Office/Desk Clutter Reduction Process Nov 2018

Alright, hello everyone. Welcome to today's video. My name is Randy Dean and I am going to walk you through my process to get your office clutter beast under control. How many of you have too many stacks and piles? It's time to go ahead and attack those stacks and piles and get your office and your desk back organized and under control. And what's interesting, I want to share a little something about this video with you. This is a video that I actually filmed over a couple of months' time. I started it late this summer, and because of my business and personal commitments, I filmed the new snippets just a little bit at a time. Whenever I had a little bit of time to invest in office organization, I put together a video snippet. And then what I've done is I've taken these video snippets, and just this week I finally had time to put them all together. And part of the reason I wanted to share this process with you is because I think it's a process that you could potentially use too. You don't have to do this whole thing at once. You could do bits and pieces at a time and break this up into smaller, manageable little projects, little organizational projects, until you get your Clutter Beast fully tamed. And so just keep that in mind as you're watching this video. I mean, you could certainly do this whole thing all at once, but you could also break it into more manageable parts. And I think I've seen a lot more people have success investing about 15 to 30 minutes, or maybe a little bit more, per week over a few weeks because then they can see that progress take place and get that process completed. So let's go ahead and talk to you a little bit about how this happens.

Hi everybody, hope your summer has been going well. It's an absolutely beautiful night here in East Lansing, Michigan, and like many of you, I've been having a summer that has been absolutely filled with travel, both client work for the first month of the summer as well as quite a bit of family travel mixed in with client work. For the second month of the summer. And like you, or at least many of you, when I get traveling a lot, I tend to get stacked up a little bit with my mail, documents, and other items in my office. And so what I'd like to do for you this month is show you how I can fairly quickly and efficiently get that mess that's on my desk back under control. Now the first and most important thing that you're going to need is a good space to spread out. And like I said, it's an absolutely beautiful night, so I'm going to go use the big open table on my deck tonight, especially since it's not terribly windy. And then you're gonna also want to get some critical other supplies. Of course, a few blank manila folders. Might need a few more than that to do exactly what I want to do. Also, if you have them, labels for your folders and folder tabs. As you can see, labels and folder tabs. And also, of course, some hanging file folders, which I have right here. Whoa! So we got hanging file folders, and additionally maybe just a few envelopes, a pen, a Sharpie, and perhaps most importantly, a pack of sticky notes. Now this is perhaps the most daunting part of this, yet the most critical part. Take a look, I just grabbed every single loose piece of paper in my office and my mail slot, and I just created the grandmother of all piles. And now what I have to do is do my setup, and I'm gonna show you what I do. I just basically put everything in a single big pile, and I'm going to try to quickly and efficiently deal with this pile. And let me show you what I do next. Now that I've got my giant stack here Notice, what I'd like you to do is build yourself a series of sticky notes, and these sticky notes are going to help you with sorting through that pile quickly. Now notice the first sticky note is what I call "Active," and these are for documents and papers that I still need to take an action on. The second sticky note are things just to file, so they don't really need an action, but I need to put them away properly. The third note I recommend for most people is simply "Trash," something that needs to go into the classic trash can The fourth note, shred, and the fifth note is recycle. And with those five notes, most people can knock down quite a bit of stuff in their office. Now I have one that's very specific because I'm a small business owner, accounting and receipts, and this is for anything that's gonna go right out to my bookkeeper. And then finally, I have one more little stack over here, which is very simply this: to read. So that's items to read, and notice how I put if time. Because if something's really important to read, I won't put it in this pile, I'll put it in that active pile. But if you can get this set up, what's going to happen is it's going to make it easy for you to now take this pile and sort it all the way down into its component parts. So I'm going to go ahead and start on that. All right, it's now 34 minutes later and I have knocked out the entire giant pile. It's gone. Randy Dean.

Look at that.

Now I've got a bit on active, I've got a lot of filing to do, and I want to talk a little bit about what I'm gonna do with the filing in just a moment. I've got a few receipts, and then I've got shredding and trash and just a couple items to read. And so you can see I've knocked this pile down and made it much more reasonable, much more manageable, and now I'm going to start the next process. Now what I'm gonna do with this file pile, I've got a couple ideas. First thing I want to do is quickly go through the pile and pull out everything that I know I already have a file folder for and get that quickly filed, and then I'll make new folders for whatever's left. And I'm also gonna take this active pile, and the next thing I'm gonna do is sort it in priority and/or urgency order from high to low. And so I'm gonna start working on those couple things, and we'll see where I'm at after I get that done. Oh, and one last thing— that stuff that's in my shred and trash and recycle piles That's gonna happen right now. Now I'd like to briefly talk about what I did with this active pile a little bit more. I told you previously to sort it from high to low, but let me share with you a little bit more detail of what I actually did here. Not only did I sort it from high to low, but before I even did that, I quickly went through the pile and identified any item that would take me a couple minutes or less. And following a tip I learned from David Allen, who wrote the book Getting Things Done a number of years ago, I got those things done. And I have to tell you, I think I knocked out more than half of the pile just by moving stuff that I'd been sitting on that was sort of quick little stuff that just needed a quick action or forward or whatever, and I got those things done. So those are done and gone. Then I sorted it for from high to low, as we talked about. High importance or urgency on top, low importance or urgency on the bottom. And then I did one more thing, which I encourage everyone to seriously consider. I basically took about the bottom third of the pile. I looked at those items closely, and I asked myself a very serious question: Am I really ever going to do this? And then what I did is I took those items that I was pretty sure were already low importance or low urgency by my own sorting behavior. Remember, I sorted this from most important to least important. I had identified basically the items that weren't very important, and realizing how busy I am, I took several of those items and I literally shredded them, recycled them, and trashed them. I made the executive decision to not do those things and thus keep my focus on the more important things and get rid of the clutter. I encourage you to do the same thing when you do your active pile. Get rid of the quick little things first, sort it high to low, and then edit the bottom of your pile. Here is the last piece of this effort. This is my To Be Filed pile. I'm gonna get started on this and I'll let you know how it goes. Okay, so now this is sort of amazing. What I just did with that giant pile I just showed you is basically went through it and put away all of the stuff that I already had existing files created for. So I just spent about an hour just putting away stuff that I already had files, and look at what happened to the size of this pile. It is literally one-quarter of the size of what it previously was. And now all I have left to do is to take these last few items and make appropriate files for them and put them in a good home. So I'll be back with you shortly. Okay, it is about a little over an hour later, and this is no joke. That is my to-be-filed pile. Yes, every single piece of paper that just needed to be filed now has a proper home. And you don't know how awesome that feels. And then I even took advantage of this to get some of my office supplies rearranged and cleaned up because, hey, why not? All right, I still have one more little tip I want to share with you, a little bonus tip, so watch for that in just a second. All right, now to give you my bonus tip I mentioned, Let me tell you what this is. This is a stack of stuff that I've been sort of building up over the last couple years, which is stuff that I'd like to read, but I don't necessarily need to read. So, like, if I get to it, cool, but if I don't get to it, I'm not gonna get in any trouble. And so when I went through my paper reduction process, I added some things from that paper reduction process to this pile onto existing stuff that's already been there. And I wanna share with you what I'm gonna do with this. So I'm gonna do this process and I'll be back. All right, that's no joke. Look at that. That's what that pile's turned into. But let me show you something here. Kept my Golf Digests, uh, the way they are because I was looking at them thinking, you know, I just want to throw these in my bag and read them a little bit when I'm on the airplane. Now let's come over here and show you— oh my gosh, here's what this is. Here's what this turned into. That right there is my trash pile. And notice it's almost all those plastic shrink wraps. I wish companies would do what National Geographic is doing now, which is putting them into a paper wrap instead, because that way you can easily recycle, and that's not cool. That's my shred pile. That is my recycle pile. And that right there, that small pile right there, is the articles that I want to read. And now let me tell you what I did. I went through that giant stack of stuff. I went through each and every magazine. Took me about an hour— each magazine, each article, each newspaper. Pulled out the ones I want to read. And now I'm gonna show you what that actually turns into. Alright, here's what this has all turned into. That is my single folder of stuff to read if I'd like to read, which will then be moving into my laptop bag whenever I travel so I can take advantage of downtime sitting at the gate and on the airplanes. That is my active pile. Remember how huge that pile was? It is now this. And here's a couple Golf Digests because I figured I'll throw those in my laptop bag too when I'm not feeling like being productive guy reading productive stuff. And over here, this is where all the stuff was stacked. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Yes, because it only took a couple minutes, I took the stuff that I want to keep, it goes into the folder. The stuff that needed to be shredded went up to my shred bin, which will be then taken when it gets full to the local shredding facility. The recyclables are now in my recycle container to be taken this week, and the trash is in the trash. This is what it's turned into. I do want to make one final point, though. Remember I took a lot of the magazines and articles and newspapers? Here's what I did. I didn't feel like I had to keep those print materials pristine. What I did was say, I want to get the content out of these print materials that I'm gonna find most actionable. And so basically what I wanted to do was make it so that I could pull out the content material and articles that I thought were gonna be most useful. And taking a look at this real quick, take a look here.

I—

there was some stuff from my National Speaker Association group that I thought might be relevant, and I took the individual articles and I just ripped them out and stapled them. And now I've got the things that I, I think are going to be most actionable for me and my business all in a single pile that can fit into my laptop bag and now allow me to keep up with my reading. Active pile for the stuff I still need to work on and complete where I need the paper. Desk looking pretty darn clean. Supplies and reference books and things like that, but the desk is pretty darn clean.

Alright, well, thanks for watching today's video. I just want to share with you, this isn't rocket science to get your office cleaned up the way that we've discussed here. Basically, all you need to do is to commit to retaking control. And what that means to commit is you gotta have a bit of time set aside and you need to have a plan. And if you can put those two things into action, it'll give you the basics of how to get that office clutter under control. And I will tell you something, this is a plan I haven't done just one time. I've done this every year or two for the last several years because it's normal for stuff to sort of stack up a little bit. But what I don't let happen is let it get to the point to where I lose control. I want to always make sure that I've got my productivity platform in place, my productivity center in place that encompasses my office and my desk. And so, if you can make that commitment, then you can make this thing happen. Now, here's a few places you can get a little bit more information, a couple books that I recommend, including my own book. And if you go out onto my website, I have a special eBook deal that's out there when you go under the eLearning tab. Also, I've linked an excerpt from my new book project from the chapter discussing office clutter and distraction in the comments below. And of course, I do recommend that you check out my other videos for tips on how to better handle your email and other related technology. I want to thank you for your time today. If you'd like to find out a little bit more about my programs, including my full-length streaming and webinar programs, as well as the programs I speak on at conference events, etc., come visit my website randaldean.com. And if you want to get even more tip sheets, I have a whole series of bonus little PDF articles and tip sheets on time management, Email management, Outlook usage, email etiquette, Google usage, smartphone/tablet usage. If you'd like to get those, just send me an email at my email address listed here and put YouTube PDF in the subject line. And if you enjoyed this, please subscribe. Thanks.