Using Organizing and Time Management Skills in a NYC Office

Some tasks or projects are more difficult to get started than others. I recently encountered this situation with a game plan that I needed to draft for a client who wanted my help with office organizing in NYC. When I took on this project, I had ample time to get the plan drafted to her with organizing her NYC office but other tasks and priorities surfaced that ate away at the cushion that I had given myself. I was now facing my self-imposed deadline which was three days prior to my meeting with my client to deliver the plan. Instead of getting stressed out about the approaching deadline, I opted to be proactive and use my organizing and time management skills in my NYC office to manage my schedule so that I could get the plan done. Here’s how I tackled this task:

Step 1: Scheduling/Energy Level

Using on my organizing and time management skills, I identified the day/time when I would focus my efforts in my NYC office exclusively on this task. In doing so, I determined that tackling this project in the middle of the day would be best. My energy level would be high so I could focus on the plan and get it completed during the designated block of time.

Step 2: No Distractions

When it was time to work on the plan, I knew that it would be important to stay very focused. Hence, I would need to ignore all distractions. I let calls go to voicemail, moved my phone off the desk so that I wouldn’t be tempted by the blinking red light and vowed not to check email on my computer for the duration.

Step 3: Build Momentum

As I had had some time to think about how best to position the information in the plan before actually sitting down to do the work, I was in a good place to get started. However, writing those first words can be the hardest. I decided that just getting the words down was more important than being sure that they were perfect from the moment they appeared on the screen. Acknowledging that I would go back to edit as needed gave me the freedom to just start typing and the plan evolved.

Step 4: Reward Yourself

When I blocked out the time on my calendar to work on this game plan, I decided I should reward myself if the plan was completed in the time allotted. This provided an additional incentive to get the job done that day. By the end of the day, I had sent an email to a close friend inviting her to lunch at the end of the week.

This turned out to be a good project for me to test my own organizing and time management  skills in my NYC office while assembling a plan to help a client with organizing her NYC office.  It turned out to be a Win-Win situation.