Yet another post on personal organization

I realize that I have already posted on this topic, but I know a number of people in post-graduate study who are going through psychological dilemas right now about the value of still being in school at the price of other missed opportunities. I know this feeling all too well, but have managed to really change my approach in the last year through some changes in my personal organization.

Post-grad students commonly have two conflicting aspects to our lives: we want to change the world, but we are often too busy to think or do anything outside of school itself. This can be a frustrating arrangement psychologically, and it can make us feel as if we are not getting what we want out of our time spent in school.

While we are- in fact- quite busy with school, there are definite personal organization strategies that can help us get more out of our many years of training. Although there are many books written on personal organization, they generally focus on one or the other of two main points: getting a system in place for organizing everything that you have-to and want-to do; and making decisions about what, amongst all of things you have on your plate, to actually spend your time doing.

In the first category, the general emphasis is to get all of the many things on your mind organized into a system that you can rely on, which will allow you to have all of your commitments, projects, and goals stored somewhere outside of your mind. I have written about this before, and although this is a simple idea, it has the potential for unlocking your mind from its constant need to remember everything you have to do, allowing it to concentrate on the things you have-to or want-to do right now.

A good book in this category is Getting Things Done by David Allen. It goes into some detail about how to get organized, but doesn’t get so structured such that you can’t adopt its principles into your own version of personal organization.

In the second category, the focus is on discovering personal priorities over and above doing anything else. The concept being that you should only bother organizing, planning and doing the things that are important to you, and by wasting less time on unimportant tasks you will be free to get the things done that really matter.

Popular in this category are the books The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey and Get Unstuck and Get Going…on the Stuff That Really Matters by Canadian Michael Bungay Stanier. Mr. Stanier also writes about similar topics in a web-based format at www.boxofcrayons.biz. All of these resources give inspirational ideas about how to decide what is important to you.

Separately, these two categories of books may leave you unsatisfied: either organized but still bogged down with seemingly unimportant tasks; or with a new zeal for only doing what is important, but too unorganized to actually get anything done. However, combining the strategies from both can lead to powerful, life altering, changes in the way you organize and spend your personal time- changes that might just harmonize your worldly ambitions with your day-to-day reality.