Photo courtesy of dougjennings

Whether you’re just starting out in your professional career or you’ve already established yourself, but would like to improve yourself, this 2nd Habit of Highly Productive Nigerian Professionals will help you become more organized in your professional career life.

So far, I’ve discussed one habit:

• Habit #1 - Plan

Habit #2 ~ Organize

Organizing may seem so much of a task for some Nigerian professionals who have office assistants. Granted, because of their busy schedule they hardly have the time to organize the simplest details of their professional lives. However, when professionals have the habit of organizing their own affairs, they become mentally organized and challenged to be more productive in their job. Thus, when you organize your affairs yourself, you can find the things you need easily and accomplish your tasks effectively.

Organizing your desk

A cluttered desk impairs productivity. A clean desk improves productivity. With neatly organized folders, files, papers, etc you save time when you’re looking for last week’s meeting notes or the project draft that you’re supposed to work on as shown in your daily task planner.

Here are a few practical tips to help you organize your desk better:

1. Put everything in it’s place including what belongs to the trash bin.
2. Avoid papers piling up; when they do, you’ll spend more time arranging them.
3. Make specific file folders for current projects, while regularly discarding or archiving old documents that are not needed.
4. Arrange file folders that are not used frequently in their respective cabinets.
5. Don’t always wait for your office assistant (or the cleaner) to clean up your desk; take a few minutes to clean particles of dust, coffee, etc on your desk that may dent your paper work.

Organizing your desktop

A well organized desk also means a well organized computer ‘desktop’. Whatever you use - a desktop computer, a laptop or a notebook - you can use some advice here:

1. Arrange your ‘desktop’ by keeping only the shortcuts to the programs you frequently access.
2. Use file folders and directories to store important files.
3. Avoid keeping file folders that you don’t need in your system.
4. Run a virus check or scan once a week (select a particular day and stick to it) to remove viruses from your system. Viruses could corrupt files and folders or even damage your system.
5. Don’t always wait for the cleaner. Keep your computer monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc as well as printer, telephone, fax, etc clean and free from dust, etc

Organizing your e-mail daily

Your e-mail box can be annoying atimes, especially when you recieve unsolicited emails that may be considered junk emails or spams. Organizing your e-mail everyday means that you always keep your junk or spam folder empty at all times. Here are a few tips to help you organize your e-mail:

1. Create different folders in your email account to manage your emails.
2. Move your emails to the right folders you’ve created for each purpose.
3. Sort out emails that have high priority and respond to these first.
4. Make notes to reply other emails later.
5. Don’t allow your inbox to control your day; clicking on every email notifications or alerts could keep you constantly distracted from your daily tasks. 
6. Delete unwanted emails like junk, spams, etc immediately. If possible, protect your email accounts from ‘phishing’.
7. Don’t forget to organize your address book and contacts so that your messages can go to preset lists or folders.

The 3rd Habit of Highly Productive Nigerian Professionals will be discussed next.

To your career success!

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Tags: Career Tips