CONTACT: Liz Franklin toll-free 800-447-3488 or e-mail MizLizOnBiz@earthlink.net
Interviews, excerpts, media kits and review copies available on request
Fire up your organizing skills: Tips to Get Organized Without Resorting to Arson
If you’ve ever wondered about how much time and
money you’ve lost because you can’t remember where you put things,
you’ll probably think that Liz Franklin was heaven sent to be your
guardian angel.
She’s on a one-woman crusade to make people laugh their way out of chaos to achieve new levels of organized perfection.
Liz Franklin is a 27-year veteran of office organizing and she’s been
called in to do rescue and damage control after a company had a
multi-million dollar deal go astray for want of not remembering where
the instructions were to submit a simple application.
Her book, "How to Get Organized Without Resorting to Arson" takes a
totally innovative approach and uses outrageous humor to teach people
funny, fast and people-friendly techniques for getting organized.
Subtitled "A Step-by-Step Guide to Clearing Your Desk Without Panic or
the Use of Open Flame", Franklin puts the reader back in control of his
or her own destiny. A master out of extracting more efficiency
out of every moment, she offers hundreds of money and time saving
insights into how to reduce your workload, gain more time at each and
every step, avoid the impacts of re-work, and save lots of money in the
process.
Here’s a sample of some of her organizational improvement tips and tactics:
1. If you are an "out of sight, out of mind" person, you’re not out of
your mind, you just respond to strong visual cues. So use bright
colors, large labels, and signs and you’ll remember where you put
things.
2. If you are a "time traveler" you simply and naturally access
paperwork according to when things happened or when they must happen.
So leverage your innate skills and use systems with dates and numbers,
not colors or places.
3. If you are a "Sparklebrain", you start lots of things but
rarely finish them? You’d be better off if you used a matchmaking
service to pair off with a "Linear Person" (like an engineer or an
architect) so you can trade tasks at the halfway point. Then you
can go shopping.
4. If you are "Cross-dominant", you switch rapidly between
starting and finishing. You will become better organized only
after you improve your delegation skills, which you’d better do because
you assign yourself more than is humanly possible.
5. Ignore the saying, "If you haven't used it in six months, throw it out." That could be your spouse!
6. Procrastination is usually a sign that you have more important things to do.
7. A clean desk is a sign of a person who is on vacation, new to the job, part-time, delegating, or mentally elsewhere.
8. You are not obligated to return any calls made by machinery.
9. Arrange your desk furniture into a U-shape and circulate your
work around you. This mimics your hand, body and arm movement, and
makes jumping to conclusions so much easier.
10. Keep everything you want to keep. Just label things
according to when you’ll want to use them. Instead of, "Tax Stuff",
call it, "Open in January", or "Open or Go To Prison."
11. Too many items on your To-Do List? Ask yourself, "Which
of these will I be sorry about tomorrow if it’s not finished today?"
Then prioritize according to regret. And if you won’t regret it,
you can forget all about it.
12. To know if you should throw something away, ask yourself how
you would feel if a stranger sneaked in and destroyed it. If you’d get
mad, keep it. If you’d secretly be thrilled, you can toss it without
fear
13. Can’t figure out what to do first? Write the goal on the bottom of
the page, then keep asking, "What must I do before that?" and write
("Backwards Up") upwards as you think of things to do to achieve the
goal. When you’re done, follow the steps from top to
bottom.
Liz recognizes that implementing the techniques in her book will take a
little time and thought. "It’s not going to happen simply
overnight", she says, "After all, how long did it take you to get as
disorganized as you are?"
If you follow Liz Franklin’s advice, you’ll find out better ways to use
your furniture, learn the nine most essential organizing supplies, and
learn that in many cases it’s perfectly OK to throw things out the door.
Of course, you may choose to scrap her suggested plans and throw it out the window instead.
