Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Many Touches
Clients often ask me if I believe in the one-touch rule, which says you should never touch a piece of paper more than once. It’s a great rule for executives who have assistants (look at the paper, hand it to your secretary and tell her to follow up).
Even without an efficient aide-de-camp, you can follow this rule when it comes to bills, forms you have to fill out, insurance policies and the like. They come in, you pay or sign or file or send and you are done. One touch. Simple—and this goes for virtual touches with e-bills and documents, too.
But there are other kinds of papers: articles, images, things that provoke or inspire us. Being efficient and organized is great for getting the bills paid and getting to work on time, but to be really creative, you have to make time to be inefficient, to roll ideas around in your head, to meander and get lost in thought. Since many of my clients are creative, right-brain people, I make them files marked Inspiration or Ideas.
I have a client who is a very successful businessman. In addition to a very efficient assistant, he has several files of articles he likes to have close at hand that are all inspiration. We’ve tried to weed them, but I can see his brain lighting up like a pinball machine as he goes through them. So we keep them all.
But don’t think I’m letting you off the hook. The point of being organized is to be efficient when you do the bills and the forms—the boring stuff—so you can devote more time to thinking big thoughts and coming up with those great ideas. Keep what inspires you, file it under Inspiration, but make sure you look at it regularly, because life shouldn’t just be about bills.