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Chapter
ORGANIZING EVERYTHING IN YOUR
LIFE: YOUR OFFICE, YOUR BOSS,
YOURSELF

Kilungu Matata, PhD

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ORGANIZING

Definition
The process of creating capabilities by intentionally imposing order and
structure
In our daily lives organizing is a fundamental cognitive activity that we
often do without thinking much about it
It is also an important part of most business and professional activities
Organizing in any context can be more effective and satisfying if we
are more self-aware and systematic about how we organize
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TEST YOUR ORGANIZING SKILLS

 Do you often misplace keys, files, important

documents, or other items?
 Do you have piles of paper scattered on your desk?
 Do you consistently miss deadlines without someone
reminding you of them?
 Do you run late for meetings or miss appointments?
 Do you let opportunities pass you by?
 Do you regularly feel overwhelmed and overworked?
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BENEFITS OF ORGANIZING

Effective organization enhances:

 a person’s sense of control
competence,
 increases a person’s energy
Increases productivity levels
A person’s career success and profitability.
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THE ORGANIZING WE DO

 Categorization (Creating “equivalence classes” of resources that we

treat the same)
 Classification (Creating models for assigning resources to existing
categories)
 Integration (Combining categories)
 Segmentation (Discovering categories computationally, assigning
resources to them)
 Recommendation (Identifying “matching” resources in different
categories)
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THE COST OF BEING DISORGANIZED

 Clutter is chaos.
 physical clutter results in mental clutter as well
 Such clutter and chaos cost you more than you may think
 Clutter zaps your time, drains your energy, prevents you from being
your best
 Clutter causes stress.
 Clutter prevents one from recognizing opportunities
 Eventually, this clutter results in strained relationships and
diminished work capacity.
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THE COST OF BEING DISORGANIZED

So what does one lose or suffer as a result
of being disorganized?

We organize:
 Things
 Information
 Information about Things
 Information about Information
 Information about (Information
about Things)
 Information about (Information
about Information)
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 Libraries, museums, business
information
 systems, scientific data… and other
 institutional resource collections
 Different types of documents
 Personal information and artifacts
of all kinds in our kitchens, closets,
personal computers, smartphones
 People
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TERMINOLOGY IN THE SYSTEM OF

ORGANIZING

 RESOURCES: These consist of “anything of value

that can support goal-oriented activity”
 A COLLECTION: It is a group of resources that have
been selected for some purpose
 INTENTIONAL ARRANGEMENT - organizing
requires explicit or implicit acts by human or
computational agents
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ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES
 Resource arrangements follow one or more
ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES
 ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES use properties or
DESCRIPTIONS that are associated with the resources
 Almost any property of a resource might be used as a
basis for an organizing principle, and multiple
properties are often used simultaneously
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ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES

 For physical resources the properties are often perceptual,

material ones, or task-oriented ones
 For information resources the properties are often semantic
ones
 Some principles are domain-specific, but others can apply
generally
 Properties can be selected, extracted, or inferred
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ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES

 Other typical arrangements are based on ownership,

origin, taxonomic, or behavioral properties (usage
frequency, correlated usage)
 Any resource with an orderable name or identifier can
have alphabetic or numeric ordering
 Any resource with an associated date (creation,
acquisition) can have chronological ordering
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THE 6 DIMENSIONS OF AN
ORGANIZING SYSTEM
1. What Is Being Organized?
2. Why Is It Being Organized?
3. How Much Is It Being Organized?
4. When Is It Being Organized?
5. Who (or What) is Organizing It?
6. Where is it Organized?
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1. What Is Being Organized?

•Identifying the unit of analysis is a central problem in every

intellectual or scientific discipline - and in every organizing
system
•Resources that are aggregates or composites of other resources,
or that have internal structure, or that can have many attributes,
pose questions about the granularity of their
"thingness”
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2. Why Is It Being Organized?

•The essential purpose of every Organizing System is to "bring

like things together and differentiating among them” – enabling
generic requirements of resource discovery, identification,
access…
•But there are always more precise requirements and constraints to
satisfy and more specific kinds of interactions to support
•Different stakeholders might not agree on these requirements,
making it necessary to use multiple and possibly incompatible
resource descriptions and organizing principles
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Interactions –The “Why” of

Organizing Systems

INTERACTIONS include any activity, function, or service

supported by or enabled with respect to the resources in a
collection or with respect the collection as a whole
Interactions can include access, reuse, copying,
transforming, translating, comparing, combining,
visualizing, recommending… anything that a person or
process can do with the resources…
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The Most Generic Interactions

 Finding a resource that you know exists
 Identifying a resource to make sure you have the one you
were looking for
 Selecting a resource from a set of candidates in a
collection
 Obtaining the resource if what you have at this point is
just a resource description
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Interactions

 Some interactions can be enabled with any type of

resource, while others are tied to resource types
 The supported interactions depend on the nature
and extent of the resource descriptions and
arrangement
 Finding the optimal descriptions is an important
goal but not always possible
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But Description is Challenging!

People use different words for the same things, and the same
words for different things - what would a "good" description be
like, and how can it be created or discovered?
Describing and organizing always (explicitly or implicitly)
takes place in some context
The context shapes which resource properties are important and
the organizing principles that use those properties, introducing
bias
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3. How Much Is It Being Organized?

 Not everything is equally organizable, because not everything

is equally describable
•A controlled vocabulary can yield more consistent organization
•The scope and size of a collection shapes how much it needs to
be organized
• Making resources “smart” increases how much they can be
organized
•How precisely a collection of resources can be described and
organized depends on well user types and requirements are
known
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4. When Is It Being Organized?

•When the resource is created
•When it is added to some collection
•Just in time
•Never
•All the time - continuous or incremental
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5. Who or What Is Organizing?

•Authors or creators
•Professional organizers
•Users “in the wild”
•Users “in institutional contexts”
•Automated or computerized processes
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6. Where is it Organized?

•Physical location is often a constraint or

convenience; use of fixed locations for personal
organization
•Digital resources often have location independence
or irrelevance
• Built environments / city plans are places, but are
usually organizing people and their interactions
rather than “the land”
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STEPS IN ORGANIZING
1. Identify the major categories of items you keep in
your office/work space/life
 Operational – company strategy and action plans,
policies and procedures, passwords, and phone
numbers.
 Financial & legal - budget reports, purchase orders,
coupons, receipts, and contracts.
 Supplies – writing instruments, paper clips, stapler,
ruler, scissors, paper, forms, and business cards.
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Records – client, employee and vendor files.

Product materials – brochures, product guides,
and portfolios.
Resources – tapes, articles, magazines and
books.
Projects – past, current, and future ideas.
Tools of the trade – things
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2. Physically sort every item in your workspace into the

categories identified in step one.
3) Eliminate unnecessary items.
4) Arrange the items in each category.
5) Make a rough sketch of your workspace and appoint a place
to store each category of item.
6) Purchase storage units for any leftover categories of
materials.
7) Create an outline or table of contents for each storage area.
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THE 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY

ORGANIZED PEOPLE
1. ORGANIZED PEOPLE SEEK OUT TOOLS
From kitchen timers to smartphone technology, organized
people find tools that can help them make the most of their
day, week, and year.
They use mobile phone apps with pop-up reminders, for
example.
They also use timers to help visualize the passage of time.
They break down tasks into smaller chunks and take short
non-work-related breaks in between, which increases their
overall productivity.
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2. ORGANIZED PEOPLE SET

PRIORITIES
.
 Instead of having an overwhelming number of
commitments and little idea where to start, organized
people have a clear sense of what’s important,
 They know what their goals are, what needs to be done
when, and what can be put off
 They start the day with a clear plan of their ‘MITs’–their
‘most important things.’
 They review their plan throughout the day and adjust as
necessary
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3. ORGANIZED PEOPLE HAVE LESS

STUFF
 The golden rule of organization is to have as little as
possible to organize
 They figure out what the core of their professional and
personal missions are and eliminate all else
 They will still have stuff to organize, but they’ve made the
job doable.
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4. ORGANIZED PEOPLE CHOOSE

SIMPLE SOLUTIONS
 When organizing systems are complex, they often go
unused
 Organized people use simple tools that make an easy job
of putting things away
 For example, baskets hold receipts that need to be filed,
bills that need to be paid, and books that are waiting to be
read.
 A hook by the door makes it convenient to hang up a coat.
 And bowls and trays near an entryway will keep keys and
wallets in one place.
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5. ORGANIZED PEOPLE PRACTICE

MAINTENANCE
 Organization requires continual upkeep, says Zaslow: “You
don’t go to the gym, get in shape, then cancel your
membership,” she says. “Being organized is the same.”
 Organized people will take a few moments each day to put
things back in their proper places.
 They might archive an email, for example, or put away
papers.
 “They don’t drop things in a random pile ‘just for now’–it’s
always now,” says Zaslow. “The tiny amount of time it takes
to do this is vastly less than the time it takes to look for
something that wasn’t put away properly.”
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6. ORGANIZED PEOPLE
REGULARLY PURGE
 Situations change and formerly useful things become
unnecessary.
 Instead of letting clutter sneak up on them, organized people
periodically purge.
 They clear out their files when the drawer starts to get full,
for example, and they toss the notes for the project that was
canceled.
 A manager says she once had a client who would buy a new
filing cabinet each time one got full: “By the time she called
me to intervene, she had file cabinets in her home office,
guest room, upstairs hall, den, and basement,” she says.
“Needless to say, most of the information was out of date
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7. ORGANIZED PEOPLE PROJECT

THEMSELVES INTO THE FUTURE
 Using a two-person mind-set–present self and future self–
can help you stay organized
 They always like to think of their future self when they
take care of small tasks right away
 “If I walk through a room and see a mess, I will say, ‘I bet
if I do those dishes now my future self will be so much
happier later,”
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 “That motivates me to do those favors for my future self.”

 Organized people also think into the future when they add
activities to their calendars
 “They ask: ‘What could I do before, during, or after this
appointment to improve it?’”
 If they need to prepare for it, bring something to it, or
follow up after it, they schedule it now and put it on their
task list
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PERSONAL REFLECTIONS
 Which of these habits could you identify with?
 Which of these habits could you cultivate?
 Formulate a personal development plan on
organizing…?
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THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION