Waffle

I am disorganised, and this is hurting me at my job, at a time when I feel very strongly that I need to maximise my career and perform as well as I possibly can. I have tried to get more organised by keeping lists, but today, I ran into the limit of what lists can do for a person, hard.
And I was actually quite satisfied with my progress over the past few weeks. This morning, for the first time in weeks, I had enough peace of mind to sit down at the start of the work day and spend half an hour doing nothing but plan: write up my early-morning list (one of two - the other is the end-of day list which is a memo of things that need to be done the next day, in a rough order of priority. By the time morning has arrived, new urgent work to be delivered the same day has usually arrived in my mailbox and that planning has to be revised, but at least I have a starting point for the next day ready before I leave the office), prioritise in some detail based on how best to prevent surprised and then talk to people about that. I was doing well.

Right until a client e-mailed me about a job that was due yesterday that I'd forgotten about completely.

And that's where lists reach their limit: if you live by the list, you will die by the list. Because I rely on my lists so much, and because one of the ways I use them is to jot things down to enter into the company Intranet later so I won't have to drop everything I'm doing and lose my place in my ongoing work, what isn't on the list doesn't exist. As a result, a job that would normally take a day to do but would have been completed easily if I'd started on time just disappeared from my planning. Needless to say, I'm very frustrated with this, and a bit despairing about what I should do to prevent this. It needs to be solved otherwise I can't perform well at my job; but I can't go back to dropping whatever I can to prepare and administer incoming projects, because in the work environment I'm in, I wouldn't get anything done.

I don't have a solution yet. Sites like The Simple Dollar have endless lifehacking recommendations. That site particularly recommends the book Getting Things Done but implementing some of the solutions in that takes a time investment upfront that I simply don't see myself having in an environment where half an hour of idle time is a rarity, and as for implementing the most important step of that, listing everything, I've just demonstrated the risks inherent in that approach.

What do you do to keep track of things? Please let me know in comments. If you're a fan of the comics I make, your solution just might help me to spend less time in the office and to come home with more energy left to work on them. I did get the project back on track with the help of some of my co-workers and a new deadline, but at a cost of me coming home much, much later than planned, putting in overtime which I'm not going to get paid for.

The other day, in the midst of what looked like becoming an ongoing conversation about tightwaddery, I posted about decluttering for the first time in months. That's no coincidence. There are four aspects of my life that I tend to get antsy about at the same time: money, clutter and mess in the house, my terrible time management, and my terrible organisation. These subjects are closely related: my disorganisation and clutter affect my ability to budget effectively; my poor time management affects my ability to budget, but also my ability to increase my income and my ability to fix the other problems.

Last evening, I did some financial decluttering: I went through the many files in the desk safe and threw out:

1. anything that was more than 10 years old (10 years being how far back an audit might go in theory);
2. anything sent to me by the Tax Administration, the local authority, my insurance company that was strictly informational except the very latest version of the document in question;
3. anything that was the debris of my financial administration, i.e. empty tax return papers, "sketches" of my old tax returns, scribbled notes, etc. It's possible that these things might be involved in an audit in the future, but I'll take that chance.

I also sorted everything that was unsorted, which I'm afraid was a lot. It was the most tedious way I could think of spending a Friday night, but it did help me feel better about a number of things:

1. I found out that I had everything I need to be able to file my tax return quickly so I can be on time for the extended deadline of September 1 (budgeting, time management, organisation)
2. I also found out that I had paid National Health Insurance advances over 2007 and 2008, which I should be getting back now that I'm on a salary and paying taxes/national insurances by the month. (budgetting)
3. Looking at my bank statements, I realised that for all the disorganisation in my budgeting cycle, there's one thing I'm pretty good at doing, which is saving. I put € 1600 in savings the month after I came back from Aggie's, and have enough saved up to cover a month and a half's frugal living expenses, a plane ticket (return) to the US if booked early and coverage for the financial time bomb I mentioned earlier. That time bomb will be defused once I've filed my taxes (budgeting)

So that's making me feel good about myself. I'm still not done with this round of decluttering and it's going to be a difficult one, because the last one was less than six months ago. But I need to do it just so I can move all the stuff from the studio there. There's a lot accumulated there over the past seven years.

More proof that the improvement areas in my life all relate: because I did not allow myself to go to the supermarket over my lunch break this week (budgeting), I was able to have shorter lunch breaks (time management) and I could use the time to make phone calls, dealing with some studio-related issues and contacting a driving school (organisation). That made my lunch breaks the one moment during the day when my own disorganisation didn't bite me in the ass constantly.