There are countless strategies for LOs to be more successful. And with so much advice (most of it good), it can be challenging to know just where to focus your efforts. One of the simplest things you can do to improve your performance, is to strengthen your organizational skills. Spending time getting better organized isn’t as exciting as the hottest new marketing tip, but once you’ve addressed it, almost every area of your business will run more smoothly and efficiently. Here’s how being better organized can boost your success as an LO:
Streamline Your Client-Experience
Once you’re organized — really organized — you’ll find that you’re not spending any time scouring the office for that misplaced piece of paperwork, or you’re not trying to make sense of a cluttered calendar to fit in an appointment. Additionally, once you get your inbox in order, you won’t have client emails getting buried among hundreds of other messages. Getting organized in these areas will make your job easier, but the primary benefit is that your clients will feel the effects too. When you’re organized at a high level, your clients see your commitment and the confidence you have in your work. It goes a long way to establish trust, and helps your clients feel completely at ease with you as their representative.
Minimize Distractions
Being disorganized creates unnecessary distractions. In fact, I wrote a piece a few weeks back called Are Distractions Affecting Your Productivity?, that you can find here. A cluttered desk or office makes it difficult to focus — there’s always something within eyesight vying for your attention. Apart from your physical surroundings, organizing your digital space is crucial. You should have orderly desktops, inboxes, and any other online storage systems you may use. You’ll also want to keep social-media work to specific windows of time, and then log out and disable notifications. That way it’s not an intrusion throughout the day when you’re working on other things. Rather than a jumbled to-do list, maintaining a clean, clear schedule that you can consult often is incredibly helpful. An organized schedule will keep you on track and help you move from task to task with maximum efficiency.
Improve Efficiency
It’s impossible to work with optimal efficiency when you’re disorganized. I’ve already covered some of the ways this is true above (like making it more difficult for you to find the things you’re looking for or stealing your focus), but it also creates a drain on your efficiency. Being disorganized often increases stress, and stress reduces productivity. If you want to work at your level best, then you need an organized environment to support that.
Simplify Goals
Being better organized can also help us reach our goals faster. When we set ambitious goals for ourselves, it can be difficult to know where to start, and even more difficult to measure the progress we’re making. But when we’re organized, we can simplify big goals, by breaking them down into achievable smaller steps on the way to our endpoint. We can write down the daily (weekly, monthly, etc.) steps we need to take to get there, which holds us better accountable, and helps keep motivation high because we can see that we’re making consistent progress.
Whether you need to revamp your organizational strategy entirely, or you just need to make a few modifications, putting in the effort to get there will benefit you in many ways. And once you get organized, don’t forget to put in the effort to stay organized.
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