Tips for Organizing and Managing Your Life: Self/Home/Work

By Patti Loverink

In the last year, technical communicators have experienced what many may have never experienced before. Whether self-employed or employed as a "staffer," you may find yourself
- doing the jobs of many,
- working overtime to the point of habit,
- carrying on in an office environment where morale is low, and/or
- foregoing cost-of-living increases, just to stay employed.

With stresses like these, good life-management skills are essential to help reduce stress. This article contains tips on self, home and work from several local technical communicators, professional organizers and a professional coach to help you realize a less stressful life.

1. Self-Management
Most importantly, take care of your physical and mental needs first.

• Eat well. Take a large bowl to the office with you and keep it filled with fruit, raisins, almonds and other healthy snack items.
  
  
• Drink at least eight 8-oz glasses of water per day. Professional organizer Maria Gracia with Get Organized Now! (www.getorganizednow.com) suggests, "Fill a container with exactly eight glasses of water. Keep that container nearby so you can drink from it throughout the day. By the day's end, you should be finished with the entire container."
  
  
• Exercise, even if it's just a short walk before work or during lunch. This not only increases endorphins (a "happy-making" hormone), but exercise actually helps you sleep better at night.
  
  
• Speaking of sleep, get plenty of it; whatever your body needs to feel good. If you have difficulty falling asleep, try dimming the lights and reducing the air temperature for 30 minutes before you go to bed; doing so engages the body's natural sleep triggers.
  
  
• Block out time in your schedule for "personal time," just as you would block out time for a meeting. Treat yourself to something you enjoy, like a good workout, music, or a massage. Gracia recommends, "Find yourself a quiet spot, take a deep breath, relax and spend at least 15 minutes each day reading a new book. This will force you to slow down, and will allow you to think about something other than work or chores for a few moments."
  
  
• Take a 20-minute-nap. Instead of fighting off post-lunch exhaustion, Oregon-based technical communicator Eric Witchey says, "I take a 20-minute nap in the middle of the afternoon sometimes. Then I get twice as much done afterward."
  
  
• Make time for silence. Witchey says he meditates in different ways to drain the noise of the day from his mind. "Sometimes it's sitting in the back yard to watch squirrels or taking a walk after dark. I find that's extremely useful given the interrupt-driven nature of life. There are so many things that are so pervasive in our lives: email, telephone and cell phones. That half hour of silence makes a huge difference in my day."
  
  
• Get all your needs met. "Most people confuse their needs with their wants and their shoulds," says Rose Hill, certified business coach. "Needs are those things that must be in place for us to be our best; wants are the icing on the cake that make our lives wonderful, and shoulds are things that others think are best for us but which most likely aren't anything we really need or want. It's easy to see that you need to eat on a regular basis. It's more difficult to see that you might need the respect of your boss. If you function at your best when your boss treats you with respect, then your boss' respect is a need. If what your boss thinks of you is relatively unimportant, then getting the boss' respect is a want, not a need. Be sure to distinguish between your wants and your needs. A good place to start is with the Needless Program" (available free at www.coachrose.com).
  
  
• Practice extreme self-care, especially when you are under additional stress. "People think that the first thing they have to sacrifice is what they most enjoy. Culturally, we've been taught that being selfish is equal to not being responsible. In actuality, taking care of yourself first is the foundation of responsibility," says Hill. "And, no, extreme self-care is not easy at first, but the enhancement to your self, home, and productivity can be phenomenal." Hill offers a program on her Web site to get people started with some extreme self-care ideas.

2. Home Management

"Releasing yourself from clutter gives you a sense of freedom both physically and mentally," says Custom Assignments Inc. (www.customassignments.com), specialists in helping people get organized and recapture their leisure time. Custom Assignments Inc offers these tips for de-cluttering your home:

• To de-clutter properly, you must first empty out the entire drawer, closet, box or whatever you want to work on.
  
  
• Make sure you have a large trash bag and some smaller containers for the giveaways and items to be returned to other rooms.
  
  
• As you handle each item repeat the organizer's mantra: "Do I want it? Do I need it? When did I last use/wear it?" and my all-time personal favorite, "What was I thinking?"
  
  
• In her book, Getting Organized, Robin Freedman Spizman suggests keeping a shopping bag on the back of each closet door. Every time you come across something that is no longer needed or wanted, pop it in the bag.
  
  
• Follow the organizer's creed of a place for everything and everything in its place. It will keep you organized and enable you to see what you have. Remember that there are general locations, such as a drawer or shelf, and specific locations, such as the hook for your keys.
  
  
• Always store items near where they will be used.
  
  
• Clear off the excess from counters and shelves. This will immediately make your room look more organized and give you the feeling of being more in control.
  
  
• For the pack rats who just can't let go, buy a variety of containers and store like items together.

3. Work Management
We all have ways of managing various aspects of our work. Here are some ideas that may be new and inspiring:

• Optimize your travel time. STC Willamette Valley member Jean Richardson says, "I schedule my phone time for when I'm commuting. You know there are calls you have to make and you'd spend that time otherwise just sitting. I use a headset, and only use my cell phone when I'm not in heavy traffic."
  
  
• Don't attend useless meetings. If you work for someone else, Gracia says, "Speak to your boss or manager, and determine if it's possible that you skip such meetings. Explain how much more productive you can be if your time is used more wisely."
  
  
• Learn to say no. Carol Halsey, founder and president of Business Organizing Solutions (www.pilestofiles.com), says, "An organized person will clearly know their goals, the job responsibilities that they alone are accountable for, and understand their priorities. It is much easier, then, to say no to taking on new tasks or projects which do not fit into their goals, or job responsibilities, and is not one of their priorities."
  
  
• If you work from home, let your family know that a closed door means "do not disturb," or "knock first." Halsey says, "…establish clear rules for how and when, if ever, you may be distracted by family members."
  
  
• Plan ahead. STC Willamette Valley member Diane Purser likes to plan out the week ahead every Sunday on the calendar. "I write a "to do" list every night for the day ahead. If it's particularly long-I star the items that absolutely must be done. (The others can slide, if necessary.)"
  
  
• Use an inexpensive stopwatch to track your billable time. Though computer-based tools are available for accomplishing the same thing, Witchey says, "I use my stop-watch to track actual minutes at the keyboard. That way, I can track cumulative time. When I start typing, I hit the watch. When I stop, I hit it again."
  
  
• Separate work from your personal life. One way that Witchey accomplishes this is by separating his creative, fiction writing from his technical writing. "I do it on different computers because I go into two separate ways of thinking when I approach those tasks. It helps me to train my mind to produce those states."
  
  
• Cut back on multitasking. "You can save up to an hour a day by cutting back on multitasking," says Hill. "I know it sounds counter-intuitive, and it goes against the culture of technical communicators, but you'll get more done in less time if you substitute concentration and single-minded focus for multitasking. When you are in the 'flow' of concentration, your productivity skyrockets."

With so much to do and so little time to do it all, there's never been a better time to be in command of your own health, and to more effectively manage the home and work aspects of your life.