The Power of Post It’s-5 Wonderful Uses for Organizing Your Life
By Suzanne McLoone
Post It’s are a great invention, are they not? They come in great colors, different shapes, and they have flags, dividers, tabs, and they even come inside of a highlighter! They also seem to act like gremlins after you get them wet. One of my clients called me one afternoon and she swore that after she came back from lunch her Post It’s had reproduced like bunnies and she was now overran with pink and yellow stickies all over her desk. What else could I do but laugh? I thought back to how many times that has happened to me and how many times I had actually done the very same thing.
“Jill, call me when you get back from lunch. Thx, Suz”
Sometimes I would get a call back and sometimes a week later Jill would come by and say, “Did you leave this for me today?” The blank stare on my face was enough to tell her that I had no memory of the “incident” and all was lost. It was at that time that I decided that I am going to put together a veritable Post It fortress. One where my love of Post It’s wouldn’t be lost, but it would become a visual assault on all that was chaos. Thus, the Power of Post It’s came to the rescue.
We are going to take 5 situations where Post It’s could come in handy with prioritizing and organizing your daily tasks. We’ll go ahead and start at home and work our way to the office.
1. Post It’s at Home: I have a family of 4 with a very active hubby-to-be and two socialite children, not to mention their mother. Trying to figure out who had hockey, when tests were, and no one told me there was a field trip today, was an organizers nightmare! MY nightmare. We tried a slew of different methods to get us all on the same page and then one day I found a little blue Post It on my computer monitor written in the big print of an 8 year old, “Can I go to Hunters howse?” It dawned on me that this just may be the solution to our little nightmare.
I had just picked up a pack of 3 foam core boards for my daughter’s Country report and I had impulse shopped for a new pack of Extra Sticky Post It’s at Staples so I was well on my way to a brilliant idea. I printed out labels for Sunday through Saturday in a bright red fun font. The Extra Sticky Post It’s came in a pack of 5 colors and I separated the stack and placed them in a row at the top of the board. Underneath the Post It’s came the labels for the day of the week. Since purple is my favorite color, I used a purple Post It and labeled it with Dress Fitting 5:30pm and placed it under Tuesday. My daughter had an orthodontist appointment on Wednesday so I labeled a green Post It with Ortho - 7:30am and put it under Wednesday. I did the same thing for everyone in the family and filled the board up in no time and since there were 5 colors in the Post It stack, each member of the family had their own color and that left one color for “the whole family”.
Now whenever the kids have something going on, they fill out a Post It place it on the board and wha-la I know what’s going on! Every Sunday morning, we go through what we have scheduled for the coming week and update the Post It Board. The kids have a great time with it and surprisingly enough it has been one of those things we have diligently kept up.
2. Fly By Post Its: Oh ya, you know what I’m talking about. Those are the stickies that magically appear out of no where with obscure notes on them. 5:00pm Bob (602) 859-5986. Who the heck is Bob? And where did this come from?
Poor Natosha is an Office Manager for an air conditioning company and she is always finding Post It’s on her desk. She has no idea what they mean, who wrote them, and if they are for her or just random casualties of war. It was driving her absolutely nuts. To make matters worse, Butch, the owner, would come by and ask her if she had seen Bob’s phone number…two days later. By this time, “Bob” had found his way to the big dumpster in the sky.
In order to eliminate the Fly By Post It’s, we drug out foam core board again along with the Super Sticky Post It’s and created a “Note Board”. We mounted her Note Board on the wall next to her desk and made labels for the Action Columns. FOR NATOSHA - BUTCH TO CALL - BUTCH NOTES. Depending on what Butch needed from each Post It, that is where he placed his scribbled note.
It saved Natosha’s desk from being a Post It graveyard and Butch was happy to keep his Post It habit!
3. Operation Meeting Notes: I absolutely love composition books and I practically use them for everything, including meeting notes. I have one composition notebook for all of my notes from meetings I attend. The problem with that is I have to flip through all the pages to find a specific meeting. Not any more! Post It came out with these great tabs that you can write on. So every time I have a meeting I write on the tab the meeting title and date. Now I don’t have to flip through my book. I also pull out my “flag wallet” and throw a Post It Flag next to the action items from the meetings so I know what to go back and follow up on. Once I finish the action item, I remove the flag.
4. Flagging Emails: This system is my absolute favorite for Admin’s and Executive’s. It saves so much time for both parties and it brings the efficiency of emails to a whole new level. John is a VP of Sales and Marketing and he sees anywhere between 150 and 200 emails per day he is also spending most of his time attending meetings so he is not even able to check out his emails on a consistent basis. Needless to say, emails were going unanswered, important messages were getting lost, and he was quickly overwhelmed. Not only that, the CEO was noticing it as well.
The good part was his assistant had access to his emails. Not yet confident in responding to a lot of emails, she was not comfortable taking full control of them at this point so I had her print off every email John hadn’t read yet. She then flagged each printed out email with a Post It flag of the action type needed. Orange flags were To Do’s; Green were emails he had to respond to; Red were meetings; Blue was a potential travel date; Yellow’s were FYI’s. She would then highlight the subject line and any important information in the email and stack them all according to Action. John could then grab his stack of emails look through them, write down notes on the email he wanted his assistant to send out for him.
John quickly got caught up on his emails, his assistant became more confident with his writing style and common responses, and they became a strong team within the organization.
5. Voice Mail Call Backs: Voice mails! Talk about a pain in the butt. You get them on your cell phone, you get them at work, and you get them at home. They are never ending and a lot of times the voice mails require you to call someone back. Yet, when was the last time you actually called THEM back? I am going to give you the quick skinny from my Organizing and Controlling Voice Mails Organizational Kit, but it’s a keeper!
Break out the composition book and crack down and pick up the highlighter with the Post It flags in the end. Every time you get a voice mail and I don’t care where it comes from work, home, cell it doesn’t matter, I want you to write the message into the composition book. Here is the key part; ONLY VOICE MAILS. No grocery lists, no to dos, no scribbled random thoughts only voice mails. When you call someone back, highlight through the message. At the end of the day, if you haven’t called them back put a Post It Flag by their name. The next morning when you pick up your composition book you will know you have people to call back.
Now you have the top 5 ways I use Post It’s and it works out incredibly well not only for me, but for my clients as well. If you have your own Post It success story, by all means, let me know! I absolutely love to share!
Happy Organizing!
Suzanne McLoone
Organizational Empowerment
About the Author
For over 20 years, Suzanne has been helping corporations and small businesses organize their time so they can spend more time and energy doing the things that are most important to them. With a philosophy of “life is too short”, she thrives on making the most of her time and trying to encourage those around her to do the same. As an organizational consultant, public speaker, and former radio talk show host; Suzanne has been offering her Organizational Quick Tips to anyone and everyone who will stand still and listen for “30-seconds”. Visit her site at www.LetsTalkOrganizing.com
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