Should it have a Surgeon General's warning?

It seems that every time I check the news these days I’m met with another study that says  inactivity shortens our lives. It rots our brains. It wrecks our blood chemistry, even if we exercise every day.

Let me be clear: it’s not just that exercise is beneficial – we all know that already. It’s that even if we exercise, hours of inactivity take a huge toll. The negative effects of sitting cannot be undone by exercise. In other words, sitting is the new smoking – no sensible person will continue to do it.

It is so easy to settle into the desk chair and shut out the world, get down to business, and seek to work at our productive best. So when these new studies find that sitting shortens our lives, how can we organize our work to minimize the damage?

First, take frequent breaks. I’ve become a fan of the Pomodoro Technique, which combines 25-minute bursts of work with 5-minute breaks. I usually use my breaks to move, or at least stretch. Now I’m using them to go outside and walk to the end of the block more often. (And that’s all it takes, according to a recent Australian study. A short walk was as good as a jog at preventing the blood sugar spikes and insulin disruptions caused by prolonged sitting.)

Stand up to work. An American Cancer Society study found that women who sit for more than six hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die during the course of the 13-year study than those who sat fewer than three hours per day. Consider a hydraulic desk that can adjust from sitting to standing.

Use a cordless headset to speak on the phone. Then use that freedom to walk around the office while you talk. Or just stand and shift from side to side, if walking isn’t possible. Just get out of the chair.

Don’t sit to watch television. The average American watches over four hours of television each day, usually seated. Instead of parking on the couch, stand while you watch. I like do the ironing while watching a favorite show. I used to think I was just making the ironing more pleasant; now I know that I’m taking the risk out of TV.

For more on how to step away from your chair, see:

Office Headsets To Save Your Neck

Meetings: Stand Up

Want Greater Productivity? Walk This Way

"Food for a time-starved world" - sign in a San Francisco cafe

You know how it can be:

• You have an overwhelming to-do list as long as your arm, and it never gets any shorter.
• There are some things you want to accomplish, but weeks, months and even years slip by with no progress.
• You are tempted to laugh out loud when someone suggests adding daily exercise, learning a language, or practicing the piano to your schedule.

Take heart! Your work and life really can be different.

On May third I’ll be speaking to a group of women entrepreneurs, and if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, I hope you can join us. The workshop is called “Organizing Your Time and Energy – For Business.” The gathering begins at 5 pm. You can get all the details here.

I’ll be sharing how you can have more time, not by saving minutes here and there in a frantic rush, but by changing some of the fundamental attitudes and habits that create so much stress in your life. Be sure to have your pencil and paper ready, and take lots of notes. There will be changes you’ll want to put into practice immediately.

Two things are certain, death and taxes.

But only one lets you have an automatic extension.

- Anonymous

photo by Margaret Lukens

As I headed to Baltimore last week for the annual conference of  NAPO (National Association of Professional Organizers) where I presented a workshop on writing a business plan for solo entrepreneurs and small businesses, Angela Wallace, our association president, sat down with a reporter from the New York Times to talk about the organizing industry today.

It was very exciting to be at the conference when the story was published. More prestigious papers, including USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, followed quickly with interviews of their own.

When I began working as a professional organizer in 2003, the notion of professional organizing was much less well-known than it is today. Now we have

• a formal education program for new organizers (I teach one of the classes in that program. It’s called PO-105 “Eliminating Excess.”)
• a legally defensible certification process (I was in the inaugural class, and it felt wonderful to have an opportunity to help shape the professional organizing industry!)
• as many participants at this year’s conference in Baltimore as the whole association claimed just 20 years ago.

Of course we still encounter folks who’ve never heard of professional organizing, those who mistake it for union organizing, and other misunderstandings. And even those who’ve heard of professional organizers don’t always know the scope of what some organizers do, including working with the client to design an organizing system just for them, consulting on planning and goal setting, and teaching clients to use new productivity tools.

That’s why it was so exciting to see our president in the paper a few days ago. I’m in favor of anything that helps overwhelmed professionals to know that there IS help available for their organizing and productivity challenges.

istockphoto.com (c) Artsem Martysiuk

Be neat and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and creative in your work.

Gustave Flaubert

photo courtesy of Staples.com

If you have a bag of old checks, credit card statements, tax returns, or other private documents hanging around, good news: Staples stores are offering five pounds of free shredding. Just bring your bag or box to any Staples store to have it securely shredded.

As you prepare to complete your 2011 IRS tax filing, keep in mind that all back-up material from tax files can usually be safely shredded after seven years. (Check with your tax adviser to be sure about your specific situation.) If you have old documents taking up space in your files and your life, take advantage of Staples’ offer.

If you have more than five pounds of paper, Staples will take the excess for a (very reasonable) 79 cents a pound. It’s a good chance to try out the service at your local Staples, and free up some space in your files.

Have a question about keeping documents? good filing practices? Leave a comment here.

Koi in the Japanese Tea Garden, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

The days of talking about resolutions may be behind us for a while, but there is never a bad time to make some small changes that will yield big results. Past February posts from the New Leaf blog suggest a few changes you may want to try now, so you can do more of what matters, and do it more easily.

A quote from Pearl Bailey reminds us of what’s really important in the world – see if you don’t agree.

Don’t feel that you must fill every bit of space or every second of time in the name of being “efficient.” Learn to incorporate and enjoy a bit of white space in your calendar and in your office.

What three words signal trouble ahead, leading to procrastination and piles? It’s probably not what you’re thinking.

Enjoy the rest of the month!

shutterstock (c) Sergey Peterman

kisses are a better fate

than wisdom.

~ e.e. cummings

istockphoto.com © anna karwowska

There are three ways to change your behavior.

• You can have an epiphany. If you know the story of Byron Katie’s remarkable turn-around, you have an example of an epiphany. These are hard to engineer, so looking for one to show up can be a long and frustrating wait.
• You can change your context. When I went to a spa for a week last summer, I awoke every morning and went for a five-mile hike. There is nothing to prevent me from doing that every morning at home; I just don’t. But as long as I stayed in that spa context, the new behavior was easy.
• You can make “micro-changes,” adjustments so small your brain doesn’t bother to rebel.

Having spent most of two decades studying how humans change behavior (and how they don’t), Stanford University researcher B. J. Fogg has devised a plan to help us finally make some of the changes we’ve wanted. He invites the world into his methods through his website TinyHabits.com

The secret to changing habits, it appears, is to make them so small that they seem trivial. The classic example of how this works involves flossing. I’m going to guess that everyone has been told by their dentist and hygienist that they should floss their teeth for “good oral hygiene.” And I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that most people have a collection of little floss samples stacked up in their medicine cabinet because MOST PEOPLE DON’T FLOSS (except the day before their next dentist appointment.) We know it’s good for us. We know that realistically, it takes all of one minute, about the same as brushing. So why don’t most of us take that second minute once a day and floss? It’s a mystery.

And here is what Fogg’s tiny habits method prescribes: floss one tooth. don’t try to cajole yourself into action by saying that you’re going to do one tooth then do them all. Just floss one. Do it every day. And watch what happens. I can tell you what happened to me – one day, about three weeks in, I had an itch for completion. I wanted, needed to floss them all. I wasn’t even particularly aware of the change, which seemed natural and unconscious. And now I can’t not floss. Mission accomplished.

Fogg doesn’t address this question directly, but I believe that adding a habit is simpler than breaking a habit – it’s easier to add flossing than it would be to quit something. However, I am using Fogg’s method of making a micro-change in order to edge out coffee with lots of milk in favor of healthier choices. The strongest habit in my day is to get up, go to the kitchen, and make instant coffee. (A personal note: my friends, who know how much I enjoy good food and how much work I’m willing to go to in order to prepare it, think it’s hilarious that I drink instant coffee most days. They make Cremora jokes. My son, a coffee-lover since the age of two, when coffee yogurt emerged as his favorite flavor, finds it unspeakable. But instant coffee – organic Mount Hagen brand – works for me.)

I began the experiment by linking my new, desired behavior to one that is already entrenched. (My friend and organizing colleague Janine Adams has written about her adventures with taking a job that loomed large and unpleasant and making it happen automatically. You can read more on her Peace of Mind Organizing blog. She also teaches a class on the subject of changing habits. Read more about it at simplify101.) Rather than making a sweeping change, declaring that there would be “no more coffee from now on!”, I went through my accustomed motions, putting water in the kettle, getting out two cups and a spoon, turning on the stove. But in addition I added “getting out a glass and putting a tea bag in it.”

For many days I enjoyed my coffee, then later in the afternoon came back to the cup and tea bag that were waiting and enjoyed my tea then. But after about four weeks of this, suddenly, rather than pouring the water into the coffee cup, I poured it into the tea cup. No drama. No big all-or-nothing resolutions. Just a little micro-shift. This habit is still new, but for now I seem to have successfully replaced my coffee with tea, often herbal tea.
One key to these micro-changes is that they must be specific: “floss one tooth” rather than “do more grooming.” And they must be almost laughably trivial, the sort of task that can be done in 30 seconds or less with virtually no effort, such as “put a tea bag in a glass.”

As I mentioned earlier, one key is to connect these new behaviors to another habit that is already entrenched. It is easier to add flossing one tooth after brushing (an entrenched habit) than it is to add something without another habit to act as the anchor. I find that I have few durable habits for later in the day, so I set out to create one.

Now when I open my computer in the morning (a daily habit) I set an alarm for 4 pm. With this new 4 pm alarm habit in place, I can add end-of-the-day habits: when the 4 pm alarm goes off, I will pick up one paper from my stack of filing. Not file it, just pick it up: remember, the micro-change should be laughably trivial. Guess what has happened to my stack of filing over the past two months? For the first weeks, not much, but then some shift took hold in my brain, and now end-of-day filing is a growing habit.

Decisions are both tiring and time-consuming, so enlisting new habits can be a great benefit for productivity – we get more done with less effort when we choose to do certain things habitually. What little habits would you like to add to your life? What micro-changes will you make? Leave a message here.

photo from istockphoto.com 2012 © akiyoko

I have seen:

• a design-conscious client who felt that all her files MUST fit into a small rattan box under her table, like she’d seen in magazines.
• a home-based business that tried to get by with a decrepit metal file cabinet that was hard to open, harder to squeeze in another sheet of paper.
• a multi-million dollar company that, in building its own headquarters, neglected to make enough space for the files needed to hold the paper that is the life-blood of its paper-intensive business.

It ‘s a fine thing to minimize the paper in our lives to the greatest extent possible. It is not so good to attempt to defy the laws of physics by storing 10 pounds of sugar in a five-pound bag.

Sure, the papers that pile up can be annoying, but let’s be serious: we need some information on paper to run those businesses that support us. When a legal or tax challenge arises, only your papers can help you. Are you dissing your documents? Time to show your papers the respect they deserve.

•  Make sure you have enough file space for the volume of paper your business needs. Measure how many feet of file space your papers require, then add 20 percent or more for growth.
• Don’t put up with daily irritations: your file drawers should open easily, and there should always be enough room to add or search for papers easily. If you’re working with a cantankerous old file cabinet, well, don’t! Replace it now.
• Set up a file system that includes homes for all the types of papers you regularly need.
• Make your papers easier to put away than they are to find. (It’s the toy box principle – you will search for three minutes to find what you want, but it should take less than a minute to put it away. Otherwise, the job won’t get done.)
• When you’ve set up a file system, make a file index and keep it up to date with any changes. This helps you to remember what you’ve done and makes it easier for assistants and colleagues to maintain the system.

When you need information in a pinch, your paper can be your friend. Just be sure to show it the respect it deserves.

Uncertain about what to keep and for how long? Look at my free record retention guide. (Scroll down to “How long should I keep this paper?”)