Organized Chaos

That’s what I sometimes call my work style.

Oh, how I would love to have a clean and uncluttered desk.

And often I do.

Okay, sometimes I do.

Every once in awhile.

But then I look at the desks of a few famous folks.

Steve Jobs & Albert Einstein:

 

Not the clean desk, everything in its place kind of people.

If you are going to do some work, you have to be willing to get messy, even if it’s desk work.

The problem is some folks are good at creating a mess to the point of it being counter productive.

Chaos is not fun.

But developing systems, so when it’s time to organize that chaos, is key.

Last week I decided I better spend a couple of hours and do just that.

Since the middle of April, I have made over 1500 phone calls to businesses.

Not 1500 businesses, 1500 phone calls.  Some businesses I called several times. Others I called once.  I have the spread sheets of my activity each week.

By the way, the purpose of these calls were to set appointments.

So I decided before my list got any longer, it was time to combine these lists, and create a follow up plan with the results.

After I sorted my list by Business Name and was able to see the progress of each contact and decide which ones needed what, if any, follow up.

Did it all in Excel, saved it to my laptop, via Dropbox and there we go.

Oh, my actual desk still could use a little organizing, but at least my work past and future are in order.

What tips do you have to stay organized?