Why you Need an Effective Organisational System

​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.

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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:

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

​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.

​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.:

​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.

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.:

​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.

​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.