Be Organized

(FIRST DRAFT - the below has yet to be Proofed & edited)

The road to preparing for success and then staying successful requires organization and good time management skills, as successful people are busy people. Most every successful person I have ever met does not turn things on a 9AM and turn them off at 5PM, they are the people who “Live to Work” instead of being people who “Work to Live”. I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with the person who “Works to Live” – just that they generally will not be giving their career enough of their time to be what is considered a very successful businessman.

The best way to deal with a very busy schedule when going to school or running a business is going to be organizational skills and time management. Time management will be covered elsewhere in this book – and I will concentrate on organization skills here.

In my current office, I have the files for five companies that I personally manage (I have three other larger companies off-site that are managed by junior partners – and those records are at those sites), my personal records, and since I’m a car and antique motorcycle collector – all of the records of each of my vehicles. Within seconds, I can put my hands on my 1993 tax return, the title of any of 23 motorcycles, my phone bills from 14 months ago, or a web site I host for a customer. That is because my files are organized to quickly find those records. Each company has at least one file cabinet. Within the company’s file cabinet, there will be a drawer for vendors, one for employees (current and former), another for customers, one for accounting reports and tax returns, and usually one for the company’s assets.

Same goes for my computer. As I write this, I have 189,224 files taking up 79,990,840,440 bytes on my main hard disk – but I can find any file I need in seconds because I have about 50 top level directories, and most of them will have at least two levels of directories below them. No matter if I need a photo of my eldest daughter at the zoo in 1982, or a letter I wrote my attorney asking for an opinion in June of 2002 – I will not waste time finding it.

Now that I spend the majority of my time drag racing and maintaining six racecars (with 2 more currently being built) – I have a 40’X40’ workshop with three repair bays. In my tool chest I might have 3,000 tools – but I can put my hands on a ½ inch stubby box wrench or a ¾ inch 6-point socket within a second after walking up to my tool chest. The same thing with supplies, I can also have a ¼ inch 22 thread per inch bolt that is 1 ½ inches long with a nut and lock washer to fit it in seconds. My racecar trailer is organized the same way.

I don’t do this because I am anal retentive (well maybe that is part of it); I do this because time is money. If it takes me an hour of going through 500 sheets of paper to find the one I need, when with organization I could have saved the 59 minutes – I’ve wasted a precious hour.

At a drag race recently, my car had a problem after I had just won the first round, and I would need to repair the car before the next round, which was in 30 minutes – or I would be eliminated if I could not make that call for my class. In my trailer, I have to keep the parts to repair three different cars, as my eldest son and eldest daughter have and race their own cars. If my parts were not organized and labeled in bins based on the type of part, and if all of my tools were thrown in one big box – I would have spent the 30 minutes just finding the tools and parts I needed. As it were, it took me less than five minutes to gather the parts and tools that I needed, and about 20 minutes to make the repair. I was able to just finish, get my fire suit on, and get back into the staging lanes just as my class was called. I won that event and it put me in First Place for the Championship Points. Had I missed that next round because I could not have the repair completed in time – I would have not only missed out on the prize money, but I might have been so far back in the points that I would not have a chance for winning the championship this year.

Organization is helpful in all aspects of life – business, personal, education, etc. If you are disorganized, you are spinning your wheels looking for what is needed to help get the job done -- rather than doing the work to get the job done.

My desk gets cluttered with various projects I am working on – and my shop work bench will get to the point of having a lot of tools and parts on it. However, I make it a point to spend the time needed to get everything back into an organized order soon. I will never have a cluttered desk or workbench for more than a couple of days – because I know I will need the workspace and to quickly put my hands on something buried there – and that I will be wasting time if I cannot find what I need, which as in that case of the drag race, might be the difference between winning and losing.

If you are not an organized person – you had better change your ways quickly.