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[progressally_objectives]Transcript:In this section, I want to share with you three tools for banishing paper clutter from your office for good, so you can confidently step away from the office and get into classrooms.
Now, feel free to skip this section if paper clutter isn’t something that’s affecting your ability to get into classrooms every day. But for most people, despite our smartphones and apps and other electronic tools, paper is here to stay. People give us paper, we print things out, paper comes in the mail – and while some of that paper can just be recycled without any action, a lot of it represents actual work.
And because it represents work, we keep the paper around to remind ourselves of what we need to do. You may actually prefer hardcopy documents that you can hold in your hands, and write on, and organize physically. That’s fine.
The problem comes when our systems start to break down. One document on my desk that I need to deal with is great. A thousand documents are a crisis. So how can you make sure you have exactly what you need on your desk, with no clutter to stress you out?
I want to draw a very clear connection here between how organized your desk is, and your ability to get into classrooms with confidence. The problem with a pile of clutter is that you don’t know what’s in it. It could be important work that you need to do right now, or it could be low-priority work that can wait till after school.
To get into classrooms every day with confidence, you need to be sure that what you’re leaving behind is OK to leave behind, and the best way to do that is to get organized, so let’s talk about three simple systems you can set up right now to banish clutter from your office.
Before we get to those systems, of course, you need to make sure you have a recycle bin and either a shredder or a box for shredding for anything that you don’t need to keep. Those are obvious, but I have a quick suggestion for you – make sure they’re within arm’s reach. If you have to get up, or roll your chair across the room to throw something away, stuff you don’t need is going to pile up on your desk. So relocate your recycle bin and shredder if you need to, and you’re ready to set up the first system.
Obviously you want to throw away anything you don’t need, but what about those documents that you might need to keep, just in case? Probably the majority of your paper clutter falls into this category, because it’s ambiguous, right? What do you do with it? You might need it, or you might not, and you’re just in kind of a holding pattern. It’s that uncertainty that leads us to let it pile up. Eventually, you might file it, or you might toss it, but for now, it’s just sitting there.
I want to give you a very easy solution that I call the “Chronological File.”
I came up with this idea one day when I was trying to figure out when I was going to file my “to file” pile. We all have one of those, right? Stuff we’re done with, but aren’t ready to throw away yet, because we might want to refer to it later. And of course, we could file it in neatly organized folders, but that takes a ton of time that we really can’t spare.
So one day, I said to myself, you know what? I’m just going to take this whole pile, and throw it in a box, and if I need something in that pile, that’s where it’ll be. So I got a copier paper box, and stuck it under my desk, and threw that whole “to file” pile into it. And over the next couple of weeks, whenever I had something else that I was done with, but didn’t want to throw away, I just threw it in the box.
Over time, I realized that a) this was a whole lot easier than making folders and having to decide how to categorize everything, and b) if I ever needed to find something, which wasn’t very often, it was really easy to just dig in the box, because it was organized by date.
See, when you just throw things on top of the pile in the box, they’re automatically organized from oldest at the bottom to newest on top. So I started to call this the Chronological File, because rather than have to organize it by topic or category, it’s just automatically organized by date. It takes zero thinking and zero effort, and it’s incredibly fast.
You may find that once you start using a Chronological File, you’re saving more and throwing away less, because it’s less hassle to keep things like, say, flyers for upcoming workshops, that you may want to find later. When it’s not as big a deal to get something off of your desk, because you know you can find it in the Chronological File if you need it, it’s much easier to stay organized. You know you aren’t going to have to spend time putting things in folders, so the cost of keeping things goes down. And eventually that box is going to fill up, but that’s fine. Just tape it up, write the date on it, and get a new box.
Over time, using this system, I stopped using my file cabinet except for a few specific things like teacher evaluations that I really wanted to keep organized in folders. All of my mail and handouts from meetings and everything else in that miscellaneous category just went straight in the Chronological File.
So that’s the first system, and probably 80% of what’s on your desk falls into that category of stuff you’re done with, but aren’t ready to get rid of. So just throw it in the box.
But what about documents that are on your desk because they represent work that you still need to do? That brings us to the second system, which I call Next Step Stickies.
Often when we have paper that’s sitting around for a long time, it’s because there’s more than one simple thing we need to do with it. If it’s something simple, for example, if you just need to sign something and give it back to your secretary, that’s easy, right? You may not even take forms like that back to your office – I would always just sign them on my secretary’s desk, so I didn’t even have the chance to lose them.
But the clutter that sticks around tends to be more complicated, and when we’re in a hurry, we put off anything complicated or multi-step. The nature of the job is that we’re almost always in a hurry to get through our paperwork, so it’s no wonder that we tend to put things off.
So here’s a very easy system you can implement so you can start making progress on those hardcopy documents that have been sitting around on your desk for far too long. Look at something that’s on your desk, and get a pad of sticky notes, and write the very next step you’re going to take with that document. If there is no next step, throw it in the Chronological File. But if you need to read it, or sign it, or give it to someone, or take it to a meeting, write that on a sticky note, and slap it on the document.
Then, next time you see that document, you’ll see that little note, and you’ll know exactly what to do, without having to think about it.
Now, to be very clear, what you’re writing on that sticky note is just instructions to your future self, and it’s going to feel a little silly to write read this, sign this, give this to Karen, and so on, because it’s going to seem obvious. But the magic is that you’re saving yourself a step next time, and you’re eliminating the overwhelm that comes from worrying about everything you eventually need to do, because you’re just focusing on the very next step for each item. You’re protecting your mental bandwidth, so you have more mental energy for the important decisions you need to make, and so you can get into classrooms.
So, try Next Step Stickies. This should be fast and easy. You aren’t writing out ALL the steps you’ll ultimately take with that document – just the very next step. And when you’ve done that step, you can write yourself a new note about the next step. You’re just breaking it down into bite-sized pieces so you can triage quickly, and take action quickly next time you see that document.
Do this for every document on your desk, and put them into a single pile. Then, every day, go through that pile, do the one thing that’s written on each note, and write yourself a new note. Again, that seems like we’re adding steps, but writing these little notes is a lot easier than redoing all that thinking and decision-making, even if those decisions seem very small. So give it a try, and you’ll see what I mean.
If you discover that the very next step on one of your documents isn’t so small, that’s when it’s time to block off some time on your calendar to work on it, perhaps before or after school at a time that you won’t be interrupted.
But then, what do you do with that document in the meantime? That brings us to the third and most powerful system for eliminating paper clutter, which I call the Future File.
The Future File has been around forever. I didn’t invent it, but people who’ve heard me talk about it have come up to me years later at conferences and said “Justin, the Future File changed my life!” Seriously, two or three different people have used that exact phrase, so I know you’re going to like this system.
Here’s what it’s for. Once you’ve gotten rid of anything you don’t need to keep, and you’ve used the Chronological File for anything you might want to hang onto, what’s left on your desk is those documents that require some action from you, which you’ve now labeled with Next Step Stickies. But we all know, you aren’t going to get all of those next steps done today. And for some of them, you can’t, because you’re waiting on other people.
The Future File is your way of getting things off your desk until the day you need them. So let’s say you have a flyer about a grant, and you need to talk to your music teacher about it on Friday. If today isn’t Friday, and you keep that flyer on your desk, there’s a good chance it’s going to get lost in a pile between now and Friday, so instead of leaving it on your desk, you can put it in the Future File.
Here’s how the Future File works: there’s a folder for every day of the month, 1 through 31, and a folder for every month of the year, January through December.
Each day, simply open that day’s folder, so on the 16th of the month, you’d open the 16 folder. On the first of the month, you open the 1 folder as well as that month’s folder. Take out everything in the folder, go through it quickly, and update your Next Step Stickies. If anything isn’t relevant today, just put it in a future folder.
For example, if on Friday the music teacher is absent, so you can’t talk about the grant, you can just put that flyer in the folder that corresponds to next Friday’s date.
And every day, you can take your entire pile of unfinished work that you’ve labeled with Next Step Stickies and distribute it into your Future File system. So every day, you can get your desk 100% clear, and the next day, you’ll have only the documents you need for that day on your desk.
To set up the Future File system, you’ll need 43 manila folders. On the page below, I’ve provided a PDF with instructions and labels that you can print. This PDF will also explain how to arrange the folders, and where to put each folder after you empty it for the day, so the system stays organized. So print that out, and set up the Future File system, or have someone in your office do it, right now.
So when I said these three systems let you banish paper clutter, I was serious! Use the Chronological File, Next Step Stickies, and the Future File, and you’ll see that it really is possible to have a clear desk every single day. When you use these systems, you can confidently get into classrooms, without worrying about the work you’re leaving behind, because you’ve already gone through it and organized it, and you know you’ll get to it when you need to.
So your action task for this section is to get some sticky notes, and a cardboard box to use as a Chronological File, and print out the instructions for the Future File so you can get that set up. I’m Justin Baeder, and I’ll see you in the next section.
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