Ten Signs of Disorganization

Assessing your Level of Organization

May 2, 2007

Are you worried about your organizational skills? Assess yourself to discover if you need to work on your organizational skills.

You can’t find things easily. You spend a large part of your day looking for things, rummaging through piles, files, drawers and brief cases/tote bags
You miss deadlines. You justify missing the deadline by some wild excuse and it is always someone or something else at fault.
You forget important appointments and important tasks. If you have a daytimer, you don’t look at it or have a wall calendar, a daytimer, an electronic calendar and slips of paper/sticky notes with some appointments on each and some duplicated but most appointments are recorded once.
You buy doubles or triples of things. When you do find time for cleaning, you discover that you’ve got multiples of things and had them on a shopping list somewhere as well.
You pile things without sorting them. You have stacks of papers, magazines, etc. everywhere you look. Some haven’t been touched in months or years. You have no idea what is in the stacks.
If you file things, you can’t retrieve them easily as your filing system doesn’t make sense. Your labels are too vague or folder label sections are left blank. The colour coding (if it exists) has been changed and no longer makes sense.
You discover papers that needed your attention ages ago and now it is too late. You forget to prioritize or note important tasks on a calendar.
Co-workers have commented, “Don’t give it to Jack/Jill, they’ll lose it”. You find that co-workers are reluctant to give you originals and if they must, they make a duplicate copy first.
You rely on others to keep you organized and criticize them for not being organized. You are lost without your assistant or significant other as they are the ones that keep you on top of things.
You do not have an organized contact management system. Key contact information is found in multiple places. You have business cards in miscellaneous places and no way to monitor when you’ve talked to a client or customer and what the last conversation was about.