Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:01:16: The outcomes of being more organised

00:01:56: Work about work

00:06:04: Being the most and least organised

00:16:19: Section one: self-organising …

00:17:44: … 1: email

00:22:05: … 2: time

00:24:49: … 3: tasks

00:26:21: … 4: projects

00:30:05: … 5: learning and growth

00:30:56: Section two: organising as teams …

00:32:14: … 1: discuss your organisation overlaps

00:33:19: … 2: team stay-organised shortcuts

00:36:00: … 3: how you use tech together

00:37:41: … 4: team rhythms

00:39:57: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Helen Tupper: Hi, I'm Helen.

Sarah Ellis: And I'm Sarah.

Helen Tupper: And this is a Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly show where we dive into the ins, outs, ups and downs of work and give you some tools to try out, some ideas for action and a little bit of Squiggly Career support so that you can navigate all that stuff with a bit more confidence and control.

Sarah Ellis: And this week, we're talking about how to be organised at work.  And this has actually given us more debate and discussion than you might imagine.  And Helen and I were going, "Are we organised?  Are we actually incredible at this, or have we actually got loads of room for improvement?"  And I think probably the answer is a bit of both.  But we do feel like in a Squiggly Career, it is incredibly useful to be organised because we're all working on so many different tasks, different projects at the same time.  I think it is hard to succeed, it's hard to get stuff done if you are not organised, and I think sometimes people pretend to not be organised.  I've definitely come across people who --

Helen Tupper: They pretend to not be?

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, you know, almost like, "Oh, yeah, I'm very flyaway and it just sort of happens", and then either those people are secretly more organised than they're saying, or they've got someone helping them, is the other thing that I've definitely seen.  So, I think sometimes it's a bit undervalued and underappreciated as a skill.  I was starting to figure out, "Well, what are the outcomes?  What do you get better at if you're more organised?"  Then, the list actually gets quite long pretty quickly. 

You're like, "Oh, well, I'll be better at prioritising, I'll do more of the work that has higher impact, I'll be better at collaborating with the other people that I work with.  In a hybrid world that most of us are working in, it sort of relies on us being organised and being quite flexible in that organisation", and that's just getting started.  So, I feel that this applies to all of us, but as we'll talk about, I don't think we're all the same.

Helen Tupper: I expect a flowy conversation, everybody, because I think we have got some thoughts, but I think we might also find them in the flow of the conversation.  One of the things, when we were researching around this, that stuck for me was a report I was reading from Asana. Asana are a tool that lots of people use for organisation, I actually used it quite a lot when I was at Virgin.  but in their report they said that, "Organisation reduces work about work".  So this is stuff like, follow up on tasks, like, "Where are you at with this, Sarah, have you done this?" or switching between apps.  So, I think in my day, I probably go from Teams to WhatsApp to Notes to my inbox and then I cycle around all those things again about a hundred times, looking for status updates, searching for things on the shared drive, you know, work about work.  And apparently, that 60% of our days are dominated by work about work.

Sarah Ellis: That's depressing, right?

Helen Tupper: I know, isn't it?  Because that means you've got basically 40% left for the really value-adding stuff, like the skilled work where you're really using your strengths, the strategic work where you're taking your role beyond what it looks like today.  I mean, that's the stuff that I love.  And I'm like, I want to do more of that.  I don't want to be searching for stuff on a shared drive and working out where I've put my last action.  So, when we're more organised, we get more time to do the good stuff.

Sarah Ellis: So, I was doing quite a lot of researching and reading about being organised, because I didn't want this to feel like a conversation that we've all heard before.  Helen and I were thinking today, "How can we be both unique and useful?"  And I was reading a book called How to Take Smart Notes.  Now, it's not a book for everyone because really it's about how to take smart notes if you do a certain type of writing, maybe you write non-fiction or academic papers, so it's quite a niche read.  

But I do think some of the principles are really helpful, and this quote comes from that book, and it just really stood out for me I think in terms of, what's the job to do here when we're thinking about being organised?  And the quote was, "A good structure is something you can trust.  It relieves you from the burden of remembering and keeping track of everything.  If you can trust the system, you can let go of the attempt to hold everything together in your head and you can start focusing on what's important".

Probably that appeals to me because I'm someone who holds quite a lot of stuff in their heads and may at some point in time lose notes that I make.  And I do like this idea of a system that you can trust, then you can let go.  Actually it goes back, doesn't it, it's like "freedom in a framework" again. 

So, I think that's just an interesting way of framing what we're trying to think about today.

Helen Tupper: And in terms of how we're going to structure the conversation, because a good structure is something you can trust, I heard recently, what we're going to do is reflect first of all on when you might feel most or least organised in your work today, because it's useful to have a bit of self-awareness to get you started, so Sarah and I will talk about some of that stuff; and then, what we wanted to do is then talk about ways in which you can own your own organisation and some ideas for action that we've got for that; but then, we also wanted to focus on how you can also have more collective organisation in your teams. The reason we want to split these two things up, so how you self-organise and how your team stays organised, is we think it is very hard to do one without the other. 

So, you can have all the tips, tools and tricks in the world to stay organised, but if they are in conflict with the way your team works, it's really hard to stay with them.  And then if your team is really slick and it has all these tools and techniques, but they don't connect with how you like to manage your work, then that feels a bit out of sync.  So, we wanted to cover these two things, like how you can self-organise, how your team can stay organised, and share some different ideas for action that you can take away from today.

Sarah Ellis: And I think that was quite an important insight for me, as you start thinking about how to be organised, because if you were to give yourself a score out of ten for how organised you are, if you then give yourself another score out of ten for how organised you think your team are, are those two scores the same or are they different?  And my hypothesis would be, everybody will score themselves higher than they would score the team.  Maybe not.  Maybe you're someone who you're like, "I'm massively disorganised and my team are really organised".  I can certainly think of people in our team who are more organised than I think either Helen or I, but I still think that's probably often the gap.  I think that's almost one of the most interesting things here, is the self-organising and the together organising, so we thought we'd dive into that a bit more.  So, Helen, when are you at your most and your least organised?  I'm really looking forward to this!

Helen Tupper: Oh, God.  It's because I think you're better at this than me.  I don't know whether you're better at it, but you have a tighter handle over it.  I think you're more vocal, I think, about your organisation, about what should be done, how it should be done, and I think you surface that more.  So, I see your way of organising more, and I think it influences the way the team works more than mine.  I think I kind of have a way and I keep it to myself.

Sarah Ellis: I trust that you'll get there (probably)!

Helen Tupper: That's so funny!  And I just let you do your thing, even though it doesn't really work for me, because it makes you happy.

Sarah Ellis: Oh my God, imagine if this was the moment where we were like, "Well, this is it, we've had enough of each other".  It's like, being organised is going to break us!

Helen Tupper: Maybe!  So, when do I feel most organised?  So, I have, this year, created a new little system for myself that seems to be working pretty well.  It's quite retro, actually.  I've tried so many tools and apps and things before, but my new thing is, I have a diary for the year, and it's not so heavy that I can't carry it around with me.  So, every day, this diary is with me.  And in a week, I have a bit of a dump that I write down, what are all my work actions; what are all my home actions? 

Actually, that's in there as well.  And then I put them onto each day so I know I can see now what I need to do; I'm recording this on Monday.  And then, I literally just carry things over from another day to another week, and that has worked quite well for me because I can see it all really clearly.  And I feel like every week I start afresh. So for example, this morning on Monday, I went through my diary, I looked at what I hadn't completed at the end of last week, I created myself a new one, and it makes me feel, particularly at the start of the week, in control and I can see what needs to be done.  And then, what I do throughout the week is if I'm in a meeting with Sarah or if I'm in a team meeting, I have one notes thing on my phone, which is called Actions Dump and I just capture it as soon as it comes up.  

I don't think about it more than that, I just stick it in Actions Dump.  And then, at the end of the day, I add it to my diary, because getting my diary out in a meeting and adding it to it just feels a bit weird.  But I don't like to hold them in my head.  If I hold them into my head, I worry that I'm going to forget or I stop listening.  It's just this one Actions Dump thing on my phone, stick it in there and then at the end of the day, I just have a process where I go through, clear that out and then make sure it's added in the diary.

Sarah Ellis: It sounds very organised.

Helen Tupper: Well that seems to be working for me better than, I've used way more sophisticated tools before, like I've used Trello and I've used Microsoft Projects, I've used so many things and it just hasn't stuck with me.  But I don't know, the retro paper diary thing does seem to.

Sarah Ellis: When are you at your least organised then?

Helen Tupper: Oh my gosh, I've put a long list here.

Sarah Ellis: Maybe pick one!

Helen Tupper: Oh my gosh.  Okay, I'll pick one.  I think I'm at my least organised when I come out of meetings.  So, often in meetings, I will generate ideas and because I like being helpful, I'll come up with solutions.  And a lot of the time, I'm probably saying that I will do something so, "Okay, well one thing we could do is, I'll tell you what I could do is …" and I'll do that a lot as part of how I interact with people.  But what it means is that in that meeting, I've probably created five more things that I now need to organise into my week in order for it to get done, and I either am then back-to-back with another meeting, where I'm just accumulating more and more of these actions, you know, I forget, "Oh, gosh, what did I say I was going to do in that meeting?" or whatever; or, I've created so many things that I now need to do that it's just very hard to stay organised because I'm like, "Oh, I already had this list and I've been in three meetings today and I've just doubled my list by the end of the day".

I think that's when I'm my least organised because I'm accumulating more and more actions, because I've been in the meetings I've got less and less time to do them, and that's where I go from feeling organised to just feeling a bit overwhelmed.  I mean, that's just one of the one of the ways that I'm not at my best with organisation.

Sarah Ellis: But you can see, I think you also need to have a bit of empathy with yourself there.  We also have to recognise, I think, what are the tools or the ideas or the shortcuts that can help us be organised within our context?  Because, you're always going to have a lot on and I think maybe sometimes we're hoping that some of those factors will change.

Helen Tupper: I think my own reflection for that is, do I need to create as many actions that I do in those situations?

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, do you know what, I was listening to you just thinking, "I don't have any actions very often".

Helen Tupper: I know!

Sarah Ellis: And then I was thinking, "Do I say that, because then she might start giving me actions?"

Helen Tupper: No, you're very good.

Sarah Ellis: That's partly we're different in that way and you probably work harder.  But I was like, "I just don't even recognise that as a problem".

Helen Tupper: But I think part of reflecting on when am I most and least organised is becoming aware of how you maybe create some of these challenges for yourself.  Even if you gave me all the tools in the world, and I'm like, "Oh, that's a brilliant solution, Sarah, I'll definitely do that", if I keep working that way in meetings, I'm always working against myself.  So, I think it's just really important that you understand what's getting in the way of you staying organised, because it makes all the solutions that we're going to suggest just more likely to work well for you, if you've done a bit of that kind of thinking.

Sarah Ellis: Definitely.

Helen Tupper: On that point, when are you at your best and worst in terms of your organisation?

Sarah Ellis: I think I'm at my best organising my time.  I think to your previous observation, I think I take it very seriously and I'm very keenly aware, I think, of how my time impacts my energy, my ability to be at my best and just generally add value in what we do.  I work really hard to not have back-to-back meetings because I don't like it, and occasionally it does happen.  But I think I would very quickly become disorganised if that was my reality too often.  I'm very future-orientated, so I look ahead, I block things out in my calendar and in my diary. 

I have high levels of control just generally, in terms of like to be in control.  But also, I do think it's worth, I suppose, at least recognising I can make a lot of those decisions for myself, compared to I do think some jobs I've been in or some companies.  I would have been exactly the same but I would have had less control over my time.  Now I think I have more choices available to me, so I do think that's partly I feel lucky.  I feel lucky that I can look ahead, be organised with my time, how I want to work, and therefore I'm better because of it.  But that's not always been the context I've been surrounded by. Then, at my worst, I mean if I could fix this, it would be useful.  So, if we could get to the answer for this before the end of today, that would be ideal.  I cannot get to a good system of collating and collecting ideas, actions and notes.

Helen Tupper: That's a lot, ideas, actions and notes!

Sarah Ellis: Oh, yeah.  So, I suppose ultimately it's writing stuff down, is the summary.  And what I do at the moment is write some things on my phone, write some things on some giant yellow Post-it Notes, which I really like, write some other things on Post-its, write some other things to myself in my head that don't ever actually get written down. 

I leave voice notes, I'm really scattergun.  For someone who is, I do think I am very organised, but in terms of that specific thing, I think I don't like the idea of being constrained, so I just do what works.  It definitely works for me, I feel good doing it.  But then, I do not feel good when I then think, "Oh, I've missed an action", or, "Where have those notes gone from that conversation?"  And then honestly, I'm like, "The bin", because I try to then tidy up and I'm like, "Oh, no". I did read, we asked on Instagram, some of our Squiggly Career community, "What are your top tips and things?"  And my partner's got one that he actually doesn't use very much, so I could probably steal it from him.  He's got one of those reMarkable tablets.

Helen Tupper: Yes, I saw that.  Someone said, "My system has completely been transformed by my by having a remarkable".

Sarah Ellis: And the reMarkables, if people haven't seen them, they look a bit like iPads, you can take notes in them, the notes get converted I think into like text documents, you can have everything in one place, you never lose anything because it's always there. 

And I could probably try that out by borrowing his, to be honest.  I think it's because I have this thing of, I love the immediacy and in the moment-ness sometimes of thinking, "Well, I want to write this in my phone because I'm having this idea now", and it feels really important to write it somewhere.  And that happens all the time and we're always doing quite different things.  And so, I've just never, ever cracked that, you know, like a continual red flag.  It's something I keep coming back to and it definitely creates problems for me and it makes me feel really disorganised, which actually is quite an unfamiliar feeling for me, because I think the rest of the time, I feel really on top of things.  I need to sort it.  So, if someone could help me with that, that'd be great!

Helen Tupper: Feel free to send us ideas.  Feel free to help, sarah@squigglycareers.com or maybe just Sarah, sarah@amazingif.com.  Send ideas Sarah's way!  Okay, so I guess the point of that was maybe a bit of empathy.  If you feel like you sometimes get disorganised and overwhelmed by it, so do we too, but also just to recognise what you do well, there'll definitely be some things that you do well that you want to do more of, and also how you might personally be contributing to some of the problem. 

And no tool will fix that unless you understand that.  So, I would think, for example, Sarah, I think one of the things that Sarah is, you are a generator.  You generate every day ideas and insights and improvements.  That is just you and it is incredibly value-adding to the business. But what it does also do is create lots of actions that then require organising, whether it's yours or mine or the team's.  And so it is a constant flow of additional actions that need organising, because you're generative.  And it'll be a tension because then you'll be like, "Well, I don't want to stop generating because that's where I add my value".  But then it also creates a tension for the organisation.  So, it's just, I think, understanding how we all potentially create problems that we're all trying to manage for ourselves, is important.

Sarah Ellis: So, now we're going to talk about how you can be organised, and we're going to divide the ideas into two sections.  Section one: self-organising, so how can I be more organised?  Section two: how can teams stay organised, so how can we be more organised together?  And hopefully in both of these, there'll be some ideas that you can try out for yourself, and I'm sure everyone else will have lots of things to add as well.  So, ideas for self-organising, Helen and I have taken five different areas that we feel are kind of common, organisational areas.  They might be opportunities, they might be obstacles for you right now, and we're going to talk about what we do, if anything, or if we've got a gap, maybe the ideas that we've stolen from our Squiggly Career community.

So, these five ideas are your inbox, so email; time; tasks; projects; and learning and growth.  So, things where to do those things well, you need to be organised.  And what was really interesting as Helen and I were planning for the podcast is we realised our approach to being organised is so different.  And so we thought that's interesting, because then you get double the ideas and you can pick and choose the ones that you like and discard the ones that you don't.  But I think what is very clear with this is, the most important thing is you create your own system, is that you do have your version that works for you.  And I do think there is a temptation sometimes to compare yourself here and to look at other people and be like, "Why am I not doing that?" or, "Why have I never used Trello?" or, "It feels a bit old school going back to a diary", like Helen's actually very techie, but she's found something that's very pen-and-paper-based.  And I think it's not judging your system too much, but actually putting quite a lot of intentional effort into thinking, "Well, what will work for me?" noticing if it's not, and then trying something new instead. So, Helen, do you want to get started with emails and inboxes?  Because you don't only have your inbox, your inbox also shows all of our inboxes as well, so amazingif ones, helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com, you see a lot of emails every day.  How do you stop yourself getting overwhelmed by those?

Helen Tupper: Oh, I do often get quite overwhelmed by it.  And also, I see lots of out of offices when we send mailing lists and things like that.  I'm like, "Oh, it's overwhelming".  And I think my most useful thing I do to organise myself through my email is, I try to spend as little time in my inbox as possible.  Now, I know that sounds really weird, but what I do is I move things from my inbox into folders that have a different type of action.  So for example, we work with lots of companies delivering career programmes, so I have a company folder, and that's often one of the first things that I will go to because there'll be live programmes, or there'll be requests for new programmes.  So, anything that comes into my inbox that is related to a company programme, new or existing, goes straight into that company folder.

Then, I have a folder for podcasts enquiries, so any questions that you might send us, listeners, and stuff like that, that goes straight into a podcast folder.  I have a folder of finance stuff, so like invoices to be paid, that goes straight into my payments folder.  And then I do have one which is to action which is, it needs a bit of thought, could be a contract to sign or something like that, but this is an urgent to action, this is not a read later. 

And that means that the stuff that sits in my inbox, basically that stuff is just less urgent and I can go through it on a Friday and I can delete or have a completed folder that I just stick things in that I don't really need to do anything with.  But my highest priority stuff has been filtered really quickly and I don't have to do it then, but I move it from my inbox to one of those folders really, really quickly and then I'm spending time with a particular type of activity. So, if I go into my payments folder, I know that's half an hour of me doing payments.  If I go into my clients folder, I know that's an hour when I'm going to be creating certain proposals, or just thinking about who's going to respond to that one.  That helps me keep my brain in one type of activity, I think.  My inbox is just full of so many different types of activity that if I just work through my inbox in a really linear way, my head would be all over the place.  So, I'd rather file it into one type of working at a time; that works well for me.  So, folders, basically.

Sarah Ellis: Smart, that sounds very smart.  Interesting, and actually I use folders a bit.  My partner, I remember seeing his inbox, you know, when everyone starts working from home and you're like, "Oh, that's interesting".

Helen Tupper: "That's how you do it"!

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and he is like Mr Folder.  I always think it's fascinating, like inbox-zero people.  Are you an inbox-zero person?  Does everything go in a folder?

Helen Tupper: No.  I dream of doing that because what's left in my inbox shouldn't really need to be there.  I dream of it, but no, I just do the stuff that goes in the folders.

Sarah Ellis: Right, okay.  Yeah, so he was like an inbox-zero person and he's so different to me.  But everything.  So, some of the stuff he filed as you described, but some of it had rules, you know you can attach rules to emails.  So, I guess it depends on the job you do, but like, "If an email comes from this person, it goes into this file".  And so some things go into your inbox and then straight back out again into the right folders.  It blew my mind.  It's quite different to how I manage my inbox.  So, I have a very simplistic system, and so nothing goes into any folders, I just red-flag, that's it.

Helen Tupper: You have no folders?

Sarah Ellis: No.

Helen Tupper: Do you have a completed folder?

Sarah Ellis: No.

Helen Tupper: So, does your inbox just have all emails in it?

Sarah Ellis: Yeah.

Helen Tupper: That is mad.

Sarah Ellis: "That is madness"!  Why though?

Helen Tupper: But obviously it works.  I just find that really overwhelming.  I'm glad it works for you and I think you stay on top of your inbox more than me, I would say, which is part of your process and part of the volume.

Sarah Ellis: I just red-flag and then I go to all the red flags, and I actually probably do the opposite to you.  I work through them quite systematically.  Then I de-flag.  I'm like red flag, de-flag, red flag, de-flag.  I probably always have a bit of a sense of urgency in my own mind, but I do that filtering for myself. Helen Tupper: I wonder if we swapped inboxes for a couple of weeks.

Sarah Ellis: Oh my God, I don't want your inbox!

Helen Tupper: Can you imagine?  I think you'd hate my inbox!

Sarah Ellis: That would actually be fascinating though, like what would I end up doing?  I can imagine doing something quite dramatic and just being like, "No"!

Helen Tupper: I'd come back and be like, "What has she done?  My folders have gone".  Let's move on to time then.  So, how do you stay organised in terms of how you are using your time?  Again, we've got a slightly different thing here.  So, what I do is, the tasks that I have got, I basically block time out of them on my diary.  And I know that sounds really obvious, but before I did that, I would have like a list of things to do, and I wouldn't have allocated any time to do them.  So, I'd be in my meetings and it would get to 5.00, 5.30, whenever the meeting stopped and I'd be like, "Whoa, I've now got to work four or five hours tonight to get this stuff done. 

I still do have some situations like that, however what I tend to do now is that if I said to Sarah, "oh, look, I'll work on that contract or I'll pick up that project", I will assign the time to do it in my diary and I will try not to commit to doing something unless I put the time in my diary because ultimately, if I haven't put the time in my diary, I don't know when it's going to get done.  It's just like a want, it's a want to do something without the time to actually do it.  So, that's what I personally do with organising my time.  If I've got a task, I assign the time to do it and I don't commit to getting it done unless I have assigned the time to do it.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think I do that to an extent as well.  I think it's a smart thing when you're working on a project, where let's say you've got to write something, or you're working on a proposal for someone.  That's not just going to magically happen.  And lots of people in our community, and I don't think either Helen or I do this so we've not got first-hand experience of it, loads of people raving about colour coding, colour coding their diaries, colour coding their calendars, I'm assuming for different kinds of work.  So, maybe meetings are all green.  Maybe you don't want to put them as red.  Meetings are all green and maybe deep work is purple. 

So, maybe that just gives you an at-a-glance view, I guess, of how you're spending your time, which might help you to feel more organised and in control. I also find that time zones help me to stay organised.  So, so when I say time zone, I mean like today, how do I stay organised today?  How am I going to stay organised this week?  And what does it look like to be organised over the next month?  And I think I oscillate a lot every day between different time zones.  And that actually does really help me to stay organised because then I spot, "Oh, well, if we don't do this thing now, today, then actually it's not going to be ready for three weeks' time", because even today, we were talking about needing to get some materials printed, for example.  And so, I think that kind of time-zone mindset just helps me to stay on top of stuff.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, I think I'm very good at a dump and do, so I can think quickly.  So, I'm like, "Okay, so we need to do this, this and this and this", whereas you are much better at that look forward to determine what we need to do by when, so you always bring that into our meetings, which I find really useful.

Sarah Ellis: So, let's talk about all these tasks that I don't do.  How do you do your tasks?

Helen Tupper: Well, I think mine was what I talked about, this kind of diary-based system that I've got.  So, that combination of I have an immediate dump, which is in my phone, and then I have a kind of more organised solution, which is in my diary, and I just keep the two connected, and I'm not letting other systems creep in. 

Because I have done before, I've used those other app-y tools, and then you just have too many things in too many places.  So, the dump on my phone, the diary, which has my list in, and then I start a clean page for the next week on a Monday morning.  And I feel like by the end of each week, I feel a little bit out of control, but then I just start again on a Monday, brings back the control.  That's what works for me with my tasks.

Sarah Ellis: I think the thing that I found interesting is actually it's very rare that I don't do something that I said I'm going to do, but it is very reliant on the quality of my head and my brain and my headspace.  And so, that does mean I'm definitely one of those people who will remember, at 11.00pm at night, "Did we do that thing that we said we were going to do [or] have we ordered that printing?" and it can be anything.  And so, I think that's that quote we started with around a system that you can trust, so you can let go to do more important things.  I think probably the motivation for me to do something about this is, that's not where I want to be using my brainpower. 

But I definitely use my brainpower for remembering and thinking, "I don't know if that's been done".  It might even be an interdependency across the team, "I'm not sure if we've done something".  And I think if I could create a system around that, it would free up brain space, so that's my job to do. Let's talk projects, because you suddenly showed me before this podcast, you were like, "Well, this is what I do", and I was like, "What is that?"  Talk to us about your project grid approach, Helen.

Helen Tupper: My project grid approach.  Well, this is in response to feeling a bit overwhelmed recently, and I sometimes find when you're overwhelmed, it's worse in your head.  And then I got it down on paper and I was like, "No, it is quite a lot!"

Sarah Ellis: It's worse in real life!

Helen Tupper: Yeah, I was like, "No, now I can see it and that is why I was feeling so overwhelmed by it".  So, I just got an A4 piece of paper and I folded it up so I have 12 boxes.

Sarah Ellis: How small are these boxes?  Tiny?

Helen Tupper: A4 paper divided into 12.  And then each box represented a project in progress.  And I wrote the headlines, so we've got gremlins and our other thing that we're working on that I'm not allowed to talk about yet, and some certification and some client things, and podcast and different things.  And then I did three actions under each.  Now, are there more than three actions?  Yes, for each one of them, but I just tried to zoom out a little bit and be like, "What are the headline things?  If you just did this, then you would have been making progress", and it helped me feel really organised.  Because right now, I'm not thinking about the other 11 boxes, I'm just going to do this one that says, "People", at the top of it.  Or, right now I'm not going to think about the other boxes, I'm just going to do, "Squiggle and stay".  

And I could see really, really clearly and the messiness that was in my head suddenly felt a bit more manageable. I think I could probably benefit from doing this once a month.  I don't do it once a month at the moment, but it has been a really helpful thing just for me to have my desk and just come back to.  I took a photo of it on my phone as well so that I had one that I could take with me when I was out and about if I was like, "Right, I've got a bit of time, which one of these projects am I going to focus on first?"  That was helpful for me.

Sarah Ellis: It sounds to me like you've started doing it reactively.  So, you've reacted to overwhelm, lots to get your head around, and you've created that system.  But now, you could use that system proactively.  You could be like, "Okay, on the first Monday of every month, I'll update the grid [or] the grid's an ongoing thing that I keep coming back to".

Helen Tupper: I wonder if there's a difference between a solution and a system.  So, that was a solution for me then for a problem but actually, turning it into a system, it means how could I use this more routinely, that's probably the thing for me to work out.  And I think when you're listening, what solutions have worked for you on an occasion reactively, and then how could you turn that into a system that you could use more regularly?

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think mine for managing projects is definitely a system, because it's something that we've used now for a couple of years, and we've talked about on the podcast before.  So, every quarter, Helen and I together agree our win-watch, which I do think benefits me more than Helen, albeit I just talked to Helen about it, so she has no choice.  But to her, I think you just vocalise it.  I think she's saying, "You just tell me", which I definitely do.  But that definitely is a system for me because it keeps me organised. 

So, whenever I'm thinking, "Where should I spend my time?  What matters now?  What's most important?" I default back every single time to the win-watch because there's always loads of stuff we could do.  And to your point around me generating things, I've always got more ideas than I've ever got time. But if I just look back at that, I think, "Okay, well these are the --" and there's usually six to eight things per quarter, I would say, "these are six to eight things that matter most.  Right, how do I make sure I'm really organised and I'm making progress on those things?"  And it just keeps me honest and I think it keeps me organised.  I think it helps me organise everything, my tasks, my time, who I'm meeting.  The trickle and the ripple effect of that system is really important for me.  I actually don't know what I would do without that.  I do know what I'd do, because I would just do my own thing, which could be detrimental.

Helen Tupper: Rogue!

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, basically, that is what would happen, I would go rogue.

Helen Tupper: Keep with win-watch.  The last one on here is about learning and growth and we've got a shared one here, which is something we introduced probably about 12 months ago now, learning-to-look-forward-to lists.  And I think thinking about organisation as something to look forward to gives it kind of a positive thing, it's not just about managing an overwhelming amount of work and all that sort of stuff.  I think learning-to-look-forward-to lists has helped us to keep learning for ourselves on the agenda, it's helped us to get excited about it, to think ahead, which especially for somebody like me who's very in the moment, I think learning-to-look-forward-to lists have helped me to stay organised about some things that are further out from now.  And they work well on segueing on to what we're going to talk about next, about how teams can stay organised.  Learning to look forward to could be a list that you do for yourself, but it is also something that could work well for you to do as a team so that you can stay organised and committed to learning together too.

Sarah Ellis: So, as a team, how can we stay organised?  One of the conclusions that Helen and I came to as we were talking about this is that team organisation definitely needs to be explicit, not assumed.  I think you've got to write this down in some way that everybody sees it and that also everybody is signed up to.  You've got to see it and sign up to it.  I think the own system organisation, your self-organisation is completely up to you.  I feel like there's a real tension between saying, "Well, we all have to organise ourselves in the same way". 

I think we are both relatively organised, but we do it in a very different way.  And I think the last thing we want to do is depersonalise the organisation and be like, "You must do your to-do list in the way that Helen's doing it with the diary".  Well, that's never going to work for me.  But I do think there are some things that as a team, if you are all sharing and signing up to, whether it's tech, tools, some of the other ideas we're going to talk about, if people are second-guessing that, I think that can create problems.  And actually, one of the things that we've spotted, we don't have this written down somewhere in Amazing If, and you can quite quickly see how some of these things fall down if you haven't got it somewhere that is really visible for everybody.

Helen Tupper: So, we've got a couple of different ideas for how you can get to this explicit organisation for teams.  One of them is making sure that you've got moments or meetings in your week when you are discussing your organisation overlaps.  So for example, we do this on a Monday morning, we have a team meeting on a Monday morning where everyone talks through a couple of things actually, like priorities for the week ahead, high-energy moments, red flags. 

And what's really useful in that conversation is you can spot where something that you're trying to do might have a dependency on somebody else.  So, if I'm saying to Sarah, "Oh, I really want to get that next chapter written by Friday, but in order for that to happen, I need you to review it on Wednesday", it's very hard for me to stay organised with my agenda unless Sarah knows there's an overlap that she's involved in. So, you could do that in a meeting where you talk about it and you could actually really explicitly ask each other, "Is there anything that anyone here needs to do in order to help you get to that outcome by the end of the week?"  So, you can ask that question, or you could do it asynchronously.  For example, you could just all on a Monday write down your top priorities and kind of fast flag anybody that's involved in getting to those outcomes so that people can see where there are some overlaps in you staying organised.

Sarah Ellis: And so, our next idea, which I really like, and we don't do as a team, but I love it, so I'm definitely going to encourage everybody to give it a try, is to have some team stay-organised shortcuts.  How do we stay organised?  Here are our shortcuts.  And I think this will be different for every team, in terms of what you agree these shortcuts might be, but just to give you some examples.  One could be, every time that we talk to each other or share with each other a task or an action, there's always, "What's the task; who's going to do it; by when?" so, the what, the who, the when.  Now, that sounds really simple and you'd think, "Surely we all do that all the time". 

I could think of two examples last week where I didn't do that, where I was very clear about the what and the who, but I wasn't clear about the when.  And equally, nobody asked me the when.  And so, then that creates problems because then I had just assumed, magically, someone was going to work out when something needed to get done.  And then you create pressure and also you create disorganisation because then somebody's going, "Oh right, I'm now having to reprioritise which I hadn't expected". 

And that's when we all start to feel overwhelmed and out of control and the opposite of organised. We were talking to our team, team meeting this morning, about what do we do well and what don't we do well, and definitely one of our even-better-ifs was people were just suggesting sometimes, everyone's very nice, they were just suggesting, but I say sometimes, there's a lack of clarity of who's doing what.  So, I was like, obviously for the team, sometimes they feel they don't know who's meant to be doing something, and I think sometimes there's a lack of clarity on the when.  So, that would be a really good stay-organised shortcut for our team. Another one could be, we find it difficult to find things in our shared drive and everyone on our team just goes, "Yes", but none of us are quite sure why.  Nobody particularly wants to sort it out I don't think either.  I don't see lots of volunteers or people going like, "Oh, yeah, I'd love to do that as a job". 

But somebody in our extended team last week did a really good version of what this could like, which was they put all of the important links for a project on an Excel spreadsheet in one place.  And so, actually for that particular project, she has really helped us to stay organised.  She's essentially created a stay-organised shortcut in this Excel spreadsheet.  And so, Helen and I were saying before this call, there's probably 25 documents that we all use really frequently.  And so, actually, do you know what?  If we just created almost like our own search engine for our 25 most used and useful documents, here's the links to where all those things are.  Yes, it doesn't solve all of the problem, but do you know what?  It probably solves 80% of the problem.  We'd all feel more organised, we'd all feel like we were getting the most up-to-date stuff and we weren't getting the wrong documents or old documents, and that would be a really good stay-organised shortcut for us as a team.

Helen Tupper: And the only other one to add there is how you are using tech together.  So, some really simple rules about what tech we use for what, is really helpful.  I think I've talked about this before in a podcast, but I saw a really good example of this at Microsoft, because Microsoft has obviously got a whole host of tools that they need everyone to use, but they came up with this inner and out-of-loop rules about, "This is how we use tech if it's a very project- or team-specific thing".  And then if you've got other stakeholders or other people involved, these are outer loop. 

So, things like Yammer were outer-loop communication, because you could involve lots of people in those, they're broadcast tools, whereas a channel on Microsoft Teams or the Slack or whatever equivalent, that was more inner.  That was like if you've got a project, you set up a channel so the right people are connected to that particular topic. Now, that's just trying to bring that to life.  But I think about for you and your team, if you think about what are we working on and how does tech enable us, I think having some simple rules around, you know, we have particular channels, we have particular projects; and also, what tech are you going to kill?  Because I think what tends to happen is people bring in, "Oh, this works for me", to Sarah's point.  It's fine, it's totally fine if people have, "This works for me".  And I think it's also totally fine to experiment with tech too.  But I think that over time, that means it can get a bit confusing and people can be a bit like, "Oh, we tried that and we're not really using that any more".  And I think every so often, I think you need to do a bit of a, "What tech are we going to kill, because it's not helping us keep organised as a team?" and get back to, "These are the core techs that help us work better together".  So, I think having those discussions and those rules and that list of, "Here is our team tech", I think that is also a really important shortcut to stay organised.

The last idea for action is all about team rhythms.  And this came from something that worked really well for me a while ago that isn't working very well anymore.  So, we had a rhythm where we divided our week up into doing Monday, so very kind of action-y, operation-y; delivery Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, which works for what we do, because that would be delivering sessions, or that could be some sort of meetings that you're having with external people; and then what we used to call Freedom Friday, and that was a day where you had a bit more control over your time.  Maybe there weren't as many meetings on that day, so you really had a lot of autonomy over what you manage your time on that day.  That works so well for me, and it works really, really well if the team is synced together, because there's no point in me having Freedom Friday if that's when everyone's decided they want a meeting with me. Now, I think doing your entire week is quite hard as a team.  I mean, it's worth having the conversation, "What would our perfect week look like of staying organised together as a team?" 

It's worth having the conversation, but I think it is actually quite hard to keep doing that.  But what you could look at is like a team rhythm, which is like, "Every second Friday, we're going to keep free of meetings.  And so, we don't put meetings in with each other on the second Friday of the month", for example.  Or, "Every Wednesday morning is a deep work time for you individually as a team.  So, we're not going to send each other emails during that time, we're not going to @ each other on whatever platform you're using". 

Having these rhythms that help teams stay organised, but you've all got to agree them and then you've all got to protect that time together, I think is a really helpful way that teams can get stuff done.  Because otherwise, we are all trying to do things at different times and it can be really hard to stay organised on the thing you want to do when no one else is working in the same way as you.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, I always find it a really tricky one, isn't it?  Because there's so many factors that can influence the ability to do that.  But the companies and teams I've heard do it really well, do it in the way that you've described, where they don't try to do all of it, because otherwise I think you over-engineer your organisation.  I think what you just do is like, "Okay, but could we do two hours on a Wednesday morning?"  You're like, "Okay, that feels realistic".  And actually, that might be quite a big difference from where you are today.  So, it might be something to experiment with.

Helen Tupper: So, we will summarise all of those different ideas for action, both for staying self-organised and then for keeping a team organised together, in the PodSheet.  And you can get the link to the PodSheet, which is just an A4 summary, you can get that from our website, which is amazingif.com.  If you just go to the podcast page, you'll find it there or in the show notes to the episode on Apple Podcasts, you'll find that there too.

Sarah Ellis: Thank you so much for listening.  We hope that has helped you stay a bit more organised.  Other ideas, let us know.  You can always email us and it will go into Helen's folder!  And that is helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com.  And that's how you make sure you get a reply, because she's got such a great system.

Helen Tupper: Oh gosh, now you've put me to the test!

Sarah Ellis: But that's everything for this week.  Thank you so much for listening, and we're back with you again soon.  Bye for now.

Helen Tupper: Bye everyone.