Why you Need an Effective Organisational System

by Carthage Buckley, Stress and Performance Coach

An effective organisational system is something which everyone should be striving for. Being organised doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you will get all your work done but it does make life much easier.  If you are not properly organised, chaos is never far away. Maybe you are the kind of person who thinks that he is going along fine until the smallest thing goes wrong and everything gets thrown out the window. It then takes you far too long to get back on track. Alternatively, you might be the kind of person who makes great plans but gets little or nothing done because you can’t decide what you should be doing in any given moment and you keep jumping between tasks and projects. There are many problems which you may encounter when you don’t have an effective organisational system and this article will discuss some of the most important.

​5 Benefits of an effective organisational system

There are endless benefits to an effective organisational system. Some of them may apply to everybody and some may be specific to the individual. The following 5 benefits will be experienced by anybody who adopts an effective organisational system

1. Less stress

​An effective organisational system will allow you to stay on top of your work and control your workload. One of the biggest causes of stress arises when you have no idea what you have agreed to and you keep taking on work because you think that you have space for more. Of course, you eventually remember (or are reminded of) all the work you previously agreed to and you realise that you overwhelmed and overloaded. This is when you get to say hello to stress and despite what you may have been told, there is no such thing as good stress.

Amongst other negative effects, some of which will be discussed below, stress stimulates the production of cortisol, which suppresses your immune system. In addition, it reduces your ability to think effectively, plan and be creative. I certainly wouldn’t classify any of that as being good.

The biggest ways that an effective organisational system reduces stress are:

  • You have a record of everything you are committed to
  • You have an accurate record of where you are with each task/project you are committed to
  • You are aware of your workload so, you can recognise when you are becoming overloaded and you can say No

​Each of the points below is a result of stress reduction and contributes to further stress reduction

​2. Saves time

One of the biggest time wasters is not being able to decide what you should be doing in any given moment. There are so many tasks and projects to choose from that the choice can be overwhelming. As already discussed, an effective organisational system allows you to know what you are committed to and what progress you have made. This allows you to determine the right thing to do with one simple question:

​What is the most important thing I can complete right now, with the time and resources available to me?

Most of your tasks will be ruled out by virtue of the fact that at this very moment, you either don’t have the time or you don’t’ have the resources available to you, e.g.:
  • You have a meeting in 30 minutes so any task which takes longer is ruled out.
  • You are away from the office so any task which requires access to your files is ruled out
You then must look at the remaining tasks and decide which is the most important and do it. If you are left with two or more tasks of equal importance, it doesn’t matter which you do. They are of equal importance so just pick one and get it done.

3. Saves energy

​You can make the best plans known to man but if you haven’t got the energy to take action on them, they are completely useless. Energy is that important. Without it, you can’t get anything done. In many ways, energy management is becoming as important as time management and in some cases, more important.

Disorganisation robs you of energy. You spend your time rushing from one appointment to another or searching for something you have misplaced. When you are working, you are always flat out because you have so much to do and not enough time to do it.

Your body was not designed to work at full capacity all the time. It needs time to rest and recover between high intensity efforts. If you push your body and mind too far, you will burnout. You begin each day with less energy with the previous day and you continue to exhaust yourself. You are digging yourself into a hole and failing to realise that you need to put the shovel down.

An effective organisational system allows you to save energy because you stay on top of your work and you don’t need to rush. Everything has its place and you know where you stand with everything. In addition, you realise that energy is a resource so when you are deciding which task you can do next, energy is one of the resources you consider. You can then manage your energy levels more productively so that you can maximise your productivity.

​4. Improved brain function

​When you don’t have an effective organisational system, you try to use your brain to remember everything. While you will usually remember, you will usually do so at a time when you can’t do anything about it e.g. you are watching television at home when you remember something which needs to be done in work.  That’s not much use to you and it uses up a lot of your mental capacity to keep hold of everything.

Your organisational system should get everything out of your head and down on paper or, into an appropriate computerised device. When you get it into a system which works for you, your mind can let go of it. That frees up a hell of a lot of mental energy which can then be used for higher value activities e.g.:

  •  Creative thinking
  •  Planning
  •  Decision making
  •  Learning

​There are many people who think that they are not creative or they lack decision making capabilities. In fact, they have never given themselves a chance to do these things because every bit of mental energy is used up trying to keep track of everything they are supposed to be doing.

​5. Improved focus

Even when you have everything captured in your organisational system and you have decided on the right task to perform, you still need to get the work done. This is where focus comes in. You need to have one task which you can work on, through to completion, with minimal interruption.

The first way your focus benefits from an effective organisational system is that you can don’t keep thinking about other tasks/projects because you know that you have them under control. You have an accurate record of what you are committed to, what progress you have made and when the work falls due. Therefore, you have nothing to worry about, leaving you free to focus on the task at hand.

The second way that your focus benefits from an effective organisational system is that you minimise disruptions. It’s easy to think that you can live your life free from interruption but you can’t. There is an obvious reason for this – while you can influence other people, you can’t control them. However, you can teach people how to treat you and most will happily oblige, e.g.:

  •  People will be happy to email you because they trust you to respond
  •  People will happily leave a voice mail rather than come looking for you, because they trust you to respond
  •  People won’t try to assign you work that is not yours because they know that you will say No
  •  They won’t object when you say No because they trust that you are doing it for the right reasons.
  •  They will accept that you only do certain jobs on specific days e.g. you only process invoices on Wednesday. If they don’t have their invoice in, they must wait a week

​When you introduce an effective organisational system, you will have to enforce the rules a few times but people will soon learn how things work and act accordingly. The boundaries set by the system will reduce your stress, reduce your workload and improve your performance by allowing you to focus on one task at a time.

​Conclusion

​Chaos is not a way to live your life Rushing from one task/meeting to the next without time to catch your breath is not effective and is not healthy. If you are not organised, you are on the sure path to stress, if you are not there already. Your health, your performance and your happiness will all suffer. The answer to this problem is to have an effective organisational system which allows you to stay on top of your work. There are many benefits to an effective organisational system, the most important of which are discussed above. Introducing such a system is not done overnight and there will be some teething problems but the benefits far outweigh the costs and the pain.

About the author
Carthage Buckley is a Stress and Performance Coach who helps entrepreneurs, management and driven professionals to identify and eliminate the sources of stress while developing and implementing strategies to realise their objectives and create a happy, healthy and successful life.
The principle philosophy of Carthage’s coaching is that the individual can shape their own world, rather than waiting for their world to shape them. Working from the inside out, it is perfectly possible for each person to create their own life, allowing them to fulfil their personal desires while living in harmony with the world around them.

Carthage has lived and worked in 5 countries and continues to work with clients all around the world, both in person and via the Internet.