Datasheet

Part I: Preparing for Personal Productivity

You may be someone who’s already tried following a foolproof personal

productivity system or two without much enduring success. Heaven forbid, you

may even be someone who’s gone through a productivity makeover at the hands

of a professional organizational life coach or efficiency expert, only to relapse

into comfortable chaos and less-than-stellar productivity after the coach had up

and gone (and yet long before you had finished paying off his bill).

And even if you don’t have any experience (good or bad) with trying to

implement somebody else’s system for becoming productive, if you’re

anything like 90 percent of the other people in the working world, you

almost certainly harbor some choice excuses about why you’re destined to

remain organization- and efficiency-challenged despite your best efforts.

Some of these excuses probably stem from doubts you harbor about your

own abilities (often known as self-limiting beliefs). Many, however, are

undoubtedly based on misgivings that you harbor about your job itself and

the corporate environment in which you have to perform it.

Before embarking on any steps designed to boost your personal productivity,

I think it’s useful to review the more common excuses given for remaining

unproductive. Here’s a short list of excuses that you may have to deal with:

 I’m just not an organized person.

 I’m just not good with technology.

 There’s just not enough time in the workday to get it all done.

 My job involves too many interruptions for me to be truly productive.

 I just don’t do well with self-help systems.

In the sections immediately following, I deal with each of these excuses in

more detail.

I’m just not an organized person

Lots of people believe that you’re either born a neat freak like immaculate

Felix Unger or a total slob like messy Oscar Madison (the mismatched

roommates in Neil Simon’s Broadway play, The Odd Couple, that later

became a hit movie and TV series).

Personally, I’m just not convinced there are any “neatness” or “messiness”

genes out there for anyone to inherit. It seems more likely to me that, when

growing up, you’re exposed either to more or to less order, and then your

early experience with the relative level of orderliness or disarray in different

environments shapes your reactions later in life.