Disorganization is a major cause of job dissatisfaction.

If the disorganization is your own, then you can choose to make changes. However, whether you are the disorganized one or the organized one working with a disorganized colleague, that lack of organization has an impact on you.

• Who does the disorganized person interrupt when they need something? Who do they count on to have a copy of the contract or to know what time the meeting begins? For every interruption that the more organized person has to field, it can take 20 minutes or more to get back into the flow of the work again.
• Who gets more stressed during the work day? What are the typical characteristics of the stressed person–irritability, anger, negativity? Have you ever had to “tiptoe” around someone, wondering what mood they are in today? It does not lead to a comfortable working environment.
• Who would your customers prefer to deal with? Negativity and irritability do not usually equate with great customer service. It either affects the bottom line or piles more work on the organized individual whose help is preferred.
• Who misses more days of work? Stress leads to absenteeism and illness. Who gets to cover for the stressed, disorganized person when they do not show up for work? And of course it is also harder to cover for the individual whose work is scattered everywhere and who has not set priorities before leaving the previous night.

When you are organized and in control, your attitude is more likely to be positive. 9 out of 10 people say they are more productive when they are around positive people (Gallup, 2004). Wouldn’t it be a great day if you only had to deal with positive people?

As soon as I finish typing this post, I am heading out to vote in Houston’s run-off primary for District Attorney of Harris County. Our recently resigned D.A., Chuck Rosenthal, was ousted, or outed, when his past years of emails were subpoenaed by defense attorneys in preparation for a trial.

Somehow the judge who granted the subpoena allowed press access to not just the messages relating to that case, but to all of the messages. Included were little “love notes” to his administrative assistant from the married D.A., along with humor forwarded to him that was racially focused.

When the situation first began unraveling, my only thought was, “What was he thinking?” Whether looking at it from the high ground or low, there were so many other avenues open to him.

High ground: You are charged with protecting our county’s citizens and enforcing the legal system. How could you let your friends and staff send this type of mail through the government systems?

Low ground: How hard is it to hit Delete and clean up your Sent and Received messages once in awhile?

Just contemplating the hubris of someone who has attained this position of authority and then somehow must think himself unassailable still boggles my mind after all these past months of turmoil. What toppled him did not relate to the initial case in question but to the indiscriminate little notes that are so quickly sent and then forgotten.

Is there anything in your email that you would not want exposed?

Job Advertisement: “Must be good at multitasking.”

Obviously the company that posted the above ad is not up-to-date on current research which shows that no one is good at multitasking. Now I realize that you are probably disagreeing with me right now, since you multitask throughout the day, but reality is that our brains are not good at executing demands to perform multiple activities simultaneously.

What actually occurs is a mental traffic jam where eventually one item breaks through, followed close behind by a second, and then a third. They may be so close together that it seems simultaneous, but in actuality one preceeds the next.

When MIT students were given two simple tasks to perform at the same time, identifying shapes and letters or colors, they could not do it and lost their composure. Once they were allowed to switch back and forth, they could do it, but it was very slow because they were forcing their brains to fire in different directions so quickly.

This mental traffic jam is causing stress as we pump adrenaline throughout the day. Over an extended period, there are both short-term (absentmindedness, since we are not focused) and long-term results (brain damage in our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus). Those two brain regions are associated with short-term memory and the abilities to assess and prioritize. The extended stress also ends up causing physical illness (80% of sickness according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

It can appear that teens and even younger children may have a better ability to mulitask. Again, reality is that they are not better at it, they just have more practice. If you must multitask, be sure that one of the two things you want to do can be done without any thought, like running and listening to your iPod.

There is an old adage that says if you eat a frog first thing in the morning, the rest of your day looks pretty easy. If you have two frogs to eat, pick the biggest, ugliest one first. Your personal “frog” is the project or activity that:

• Yields the most benefit for you in reaching your goals or has the most importance for a company’s development
• Is the item on which you keep procrastinating
• Will normally give you a sense of accomplishment in getting it off your plate

Some tasks may fit all of these descriptions and some may only relate to one. My personal biggest frog is working out. Even though it doesn’t take mental acuity, if I don’t get it done first, chances are slim that it will happen later in the day, although it still lingers in my mind as a difficult, pending activity for the day. Once I have that out of the way, it makes the rest of the day seem easier. Then when I start work, after I do some quick clearing out of small items that have come up, I turn to the project that is going to take the most time and have the most impact (my second frog). From there, it is a downhill slope for the rest of the day.

We often hear about “morning people” vs. “night people.” Our internal clocks certainly have some effect on when we can focus, but reality is that there is only about a two-hour difference in peak mental concentration between the two groups. When you have a difficult project to do, it is normally best to set up an uninterrupted block of time earlier in the day, and use the afternoon for more routine work.

Without a plan to eat that frog first thing, you can wind up saying, “Where did this day go?” You were busy non-stop, but you do not feel that you actually accomplished much, and that significant activity you put off is still looming and creating little nagging feelings of guilt and stress.

• Are one of those people who lament the lack of personal time to escape from work issues, yet cannot bring yourself to let go of the Blackberry, laptop, and cellphone even when on a vacation?
• Are you a family member who wants a vacation without those electronic intrusions into your spouse’s “free” time?

There is now an answer! The Caribbean island of Anguilla has a hotel (Arawak Beach Inn) that confiscates laptops and any other handheld devices when you check in. You are not permitted internet access and have no television or telephone in the accommodations.

Quittting cold turkey may be a bit traumatic at first, but sometimes it can be necessary to save a relationship. I understand they go out of their way to make it up to you in other ways, and you may find it very freeing after the initial withdrawal.

It says something for our society when a true escape requires that we seek help in eliminating any other choices.

“Where did I put that document?” is often a common plaint when desks are stacked with piles of paper. However the same thing may happen with our electronic files even though, being out of sight, they don’t scream for organization.

The best way of handling electronic documents would be to have obviously labeled folders, and then subfolders, and subfolders for the subfolders. Yet even in organized computers, you can forget what you called something, or where you put a file that did not easily lend itself to a specific category.

The first thing you might do is go to the Microsoft Search feature (Start/Search/For Files or Folders). Yet this often seems to be ineffective in finding that item you need. To remedy this, companies came out with independent programs that index all the contents of your computer (e.g. Easy Reach). Then Google realized there was a chance to gain a foothold here, and they began offering the free Google Desktop Search. The drawback to this is that they take your files onto their computer and index them.

Finally Microsoft woke up and noticed how effective a program called “LookOut” was, and they bought the software. Now you can have access to a free and fast search engine that runs through all of your Microsoft products. Within a second or two after entering a keyword, you have a list, with that keyword highlighted, of all documents pertaining to your term. Their search includes Outlook as well as Excel, Word, etc.

The download for this free link is: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/default.mspx.

It is far superior to the built-in Windows Search feature. Amazingly enough though, while it is easily available on their site, Microsoft doesn’t publicize this add-in. I suggest you try it. It is a good answer for those who don’t have time to create folders, as well as those who may be organized but still need a little extra help occasionally.

Two pieces of legislation, one from the House and one from the Senate, relating to mental health issues have recently passed. It is the latest step in a seven-year effort to craft a mental-health parity bill requiring insurance plans to match mental-health benefits with those for other medical conditions. The next challenge is to reconcile the two bills.

How do mental health issues affect productivity in the workplace?

• 222.7 million days of work are lost each year because of absences and problems pertaining to depression, costing companies $51.5 billion. (National Institute of Mental Health)
• Employees with depression who received support were 40% more likely to recover and 70% more like to stay employed, compared to a control group. (Journal of the American Medical Association 9/07)
• 9% of employees felt anxious or depressed, and those employees accounted for 40% of lost productivity. (Cisco Systems, Inc.)

Whatever form the final bill takes, it will cost employers more. However the payoff should come with increased productivity in the work place. From the study in the above journal, employees with the support program worked an average of two more hours a week than the control group. That came out to a $1,800 gain per employee, compared with the program’s cost of $100 to $400 per employee.

Another meeting to attend, and you won’t get any work done again today! That’s a common complaint in some companies, yet the schedule of meetings continues. There have been some changes with teleconferencing and videoconferencing, but the gatherings still occur with regularity.

A new study coming out from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte (Steven Rogelberg) finds that even though 50% of attendees complain about meetings, more than 60% of these gripers concede that they don’t mind attending. The most surprising result is that an ideal day for many would include at least one meeting.

How can you explain the disparity?

• Social: Meetings can be social events. It is not necessarily about what happens at the meeting itself, but the give-and-take before the meeting when you actually get out of your cubicle or small office and connect with others.
• Filling Time: Another outlook is that it looks like you are working since you are in attendance, but you don’t have to do much. You can look busy all day if you have multiple meetings.

What’s the answer? You certainly do not want to call more meetings than necessary. However, from a productivity standpoint, if you are in charge of a department or a company, you might want to be sure that all of your direct reports have a chance to interact at some point during the day. In some cases, you might have a short meeting without the meeting agenda, a free-flowing exchange of updates and challenges in a 15-minute session. You learn more about each other’s work and still have more time to devote to your own projects while filling the need for conversation and connection.

Have you noticed your corporate network slowing down lately? If yes, you might want to do a quick check of where employees are logging their time. With the proliferation of video sites like YouTube, more staff members are checking out the latest postings. Other popular sites include Yahoo, Fox, MSN, CNN, and ESPN.

Whether it is a stealthy break during the work day or an employee’s lunch hour, the downloading can result in a significant drain on company resources. The average online video files are seven times as large as an audio file and 100 times as large as a typical email message.

Some employers are starting to counteract this by blocking access to video because, even in “legitimate” cases such as breaking news, when everyone wants to check for updates, that can crash the system. However a blanket block can also make it difficult to be productive when you need to access information on customers and vendors.

It is a tough call. There is no doubt that internet access can be abused, lowering corporate productivity. On the other hand, blackouts can cause employee resentment in addition to limiting helpful information.

What have you observed? Knowing how colleagues use their work time, if you were the one creating policy, how would you vote?

1. Block access to video sites
2. Allow access but impose company rules on what can be visited
3. Post no restrictions

Tomorrow is designated as “Organize Your Home Office” Day. Whether you work full-time from home or simply pay your bills and file personal records at home, having an organized office space can change your outlook.

What makes a home office a good setting in which to work?

1. Furniture

Too often the home office is composed of leftover pieces that aren’t needed in another room. Ergonomics is not a consideration. Yet reality is that you may spend a great deal of time in this space. Inappropriate furniture, especially chairs, can lead to back or neck pain.

2. Lighting

If your work spot is a corner of the bedroom or dining room, you may be straining your eyes when you stay too long. Make sure you bring in good lighting sources.

3. Storage Space

You want to have filing space close to you, preferably in a desk drawer or nearby credenza where you can keep your active projects. If you do not have file drawers, consider a rolling cart that can be tucked away when not in use. You also want to have enough file cabinets to hold all of your reference materials. These do not have to stay close to you since they are not accessed as frequently.

Without the right amount of storage space for both papers and supplies, clutter tends to accumulate. Clutter is distracting, and it becomes harder to focus on the tasks at hand.

When you do not have the right setting in which to work, you either avoid spending time there or are not as productive as you should be for the time that you do spend. Look over your office space in terms of these three features–furniture, lighting, and storage–to see what can be improved. You will quickly notice an increase in productivity when your office when you have the right components.