I started this presentation because Time Management was one of the items I really wanted to work on this quarter. I got overwhelmed many times with projects and found I was not enjoying my work, despite the fact that I love my team, I love what I get to do, and I love being able to work from home. The element that was missing for me, was this stress prevention. So I began investigating methods of managing this, and wanted to come back and share with you all what I found. I had been obsessed with Marie Kondo long before this of course, and I am not sure if her TV show is still on Netflix, but my husband can tell you, I still talk about her methods at LEAST once a week, because it genuinely has brought me SO MUCH JOY. I am a super Kondo fan-girl, essentially.

With that, I want to jump in and begin sharing with you what I found.

Bathing the Cat:

Once upon a time, I asked my husband to bathe the cat. He had never done it before, as it was usually something I did myself.

It didn’t take long before I heard a lot of screaming and wailing from both him and the cat, and out of the hullabaloo I could hear husband yelling,

“ROSIE CALM DOWN!!!”

I rushed into the bathroom.

“You can’t YELL at her to calm down,” I said, “That doesn’t work!”

“But her claws were in my leg!!”

“It doesn’t matter. She will NEVER be calm, unless you are calm first. Even if she is clawing you at the moment. You have to share your own calm with her in order for things to go smoothly,”

I then demonstrated holding the cat in a firm grip, taking a deep breath and speaking low and smooth. She then patiently, albeit with wide eyes, allowed me to bathe her without further incident.

My manager Tony and I have found this has worked for us when collaborating with the Sales team. As we instigated our own processes around healthy work expectations, the Sales team as a whole has developed in their ability to communicate needs and desires with the Product Org.

A lot of the joy I have found in organizing or “tidying” as Marie Kondo calls it, is from what I learned in her first novel called “Spark Joy” which I will also reference often in this presentation. There are many applications between tidying a house, and tidying our work processes.

Since we are all working from home these days, I want to just say one thing about our physical spaces, before I jump into the deeper topic of tidying our time and schedules. Make sure your space is supporting the type of person you want to be. Like Marie says above, consider what the environment inside your home is doing to your psyche. And tidy up your office, for goodness’ sake.

Some of you may not be familiar with Marie Kondo or her work, so I wanted to take this opportunity to just relate, if it wasn’t clear already, she is seen as a major mover and shaker in the “minimalist” home movement. She had a major Netflix show in early 2020 that I encourage you to go check out, where she helps people organize their homes, using her tried and true method, of essentially deciding for yourself “What Sparks Joy?”. Oh, and she is an adorable, classy little Japanese lady.

I personally fell in love with her method, because it helped me to not only simplify my life, but to prioritize what was important to me. I learned to surround myself with only the things that Spark Joy, which led to me living a much more fulfilling existence. Too passionate a thought? Perhaps. None the less, I have found enormous satisfaction as I first tidied my house by these principles, and then my work life.

Imagining your day at work in concrete detail while asking yourself what kind of work life sparks joy for you and what values are important in your work is the first step to tidying, and it’s crucial to success.

Obviously at work it is not as simple as it is at home to simply discard the things that do not bring you joy. So in this scenario there are three types of things that you should keep.

1) Personal items that bring you joy.

2) Things that are functional and aid your work, things you use frequently like staplers or heavy-duty packing tape. They don’t necessarily spark joy, but having them makes you able to relax and focus on your work.

3) Things that will lead to future joy. This includes receipts, papers related to a project, and other such items you will need in the future.

If “Spark Joy,” doesn’t ring well for you, feel free to use another term like, “Will this help my company prosper?”

I had one coworker say, “Well, something like exercise doesn’t bring us joy in the moment, but it produces joy and pride later,” and to them I responded, “Yes, that counts! Marie does NOT say, “Everything you do has to be fun in that exact moment, or it is not worth doing,” In fact, the act of moving clothes and items around your house is not expected to be fun at all. The Joy part comes from completing a task, and preparing a space for Joy in your future. Therefore something like working, or exercising, that may not be 100% fun in the moment, are essential in bringing about future joy! And therefore must not be discarded.

EMAIL: There are three types of filers (aka people who file emails)

Frequent filers: While it might seem good to have a vast system for filing your emails, Frequent filing can be bad because a single interruption can require 26 minutes to pick up where you left off, especially if you have a complicated filing system.
Spring Cleaner: Go through cycles of cluttered email where they can’t find anything and then go straight from a cluttered to an empty inbox. Neither of which are good.
No Filers: Those who rely on their email’s search function, which requires sifting through mountains of irrelevant messages more often than not.

All three are poor options. The best answer is to keep only what’s needed for the future, and to store emails in a logical set of a few folders. 10 or fewer.

YOUR INBOX IS NOT FOR STORING EMAILS YOU WANT TO KEEP PERMANENTLY.

Other tips: Divide miscellaneous files into subcategories. Once you have chosen only things that spark joy, this means you will have a place to store them.

In “Don’t Make Me Think,” a popular UX book, it says that making a website is like creating a roadmap. People need to relate to the map physically, so they can understand where they started, where they can go, and how they can get back to the page they wanted. Your files should read the same way, and not be found only by using the search tool.

Next we jump into the subject of our often over-packed calendars. We understand in terms of our personal lives, that some things (like the company bake-off tomorrow) are urgent, but not important. If you ALSO have a project due at work next week, which is much more important, don’t give in to the temptation to place your attention on the non-important, but urgent matter of baking. The reward of doing your job and getting paid is a better reward than the momentary praise from your coworkers on your fine cinnamon rolls.

Core tasks: Central, ongoing activities of your job, the key things you do that justify your existence at work. For management it might be budgeting, planning or leading a facility or team. For a designer it might be designing products, analyzing company or user data or polishing products hand in hand with your developers.
Project tasks: These are the kinds of tasks that have a discrete beginning and end—think planning an event, designing a brochure or launching a new product.
Developmental tasks: These are tasks that help us grow or learn, such as training, reading, attending conferences, or taking on a new task. They should advance your work-life vision.

A quick word on expressing Gratitude. Choosing what to discard is very different from choosing what sparks joy. Although they may sound like different sides of the same coin, to choose what sparks joy focuses on the positive, while choosing what to discard focuses on the negative. Data shows that negative emotions have a more powerful impact on our thoughts than positive emotions. A study examining 558 words for different emotions in English concluded that 62% of them were negative, compared to only 38% positive. In another study participants from seven countries (Belgium, France, England, Italy, Switzerland, Canada and the Netherlands) wrote down as many emotions as they could think of in 5 min. People from all 7 countries recalled more negative words than positive ones. In addition, among the most used words, only four were shared by all seven countries, and of these three were negative: fear, anger, and sadness. The only word expressing positive emotion shared by all 7 countries was JOY.

As this example illustrates, the human brain gives greater weight to negative emotions than to positive ones. If we focus on the negative when we discard, the best we can hope for when tidying is to discard the things we don’t like.

“Not being sick is not the same as being healthy,”

So when tidying, focus on the positive—on the things that you love. If you do you will likely find that you enjoy tidying.

And now FINALLY we get into the nitty gritty of how to do this.

Some examples of where I have implemented these processes:

Tony and I recently realized that the requests we were receiving were coming in with not enough time to take care of them! So we began implementing an “Intake Form,”
We also realized that things were being forgotten, or that team members were not aware of certain items on our list, and were handing us additional unknown pressure. We therefore instigated a team Trello board, and assigned values to the cards, so we could visually see and understand the load that each of us was carrying and when to tell incoming people to leave their stuff at the door and we’ll handle it when we have time.

When our team transferred our files from Abstract to Figma, I had the opportunity to reorganize the files. They had originally been stored by project (by another designer) but the problem became that there were 7 files named “Lowes Prototype”. I therefore decided to organize the projects by store, (ex. Lowes) and then create subcategories (prototype_date created).
In my own personal photography storage, I had a TERRIBLE mess of files. Raw photos, edited photos, and everywhere in-between were mixed together and mashed, not to mention the bleeding over between different shoots and whatnot. Going through this process with my own photography has allowed me to be able to find and store things in a much more logical way, that has saved me numerous headaches and stress since then.

1) Me and the other intern at this investment firm would get bored enough that we started throwing each other popcorn kernals for the other person to catch with their mouth, and having competitions seeing who could create the best sculpture out of a kit kat using only their teeth.

I even brought it up to the CEO of the company once, saying “So um, we feel a little bad, but…there seem to be big lulls in activity,”

His reply taught me a lot about investment. He said,

“Yeah—that is on purpose. It is essential to keep a portion of both our time and capital free, because if an amazing investment opportunity comes up, we want to be able to participate. If all of our time and money were already tied up in other things, we would not be able to take advantage of golden opportunities when they came.”

So not only does a clean space on your calendar allow for you to take advantage of golden opportunities that may cross your path, free time and boredom are often the best catalysts of creativity. Our brains need rest, and I know personally my best ideas for my current company have not come during work hours. They usually come while I am on the treadmill at the gym, or gardening, or lounging around my house. Let your brain have some unstructured time to breathe, create, and wait for good things to cross your path.

About rule 2: If a leader provided an agenda beforehand, make sure you’re ready. If you feel like you don’t have enough time to prepare yourself, you probably don’t have time to attend the meeting either. (Ask yourself, was this meeting really worth keeping?

About rule 5: Focus on advancing the conversation with new information, a different perspective or putting the discussion back on track.

About rule 7: They will feel better, and you will too for helping them.

Know what you want to accomplish: Is a meeting even necessary? Is there a more efficient way to share this information?
Think carefully about the participants: Given digital scheduling, it’s easy to invite to others to join. Too many people slow down a meeting, focus instead on having the RIGHT people in the room.
State the goals of the meeting in the invitation: This will help people decide if they are truly needed. If they’re not, give them permission to skip it without consequences. Give people enough details so they can adequately prepare.
Encourage participation: Invite people to make contributions. When leaders talk too much, it slows down decision-making, lowers productivity, and leads to worse decisions overall. Allow people to contribute when they have something rather than going around the table.
Set timelines for meetings: A shorter meeting and moderate amount of time pressure can spark creativity. Try reducing existing meetings by 16 min increments until you find that you’re too short on time.
Recap: Thank everyone for their participation, ask yourself “What progress did we make? What got in the way? What did we learn? What did we solve?” Follow up with the answers to these questions. With this public declaration, they’re much more likely to follow-through and less likely to engage in back-channel after-discussions with others in which they undermine or sabotage the decision.

There are more topics Marie covers in her book that I would love to talk about, but there isn’t time in this presentation. So I encourage you to go check out these other topics by her, where she provides amazing insight on Tidying teams, and achieving true work-life balance.