It should go without saying that organization is paramount to efficiency.
Organization comes in many forms, from mental checklists to e-mail processes to designing the layout of your physical space. All forms are important, depending on the task at hand. Many people find it difficult to get or stay organized, but we have a method that is simple to execute and requires only a modicum of discipline. It’s all about setting limits.
Upper limits and lower limits each have a place and can be useful in their own right. You need to set and abide by a reasonable limit for yourself in any task you complete.
Accountants would view this as a “FIFO” system, or “First In, First Out.” The most concrete example I can give is my electronics stash. I used to have a closet completely dedicated to electronic gear. There was a shelf for audio cables, a shelf for network cables, an area with all kinds of dead technology like a wristwatch walkie-talkie (What? I was a budding secret agent . . .), and a whole mess of other stuff. I didn’t know where anything was, so on the rare occasion when I needed a network patch cable, I would make a bigger mess just trying to find it.
After selling most of the stuff on eBay and recycling the rest, I now have a single egg crate for electronics. It holds a couple of cables, an old webcam, and some other miscellaneous items. The box is my absolute, no-questions-asked limit for storing electronic gear. The box is always filled, so whenever something new comes along that I want to put in the box, I have to get rid of something already in there. This forces me to make a decision about whether or not I really need that new thing, or if it’s more important than something at the bottom of the box that I haven’t seen in months.
The other day, I bought a new cordless phone for our house, and it came with a new telephone cord. I took a look at the bottom of the box, and there were a couple in there already, so the new one definitely was not a keeper. It’s very satisfying to have that one small box in the closet instead of using the entire closet.
You name it! Whether it’s e-mail, grocery shopping, time on Facebook, or your workweek, you can set a limit on anything. You should never have more than fifty e-mails in your inbox, you don’t need eight boxes of cereal (unless you’re a house mom at a large fraternity), you shouldn’t spend more than a few minutes per hour on Facebook, and your workweek should never, ever be seven days long. Everything can and should have a limit, even leisure time (which should have a lower limit).
Upper limits are obvious, but many people miss the other side of the coin: the minimum limits to the things we do. These apply very well to travel (I want to take one trip per month), fitness (I will run thirty miles per week), nutrition (I will cook at home three times per week), and so on. Limits can refer to times or amounts, whatever makes the most sense.
The key is picking a realistic limit and sticking to it. It’s better to be conservative and hit your limits than to constantly fall short and cause yourself more frustration. For instance, a cigar box for my electronics would have been too ambitious.
To give an example, I have a limit of ten e-mails in my inbox. I refuse to have more than that many in there, ever. Right now I have six.
I can keep the e-mail within that limit because I have filters set up, I have a virtual assistant, I have autoresponders—I’ve reduced the amount of e-mail I get to the point where I can keep up with it and never need to have more than ten messages in my inbox. If I found that I was consistently exceeding my limit, that would mean I needed to optimize the system more, or the VA needed to check in more frequently, or something else needed to change. Whatever that might be, it doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
When I switched from PC to Mac, I did so partly because I’d wanted to switch for a long time, but also partly because my PC died. I had a backup, but it was outdated. I lost some of my stuff. I decided I never wanted something like that to happen again, so I switched to keeping everything in the cloud. This was three years ago, when it wasn’t as easy as it is now.
Since I keep everything in the cloud, I have only two programs on my computer: Dropbox and Chrome. I will not install anything else. That’s my limit. If there was something else I needed, I would either find another way to do the same thing on the web, or I would realize that I really didn’t need that piece of software to do that task.
The beauty of that setup is that if my computer blew up right now, I could move to any other computer or iPad and be up and running in about three minutes. I actually decided to run my life entirely from my iPad, just to see if I could do it. After trying it for a week, I found that there were four or five things I couldn’t do from the iPad, so I figured out how to do them. In some cases, it involved a new app that hadn’t previously existed for iPad; in others, it involved sending things to my assistant, having her process them in some way, and having her send them back to me (or just do it for me). But I figured out how to do all of them from the iPad.
After that, I took it even further: could I do it from only the iPhone? My wife and I went to Los Angeles for a week, and I didn’t take a laptop or an iPad, only my iPhone. I was able to successfully run my entire life and business—construction projects in Long Island, Less Doing projects, everything—all from my iPhone. In the whole week, there were only two hiccups, and I figured out how to get around both of them from the road.
Realistically, I’m not going to be running my business on a daily basis with only an iPhone, but it’s great to know I can if I need to. That means the iPad is about ten times more efficient and the computer is about a hundred times more efficient, as I’m benefitting from a larger screen and more processing power.
To streamline your life and help yourself get organized, always set reasonable limits for the things you do. If you find yourself running up against those limits, it usually means something else must go.