Description

Class OverviewThe personality of the creative is often said to be at odds with order and organization. Learn to master the skills of organization so you have a solid base to create, make mistakes and messes! (Check out the Top 10 Big Ideas from the class below!) Your ProfessorDr. Eric Maisel is the author of 40+ books and is one of the world’s leading creativity coaches. His interests include the creative life, creativity coaching, and natural psychology, the new psychology of meaning.How to Get Better OrganizedAlmost everybody feels the need to get better organized. But what does “better organization” really mean? Is it about having a good filing system and multiple to-do lists or is it about more than that? Let’s take a look! The Top 10 Big Ideas1Organizing for Today Each day involves you in both short-term tasks and long-terms tasks. If you only focus on pressing short-term tasks, the long-term tasks will never get accomplished! You must organize your day around both the immediate and the long-term.2Protecting Your Space If you let people bother you, invade your space, and intrude on your work and thought processes, you are bound to stay disorganized. If you let things invade your space, that also fosters disorganization. It is your job to protect your space from invasions: no one can do that for you!3Protecting Your Time You can protect your time or you can give it away. Has a free hour made itself available? You can squander it with some Net surfing, game playing, television watching or email checking or you can work on one of your short-term or long-term projects. 4Organizing Around Your Life Purposes It is common to organize our lives around our tasks, duties, and responsibilities as opposed to organizing our lives around our life purposes and our meaning-making efforts. Everyday tasks must get taken care of, of course – but at the expense of not experiencing life as meaningful?5Organizing Each Day Each day is a certain sort of negotiation. We can’t do every possible thing we might want to do. We have to make choices, prioritize, and be mature about how much a day can hold. If we mindfully organize every single day, we have organized our life.6Organizing Each Week Do you set yourself weekly goals? Weekly goals accomplished add up to completed long-term projects. Factor your cherished dreams and your highest aspirations into your weekly planning!7Thinking in Three Month Increments The mind likes to think in three-month increments. If you map out a three-month calendar for yourself, you will discover that three months is an excellent amount of time to begin to implement a business plan, write a draft of a book, or accomplish some other big task. What would you like to get done in the next three months? 8Managing the Anxiety of Organization Because organizing involves making choices and because choosing provokes anxiety, there is always a certain amount of anxiety lurking at the corners of our organizational efforts. Learn how the manage the anxiety of organizing!9Using Small Increments of Time We typically throw away fifteen minutes here and twenty minutes there by checking our email one more time or doing something on the Net. Keep a separate to-do list of tasks that can be accomplished in just a few minutes and when you get those few minutes, don’t scorn them or throw them away – use them!10Regularly Catching Up with Yourself Your organizational scheme of today may not serve you or suit you six months from now. Even as life rushes by, we nevertheless must stop and make sure not only that we are organized but that we are organized in ways that make sense for this phase of our life!