Premium ContentClick on Premium Content on the Featured navigation bar for information.
Diane Sullivan is a professional organizer and a 32-year administrative assistant at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Sullivan answered questions about the cost of being disorganized, the topic she’ll discuss Thursday in Central City, Neb.
Q: What are some of the common organizational problems people have that end up costing money?
A: People have huge collections or souvenirs. Books are a big one, and they cost a lot of money. The bigger your book collection, the more book cases you need, because nobody ever wants to part with a book. And if you can’t find things you buy them over and over. That’s the cost of organization.
Time is another costly problem. Time is worth money, so the time you take in an unorganized house is tremendous. It also applies to your work. And at work time is money.
Q: What are some solutions for staying organized at work?
A: The key to an office is that you want to set priorities. What’s going to make you the money? What’s going to get you a raise? That’s the first thing you want to concentrate on. A lot of people feel their job is to put out fires, fix things, but at the end of the day that’s not what is important. Today, being disorganized could determine whether you have a job or not.
Q: Why is being organized especially important during a recession?
A: Because in a down economy you have to be more efficient, with your resources, with your time, with what truly needs to get done. More people are doing more with less now. There are fewer people doing the job than what used to be.
Q: This Thursday you will give a workshop titled the “cost of being disorganized.” What exactly is the cost of being disorganized?
A: The cost of being disorganized is that if you have too much stuff in your home then sometimes you can’t find what you need when you need it. So in that case the cost of being disorganized is that you have to go out and buy the product you already own because you can’t find it.
An example is painting supplies. When you’re painting a room, you know you have the brushes and the rollers and the pan, but if you can’t find them, you go out and buy them.
Contact the writer:
444-1414, ross.boettcher@owh.com
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
