Productivity Pointers
Organizing Lessons from My Garden
Barbara Hemphill, Hemphill Productivity Institute
What does "Lessons for My Garden" have to do with organizing? One of the things I've learned after 27 years in this industry is that organizing has something to do with everything! Regardless of whether you are planning your family vacation, trying to get a new job, running a business, or clearing up the clutter in your office, getting organized is key!
Here is how 6 Paper Tiger principles apply to the art of gardening:
- "Successful organizing begins with a vision." The most beautiful gardens are first planted in someone's mind! The initial question we ask every client is "If we were to meet three years from now, what has to happen for you to feel happy about your progress?" Their answers are varied, and include such statements as "I'll be making $100,000/year," or "I'll be taking six weeks of vacation every year," or "I'll be working at home" or "my office will be clean!" Create a vision for your garden – and for your life!
- "Organizing doesn't have a 'right' or 'wrong.'" The most exciting aspect of my work is the "art of organizing." Gardens come in many varieties – and so does organizing. If you look outdoors at a forest of trees, God created every leaf uniquely. No two leaves are identical. And so it is with organizing. As we frequently tell our clients, "You paint a picture of what kind of a life you want, and we will help you create and sustain an environment to make that happen!" What works beautifully for one client would be a complete disappointment for another – in organizing and in gardening.
- "Half of any job is using the right tool!" (Note I said "using" – not "having!") It took a blister to convince me to buy a new pair of loppers to finish trimming the butterfly bushes. With the new tool, pruning was easy and painless. Organizing tools can range from a bowl on the kitchen counter to dump your keys in to an electronic address book. I'm continually disappointed to discover how many people buy Paper Tiger software, but then fail to use it, or to take advantage of all the ways it can be used to solve organizing problems in their lives.
- "Today's mail is tomorrow's pile." With Paper Tiger, we encourage you to start using Paper Tiger first to organize your desktop – you can worry about all those old piles later! After you get the new system in place, you can incorporate the old files into the new system – and if you don't, they will eventually be old enough that tossing them will be easy. In the meantime, you have what you need to do today's work, and you won't be creating new unidentified piles! While it is certainly important to clean up the trash, weeds, and other undesirables in your garden, if you limit yourself to that activity, you can work very hard and see little results. One of the things my landscape designer taught me was to pick one small area and plant beautiful things to inspire me to keep going.
- "Put like items together." One of the first steps in creating any enjoyable garden is determining what kind of garden you want – vegetable, herb, cutting, perennial, etc. As great as all those options are, if you try to have all of them in the same space, the result will be disappointing. Create a specific area in your garden for herbs, another for cut flowers, etc. In the same way, you can create separate "locations" in Paper Tiger for personal papers, active projects, CDs, clients, etc. Creating locations in Paper Tiger software is a stumbling block for some people in getting started or progressing with The Paper Tiger.
- "Organizing is a way of life, not a destination." A garden, like organizing, is a continual process of reassessing what you like, what you don't, rearranging existing plants, and trying new varieties, and so it is with organizing! Continually asking three questions: "Does it work?" "Do I like it?" "Does it work for the others I care about?" Be willing to take risks, don't worry about mistakes, and just keep planting – and organizing!