. To the management, managing ourselves means having the ability and capability to contribute effectively towards achieving organizational goals. There is no easy solution or standard “survival kit” that fits in into everybody’s style. I wish there could be one. Not having one, what Dr. Carter McNamara offers below in his article, Free basic Guide to Management is to be taken as a guide only.

Guidelines to Manage Your-self
• Monitor your work hours : Take note of how many hours you are working per week.
• Recognize your own sign of stress : Different people show their stress in different ways - know your sign of stress.
• Get mentor or a coach : Many people have “been there, done that”, and can serve as great mentors.
• Learn to delegate : Delegation is a skill, start learning it.
• Communicate as much as you can : Never let communication to break down.
• Recognize what’s important, what’s urgent: Fix the system, not the problem.
• Recognize accomplishment: In your plan, include time to acknowledge accomplishment.

Tools For Self-Management
“Track your daily, weekly and monthly activities. Determine which activities produce the most profit. Focus your time on those activities. Delegate or outsource everything else“.

This sub-topic starts on the premise that you have made a deep commitment to “create your own destiny”. It is only when we are deeply committed to creating our destiny that other steps follow suit, such as our ability to plan and prioritize. Being busy means nothing much if it does not contribute to our acceptance of what’s important, valuable and meaningful in life - career, health, family relationship, etc. Only you can decide for yourself, and the moment that’s settled, the followings are just example of tools for achieving it:

Calendar
“Don’t be fooled by a calendar. There are only as many days in a year as you make use of. One man only gets a week’s value out of the year, while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week”.
(Charles Richard)

Calendar is used for long term planning. It provides us with a long-range view of our overall commitment. Calendar is not meant to be kept or hidden somewhere, that when you need it, you have to really look for it. Calendar should be accessible at all time, to avoid what Edel Jarboe in his article, Four Simple Time Management Tool as “over-scheduling”.

Diary
This is a very common tool in possession by almost everybody. Diary serves as a reminder of our commitment, important meeting or assignment that needs to be completed on specific time frame. Debra Allcock cautions us to be extra careful with our diary, less we commit more time to other people than to ourselves. According to her, “we need more time for ourselves than we give to others because we have a job to do”.

Daily “To Do” list
What this means basically are list of things that we want to do and accomplish for the day. Listing of task should take into consideration the following factors.
• do it now
• delegate to other people
• schedule time to do it later
• delete it altogether

In addition to the above, Debra Allcock also strongly recommends that we prepare a “rolling to do list”. By this she meant, “ Instead of writing down a daily list of things to do, or a weekly one and moving things from one list to the other, you write down what you have to do on the day on which you intend to do it. The ‘rolling to do list’ should consist of small, fairly quick job, example telephone a customer, check on invoice, etc.

Part 1