The cost of a messy desk

A Great Product written by janecampcpo@comcast.net

Great organizing product. Written by Jane Campo, CPO, and published in NAPO News-Washington D.C. chapter.

I became familiar with a great software product in 2008. Because I don’t want my great enthusiasm to come off as a sales pitch, I’m going to describe what the product does, and I’m going to attempt not
to give away its name. (I don’t want a sales pitch because people run away from sales pitches. And it would be ironic if it were my very enthusiasm that drove people away from this product.) The product does very many of the things PO’s like you and I do. It’s a way of listing the things a person might have by creating a catalog and an index. It has a specific place for labels for each thing, labels being something PO’s love to attach to things. But PO’s also like to put things in categories, and this product has a specific
way of accommodating categories. Since we like to think of different ways to associate things with each other, the product has plenty of room for entering whatever words suggest themselves as associates of the things one might list. And this product was expressly designed to assist with a process that we PO’s pride ourselves on. I learned about this process when I studied perceptual psychology at the graduate level. It’s a process that the human brain—the most powerful computer known to mortals—is actually
less brilliant at than the average inorganic computer. (And the human brain is more brilliant than inorganic computers at most skills.) But it turns out that the human brain is singularly bad at associating things with places. Our brains have separate “what” and “where” systems, and they often fail to interact smoothly. And like the PO who prides him- or herself on finding logical, memorable places for things, this product owes its career to people’s need to know where a specific “what” is. Like a PO, this product is pretty much a thinking machine. It is the perfect place to safeguard one’s notes as one works one’s
way through large collections of pretty much anything. Before I had ever heard of it, this product was being designed to grapple with what I call “Jane’s Three Questions of Stuff.”

Question 1 is: Where should I put this thing away?
Question 2 is: Where is that thing I need?
Question 3 is: What IS all this STUFF?
For Question 1, the product has a built-in
function for transferring things from location
to location.
For Question 2, the product is searchable
70 ways to Sunday, allowing the user to
be reminded where anything they have
entered lives, no matter how many things
they have entered.
For Question 3, the product allows the
user to print out any kind of list imaginable—
by category, by label, by location,
you name it.
I hereby nominate this product for a “most underrated organizing product of all time” award. When you discover which product I am talking about, I hope you will spread the word.


Ok, it's Paper Tiger software.

How costly are your papers?

I recently worked with a client who was a professional services provider. I was amazed, and she was shocked at the amount of hidden-lost money we found below her papers. During the beginning of our 8 Hr. Miracle TM we found the following:

Item Value

1. Unreturned products for credit $556
2. Unpaid/late invoices $326 (including late fees)
3. Unsent client statements $1,296
4. Incorrect orders needing return $4,217
5. Missed Continuing Education course $250 reg. fee + license
6. Old, unopened bank statements too large to quantify

Unfortunately for my client, the unopened bank statements would have given her a clue that there was an irregularity with her bank account. And you might think that this client is an unorganized person. Really not so. But like most of us, there were a few old piles on a desk, a few cluttered drawers and a file cabinet drawer that hadn't been opened for a while. And as a busy professional, these were things that had been delegated to an employee and/or were meant to be reviewed 'one of these days'. One of these days turned into the day that I began the business efficiency project in the office and although I'm happy about the fact that this client has systems in place that will prevent this type of financial set back in the future, I'm really upset that more business owners don't realize how costly it is for them to have piles in their office and clutter in their supply room. I guess it is human nature to put off taking action until a disaster happens as in the case of my client. It's too bad.