The Three Key Rules For Any Organizing System

November 6th 2007

Every system or tool you have setup to organize your life, whether it be the filing cabinet at work, the drawer in the kitchen or your home cleaning schedule, will ultimately flourish or fall apart depending on how easily it functions in three key areas: inputting, tracking and deleting.

Input information quickly and easily
If it takes time or it is difficult to input stuff into your system you simply won’t do it. This is why David Allen encourages all those big business types to take typing lessons. They want to use an electronic system but because their typing skills are lacking it takes them so long to input anything. And it doesn’t have to involve your big, expansive productivity system either, it can involve all the small scale tools that keep you organized at work and de-cluttered at home. For instance, an in/out tray is a very simple organizing tool that follows this first rule well. To input information (in this case a letter, magazine etc) all you do is put it into the in tray. If it takes more than a couple of seconds to input a new project, jot down a new next action, file some reference material etc then you will eventually end up not doing it.

Monitor/track all the information
Once you have inputted the information into your organizing tools, you need to be able to regularly track/edit/move it all with as much ease as possible. This is why I prefer my productivity system to cover as few tools as possible. When I used to have it all contained in folders and ring binders, it was awkward to flick through all the different sheets to get to what I wanted. To move anything around I would also have the laborious task of opening up the binder and taking out a bunch of sheets to re-arrange them. Like with the previous rule, if it’s a chore to do, you won’t do it. You might be able to get all your information into your system, but if it then takes time to refer back to all your next actions or update a project’s status you will end up not knowing where you stand with any of your work and the system will fail on you.

Delete/remove information
An in/out tray would not be very effective if you couldn’t simply pull sheets and envelopes out of it to be binned or posted. Some people store such things in drawers and cupboards. Only problem is you’ve got a door in the way and you have to dig around inside to get to it all. It may not sound like that much effort but it’s one more obstacle between you and your stuff. Once you’ve completed a project it should be a simple matter of ticking it off then pulling it out of your folder and binning/archiving it (if you are paper based). If you don’t have a streamlined approach to deleting information from your system it ends up becoming cluttered. This is one of the big reasons people don’t keep their homes organized, as they don’t have this rule (and no doubt the other two rules) in place. Throwing stuff into a cupboard may be a quick way of inputting but when it comes to tracking what is in there or even throwing it out, it requires a lot of extra work and in a lot of cases it simply won’t get done.

Using the three rules above check each of your organizing tools and systems (a cleaning rota, a diary to track your time or even a coat rack all apply) and see how well they perform against the three rules. Your systems may be streamlined and efficient, or maybe some areas need tweaking to allow it to serve its purpose as easily as possible (if you are skeptical about the coat rack as a organizing tool, ask yourself if there are enough hooks to hold all your coats, if it’s too short, too high etc).

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my RSS feed for easy access to the latest content. If you prefer, you can also subscribe by email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox. More info on RSS can be found here.