“I don’t have time to organize.” Have you ever said that to yourself in the heat of frustration? We live out that maxim in so many ways. We are constantly looking for our keys, yet we don’t take the time to create a snappy, simple system with a place to put our keys so we can always find them. How about our spices? Constantly, we shuffle through the jars to find the spice we need. If we would take the time and put the spices into a system, we could instantly find the spice we want when we need it. We are buried by our good intentions. “I am saving all this paperwork, because there are some great ideas I might want to do one of these days.” We never get to it; the paperwork mounts up; we shuffle and unstack, search through and swear over it. Yet it does not occur to us to stop work to establish a system for our mail so that when we do need a certain piece of paper. . . you get the picture.

Here is a classic story regarding one of my clients. I was in Indiana working at a corporation, and upon entering an office to start my coaching, I noticed a pile of neatly stacked papers in the corner. The pile was about three feet tall, and my client said that it was a monthly report that he referred to about seven times a day. When I asked him to find the March 17 report, it took him three minutes. Multiply three minutes by seven and you get about 20 minutes a day that he wasted going through work to get to work. I suggested that we organize the report into a simple system so he could access any report in seconds. Do you know what he said? “I don’t have time.”

This is a fabulous example of how we waste precious time operating under the wrong paradigm. Needless to say, we took the time to set up a system. (It took about 20 minutes.) We just set up 31 hanging files numbered 1-31 and placed each report in its corresponding number. The March 3 report went into the number 3 file, and so on. Now when he needs to reference March 17, he goes to the file numbered 17 and pulls out the report in three seconds — 20 minutes saved a day. He grosses (probably) $100,000 a year. That’s $50 an hour or about $1 a minute. Twenty dollars a day multiplied by 244 workdays equals about $5,000 a year that I saved his company, simply by setting up a system for his reports.