To Organize or Not

The dilemma: to work in a disorderly place and be less productive or take some time to organize and be more productive. It is easy to just work. I want to work. But I have to stop at times to organize.

How to Organize

One way to organize an office. Take everything out. Get a dropbox – a cardboard box to throw into anything you need.
Have a trash close by. Make 3 piles. Trash. Put away. Keep.
After the sort – take out the trash. Then make the recycle items and
trash items piles. Put them in respective bins.

Now remove things from dropbox. Categorize everything.

Put them into manageable – stackable boxes. You have two kinds of
boxes 1. things used. 2. Things to store for long term. Things used on a daily
basis – put them in accessible place in office. Things rarely used put into
long term storage. If you don’t use it – consider putting it in a remote
location.

A Second way to organize an office. Take everything out. Consider everything
as things to throw away. Take back anything that you find necessary. 
Get a dropbox – a cardboard box to throw into anything you need.
Have a trash close by. Make 3 piles. Trash. Put away. Keep.
After the sort – take out the trash. Then make the recycle items and
trash items piles. Put them in respective bins.

Label each storage box. For Label printers I found one program that is useful
called glabels. You can do merge with a .csv file. So you can create numbers
followed by a comma and the name of the box, load it to glabels and print them all at once.

Be stringent to not let loose things cloud your dest. It happens that things
that need to put away get stored on my desk until I store them away. Store
them away right away.

Before You leave the office – make sure 1. your desk is clear. 2. You put away
10 things. Little by little the ofice becomes clear.

Put things in the most accessible position. For instance if you have reams of
paper put them in lying the direction that is most easy to open – ie, with the
seam upwords. Put things with the information easily accessible – like eggs
with the date pointing outward or paper reams with the paper type label
pointing outward. Notice which way the arrow on the ream is pointing – the
point of the arrow points to side that the printer prints on. ie, if it prints
on the top of the ream & your printer prints on the top place the paper in the
way that arrow points upward.


Productivity tips 
Today as opposed to yesteryear – we have so many functions in software – it is
easier to get distracted. What I did was to install an old DOS word processor.
I use pc-write. then I copy text into windows. you might need a DOS emulator
like DOSBOX. You have to set up the program. I use PC-WRITE. You can even make
a shorthand file – words.sho – that you create to write short letter
combinations to type out the entire word. Like I associated leters e-d-u- to
spell “Education”.