Compliments of MC =) via Flickr
[The following is a guest blog post from Dr. Amy Sayward, History Department Chairperson, Middle Tennessee State University].
In 2004, I hit bottom organizationally. I had told myself for several years that I was organized, just not tidy. But in February of 2004, I took photos of my faculty office, which forced me to confront that I was not organized and my office was a disaster area. In fact, I recall a student who walked into my office and started talking to me, because he didn’t see the other student seated in my office–that’s how much visual clutter there was!
At that point, a friend gave me a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. It didn’t magically cure my organizational issues over night, but it gave me a system that I could work within so that things stopped getting worse. Over time, I started to address the huge backlog of “stuff” that I had accumulated–6 boxes of unfiled papers, 6,000 emails in my inbox, and all of the general clutter. As I started to get organized–to feel in control of my workspace and life–my stress decreased and my capacity increased.
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