Last week was crazy….and it doesn’t stop there, no, it continues onto this week. Long story short, I have a business associate I’m working with on trying to finish up a brand new, completely revamped commercial property, who is all over the board – no sense of organization or time allocation whatsoever…and it’s just about damn near driving me up the wall.

The project we’re both working on together, has been like molasses once it gets out of the bottle – initially, it trickles down slowly, reaching the spout – but once it does….it all comes out as if a landslide. Stopping it takes a bit of skill and you’ve gotta be quick enough to catch it all without spillage.

That’s pretty much the same thing I’m dealing with with the tasks at hand – it’s at the landslide part. Because of lack of organization in the beginning – everything, and I do mean everything is having to be done last minute. Now, if you were to hang out with me and get to know me on a week to week basis, over the years you would discover when it comes to business – or most things for that matter – one thing I absolutely despise is leaving things until the last minute.

It’s impractical. Leaves room for mistakes. Work gets sloppy, because things must be done in a rush and much faster. Things get forgotten, details overlooked, and in the end having to go back and correct/complete the overlooked/forgotten things actually just ends up creating more work, that takes more time.

Disorganization is not my friend.

Some people thrive in diving into a project where everyone’s flying by the seat of their pants. Others, like myself, don’t mind building a structured system to apply to a project that’s currently all over the board – but not often.

Getting organized really isn’t that hard. It just takes a few small simple steps on a day to day basis, until you can pretty much put everything on “auto pilot”. I’ve always liked the sound of that – maximizing time efficiency. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not at all a fan of things such as auto bill pay or cars that drive themselves.

I’m just one who appreciates shaving off a few minutes – even hours – here and there so I can enjoy the most of my day. It could be as simple as setting things out a certain way so I can breeze through my daily routine, or creating “systems” in my work to speed up the process of certain things. Even when I plan a great night out, I’ll have it laid out down to the minute detail – always of course, with room for flexibility. What I dislike, is when minds can’t be made up or large amounts of uncertainty.

Some things are made to where they seem more efficient but really end up being less so and take up more time. A good example of this is voice text – okay, so I get the basic concept and all, but honestly, has anyone really tried that shit out…? Even if you calibrate it to recognize the way you say certain words, it can still fuck up pretty bad. I’m a stickler for the smart phones with the Qwerty keyboards….like the LG Mach. At least if you make a mistake it’s purely your own grammatical error. Instead of…eh…I don’t know, implying you want someone’s grandpa dead.

….or implying you have a strange addiction to certain foods…

….or you know…just getting plain frustrated with the auto correct feature and not even being able to express said frustration.

Last one I swear.

The amount of time spent correcting mistakes made by the phone’s auto correct or voice recognition takes longer than banging out a simple text that just requires a bit of dexterity and finger work – today, I still have a Qwerty keypad phone for my personal use, and a regular “swype” keypad as one of my business phones.

But back to the main subject – being organized basically means putting a little bit of effort in day to day, so you don’t have one collective pile of stuff that’s been pushed aside coming back and slapping you in the face like an overwhelmed teen who just found out they’re pregnant.

The main thing here is to sort out the simplest things first, then work a structured plan and pace of action for the bigger fish you have to fry. Anything last minute has a bigger chance of going tits up…and and anything that’s “put aside” until later has a bigger chance of becoming unnecessarily overwhelming. If you try focusing on the biggest things first all the time, or worse, jumping from one project to the next simultaneously, you can potentially end up taxing your brain too much.

Wanna know how successful people really get things accomplished? They take more breaks. They stop multi-tasking….and the avoid bullshit time-consuming things, such as going back and forth with e-mails, instead of just picking up the goddamn phone.

There’s loads of ways that you can get organized. I may be elaborating on this in a later post. For now, this is more of a rant – I know, I’m usually not one to rant, but jesus christ disorganization is a pet peeve of mine…actually no – I don’t even want to call it a “pet.” It’s a pain in the bum.

Look out for this Thursday’s “For The Weekenders” post….I can guarantee I’ll be doing every single thing on the list…maybe even for a week…or three….thousand.

Stay cool.

– Rego

Musings Episode 21: Get Organized… is a post from and appeared first on Rego’s Life