The 60-Second Organizer - Book Summary

The book ‘The 60-second organizer’ is about small steps for beating chaos and getting a more organized life. The book as such consists of 6 parts, and each part has ten rules.

Organizing gives me peace of mind. When things are placed in the places they are meant to be, it feels like I have got a restart point, and from there on, I can start working on fixing the important stuff. The book sees organizing as being prepared to “respond to life.” This seems like a good analogy.

Part One: Embracing Powerful Perspectives

• Learn your ABCs: Why are we able to achieve the things we achieve? The three basic elements to any behavioral change are:

  1. Antecedents. An event that helps you determine you next action. Like, seeing a stop sign, green light going yellow, etc.
  2. An action or Behavior itself. Based on the antecedent, we decide what we will do. Like applying breaks on seeing the stop sign, or acceleration on seeing green going yellow.
  3. Consequences of that action or behavior. They are the results of your action. Fo ex. getting caught on breaking the traffic rules, or getting by without anyone noticing.

  When the consequence of the behavior is positive, your experience can be an antecedent for others and will encourage your behavior. Virtually every goal we’ve ever set, and every goal we will set, is based upon some antecedent. Recognition of opportunities and the fear of pain are the two fundamental antecedents for engaging in behaviors that lead to goal achievement. This simple paradigm is complicated because each person’s conception of opportunity for gain is multifaceted. In addition, how people seek to avoid pain is varied. These two fundamental antecedents are often intertwined in ways you may not realize.

  When we understand our motivation ( here for organizing ), we can take appropriate action that will result in the desired consequence.

• Capture your best thoughts: “Ideas are like slippery fish. Unless you write them down, they are going to slip away.” It’s a good idea to organize your thoughts, either by using a notepad or using an app. ****

• Determine “Who created that?”: Most of the time the answer to that question, and almost all of the time in case of organizing the answer is going to be you. When you honestly confront an issue, you are bound to concede that you created the problem ( here disorganization ). There’s no one else to blame, and no one else will fix it for you.

• Make profound choices: When you choose to do something, choose what feels right for you, gives you a new sense of control over your own life and yields a tremendous sense of inner harmony.

• Live and actually learn: If we are not able to recognize how we’ve changed since the past, we’re likely to allow our past to unduly influence what we do next. It’s good to learn from past experiences and not repeat the mistake. All by itself, the advice is not of much use.

  So for example, maybe you tried organizing few times back and you failed, then remembering what you did will help you avoid the same mistake this time.

• “Work Smarter” for Real: We often hear, “work smarter not harder”. But what does it actually mean? Simply telling someone to “work smarter” does not work. Was Thomas Edison working smarter when he tried and failed to identify a suitable filament? Did his IQ suddenly rise? Working longer and being open to new ideas can lead to working smarter. With hard work, you can learn about your subject and develop more efficient techniques.

• Heed Perato and his Principle: The Perato principle describes a relationship between effort and result. The principle says that, 80% of the result comes from 20% of the time that an individual expends. Therefore, it makes sense for directing our efforts in those areas which will generate the most results.

• Forget about the “Right Mood”: If we keep waiting for the right time/mood, it is very probable the “right mood” will never come. Even if you don’t want to do it, doing something will count rather than not doing anything. Suppose your goal is to write 20000 words each day, and when you feel good, you write 24000 words, and the rest of the days you don’t write at all. Rather than doing this, on the days you are not feeling like writing, it is way better to write only a few (say 2000 words).

• Reward thyself: Easy enough. When you complete any task, that you have been avoiding for a long time, or something that was tough, reward yourself a little.

Part Two: Enveloping Proactive Practices

• Forsake excuses for not becoming organized: If you hear yourself saying any of these ones, then you are making excuses: “I have been meaning to.”, “I have never been good at organizing.”, “I don’t know how to get started.”, “I have so many other things to do.”, “Organizing will take too much time.”, “I don’t see any value in organizing.”, “It makes me anxious; I don’t feel I am accomplishing much.”

  When we realize that we are making excuses and get past them, we can achieve worthwhile things.

• Defeat Perfectionism: At times, striving for perfection is good. But most of the time it is not worth our effort. Studies show that, the additional time we invest to take a project from 95% to 100%, in most cases is not worth from the practical point of view.

• Start simply: Okay, you have piled up a lot of things, and it is hard to get started. In such scenarios, the best thing is to perform the first step simply. Take a few common items and put them together (rather than determining the best possible way to put them) and do the intricate arrangement in the next iterations.

• Handle tough things first: If you save the things you love for last and do the unpleasant things first, then you will maintain the order longer. It sounds so easy, then why do people resort to old, unproductive ways? Bad habits or routine behaviour have far more of an impact of daily activities than we might imagine. Research shows that more an individual engages in a particular behavior, the stronger the neuronal pathways in that person’s brain become, which encourages them to continue the behavior. As you get older, decades of habitual behavior, habitual thought patterns, and a habitual life all but ensure that your capacity for change in the years to come will be a fraction of what it was 10, 20 or 30 years back.

  It is an axiom of life that if you are seeking to develop a new habit, the best possible time is to start now.

• Ask yourself “Will it be any easier later?”: About 99 out of 100 times, the answer will be a no. By asking yourself that question, you automatically create an incentive to deal with it now, independent of your mood.

• Stake your claim: When you make the goal your own, attach emotions to it, you don’t need outer motivation to reach the finish line.

Part Three: Listing and Charting Your Way

• Recognize Fallibilities: There are many management tools, to-do lists, and planning software in the market, but none will work unless we keep the information up to date. Your mind is the most important tool in organizing your schedule, time, and life.

• Mark your calendar: Why don’t we put/block time for organizing things on our calendar? Organizing your life is as important as other things on your plate. So mark a 15/30 min meeting. If you are done, then well and good. If not, then set another time for it.

• Maintain a checklist/to-do list: The aim here is to make a super-long to-do list of everything you want to do in life. However, out of the 10 pages, you will always look at the first page in the list and complete those items. Next is to separate your short-term tasks from your long-term tasks. This will help you keep things in perspective.

  Maintaining a checklist is essential when the to-do items are long-term and consist of various subtasks. In this way, we have an outline of all the steps needed to complete the task.

• Chart/Plot your way: This is in addition to the previous point. While creating an outline, we can use mind maps or other visually attractive formats to bring your attention to the main points with one look. For creating a checklist, we can use project planning software.

  One important thing is to know how much time it will take for each item and then create a Gantt Chart. This is specifically for task items that take a long time and will span over few weeks or months. This becomes necessary because we are not good in switching contexts and when we come back to a task, it is highly probable that we will forget where we were in the task. Adding subtasks to the chart helps to get back on track faster. For example, solving a bug involves various steps: investigation, fixing, build, testing (ad-hoc, automated), review, and check-in.

• Track your progress: This is the most important and at least for me, the most challenging step in getting organized. While making the Gantt chart, it is a good idea to set up dates on the calendar when the task should be completed, and if not completed, how will it affect the next tasks in your checklist.

Part Four: Reclaiming your places and spaces

• Start from scratch: When you have a space that needs reorganizing, and its straightening is long overdue, then the best way to deal with it is to empty the space and start again. Remove all the unwanted pieces, place the less needed objects, larger items first, and then the smaller and frequently needed items.

• Conquering your desk: The desk is the first thing you see when you come to the office. If your desk is disorganized or filled with files or items related to pending tasks, it drains your energy. Rather than having multiple pending task items/notes on your desk, it is better to have one to which you would like to devote your full attention. The next thing is to clear out your desks before leaving the office. Keep the things you need regularly nearer to you on the desk and readily available.

• Manage your work items and emails: (Originally, the title was “Win the paper chase” as earlier documents were all printed). Here is what we want to do. There are plenty of emails and documents ( files, attachments ) that we need to deal with. We can’t discard all of them. We can’t backlog all of them. So, to deal with this, when we go across a file/mail, here is what we can do:

  1. Act on it (Important and Urgent)
  2. Delegate \ Delay It
  3. File \ Save It
  4. Remove \ Delete It

  One thing to note here is that the “act” list should be thin, the “delay” list can be larger, and we need to routinely move items from the “delay” list to the “act” list or remove it to avoid overstacking items.

  Reduce your junk email. Unsubscribe to anything that you don’t need. Or set up some rules to send these items directly to folders that don’t need attention.

• Managing documents: We have to deal with many documents in our work. We write down several specs and steps to do a thing in documents. We have various mail and chat threads that contain essential information. We need to store it. There are a few things that should be kept in mind while collecting and organizing these documents :

  • What can be combined? What needs to be reallocated?
  • Is the document relevant anymore?
  • Keep fewer categories and more documents in each category. This makes it easier for us to search for and organize the document.

  Despite all our efforts, things will get disorganized, and then we need to look at the documents and decide if we want to: Act, Delay\Delegate, Save, or Delete the document.

  One important thing to note is that there is no need to worry if the pile gets high. We don’t need to organize it all at once. We can look at a small subset of items over time.

  This is the same for work items as well. Keep all the backlog items in one place rather than those being spread all over the place.

• Read with aplomb: This mainly refers to the use of speed reading to segregate items of importance from those not. We can read subject of mails, backs of book covers, first paras of documents and mails to know if they are important for us or not.

Part Five: Organize Meetings, Travel, and Online Activities

• Manage your e-mail: Will cover this in the previous section
• Organized and Effective Meetings: For this, I would suggest reading the book “Read this before our meeting” because it puts forward the same principles in a concise way. A few of the things worth mentioning here are:
  • Meetings should always have an agenda. So that, when people attend it, they already have the right mindset about the topic at hand.
  • It’s a good practice to do a pre-interview of the attendees and understand, what it is that they want to discuss and what are the ways that work with them.
  • It’s better to be strict with the start and end of the meetings. No do-overs for those attending late.
  • It is a good strategy to give an outline of the structure of the meeting. This makes the attendees aware of when they are extending a topic and can take it up later.
• Be productive on public transportation: This principle may or may not apply to most of us now. The book mentions that while on transport, you can go through magazines, newspapers, and articles and reduce the things you need to look at by skimming through them. Not directly, but we can use this on e-mails, tasks, and calendars.

Part Six: Making your home your castle

• Destroy enemy outposts: In this, the author is trying to say that when you bring something home, take it to completion. If there is some mail you are bringing in or coming home from shopping or a trip. Rather than leaving the task of unpacking to some other day, close the day by putting the thing in its place. Leaving things will result in 2-3 times more work as multiple types of things pile up this way.
• Pick a regular day and time: This is excellent advice. Setting up a time for doing certain recurring tasks can help you control what is happening in your life, like setting up a time to get the groceries, or setting a time for laundry and ironing. Making it a habit in a way helps you reduce the number of decisions you need to make.
• Approach space strategically: It is a straightforward and common principle. Spaces can be of variety of types- closets, drawers, shelves. They can be at different height and the accessiblity for each place is different. Depending on that we should place our items.
  • Smaller items should be placed on top of heavier objects. Objects with smaller base area can be kept over objects with larger base area.
  • Things that are used frequently should be in the shelves that are most accessible. The main shelve can have a U-configuration so that each stack is easily accessible.
  • Things that are not used frequently should be placed on higher shelves.
  • Use boxes to keep smaller similar items together (like a stationery box, a box for oil, perfumes, comb, etc.)
• Adopt replacement policy: Once you get something, you replace the equivalent of that thing from the house. Otherwise, we will keep hoarding stuff, and soon things will be out of our hands.
• Divide, Literally and Conquer: This principle means that, when you are organizing your home/shelves/closet space, one of the good things to do is to divide the space for what items need to be where. Like in my case, I have dedicated spaces in halls for anything of common need. There are cabinets for sports items or anything related to games. All the household items go in another cabinet. This will be a bigger task for the first time, but once you do it, it is easier to reorganize stuff.