I have a couple of projects staring me in the face right now. They’re pretty large – and when I think about how much I have to do it can be pretty overwhelming.

Sometimes it’s okay not to look at the big picture. Temporarily, of course. If the big view of things makes you panic, then stop for a moment. Take a smaller, more manageable piece and do it. Or do part of it. Just make sure that what you’re doing is actually helping you make progress towards your goal.

I’ve mentioned that my desk has a large stack of mail left over from when I was traveling. And I tossed several things on it when I got home. There’s so much to do right now. Process my travel receipts. Put away the cords and other things that I just tossed aside as I was unpacking. Finish opening all of the mail. Shred what I don’t need. File. And even just cleaning my desktop to get rid of a little debris and dust from being away (we live near two freeways and the dust that gets in our place is unbelievable).

I look at all of that and shake my head. I don’t want to do it right now. I have other things that I feel are more important. But if I wait any longer it’ll just get worse.

So I took just 20 minutes to get done what I could. I put away a few things, opened part of the mail, pulling any bills I’d missed, tossing the extra junk that’s always inside a bill, and putting things in my “to file” bin.

I didn’t get through everything. But half of my desk looks better. It’s neat(er). And there’s space to work again. And just having part of that task completed really helps. This weekend I’ll do another 20 minutes and see what else I can get done. And then another 20 on Monday, if I need to. If the desk is clean by then, I’ll use that time to file.

What started out as a seemingly unmanageable project is suddenly much easier to handle. It can be done, even though it may not have looked that way at first (not with limited time, anyway).

Do you get overwhelmed by a mountain of papers? A big project? How do manage your expectations? Do you break it down into smaller pieces?

Post from: My Organized Biz

The filers use lots of folders to categorize and file away their email. I can remember doing this in Outlook. You see, Outlook’s search function is terrible. So I would file by project or department or whatever seemed appropriate at the time.

Unfortunately, when it came to finding those emails, it wasn’t always easy to remember where I filed it. Was it by project A? Or department B? Or did I put it in the folder where I stored all of Boss’s emails?

It wasn’t a great system, but it was all I could do in Outlook.

Until I became a finder. What changed me to a finder? A couple of things. One was the advent of Google desktop. It radically changed how I found email. But so did inbox zero. With inbox zero I simplified everything. Since my folder system was so complicated, I couldn’t remember where I filed things anyway. Six or seven years’ of email will do that to you. (Why did I keep it that long? I worked for a state institution and I had to keep things relating to educational records.)

So I went to just 5 folders. And with searches via desktop, it didn’t really matter if I had those 5 folders or not. As long as I could remember a portion of the email conversation and even who sent it, I could find it. Sometimes it took refining the search a couple of times. But I always found what I needed.

Now I definitely subscribe to the finder way of retrieving email. Although I still do some filing by project just to make my searches (now I use spotlight on my mac) a bit shorter.

So which one are you? Why? And have you thought about trying an alternative?

[Image: sxc.hu]

Post from: My Organized Biz