/karen/

I ♥ organisation

Monday, 19 June, 2006

I had a thought back in the dim dark recesses of this year's Easter long weekend that good organisation can actually be a loving thing. It seems to me that less and less people are on the ball with organisation—there are less and less people out there who are structured and methodical and who think like administrative assistants. My perspective might be skewed on this because of all my years of working as administrative assistant, working with other administrative assistants, but it seems to me that the administrative assistant—particularly the good administrative assistant—is a rare breed indeed. Or maybe it's just that I tend to make friends with spontaneous unstructured people who have trouble managing their diaries ... I don't know. Probably not.

Anyway, I was thinking that admin-type people (as I will hereafter call them) are quite valuable people to have around because they can do the things that spontaneous unstructured (and I'm tempted to say “arty” people) can't do or aren't very good at. (Reflecting upon all this, I realised that I'm kind of lucky and a bit odd in that I've got a healthy dose of both creativity and orderliness which ought to combine together to make me into the greatest and most prolific artist the world has ever known [eh heheheh ... back to the blog post ...]). Admin-type people can certainly make life run smoother for others. They can solve problems and resolve issues. They can free up others to do other things.

In Ben's first year of MTS, he was in charge of sending out the ECU weekly email news. Every week he'd get back a bunch of people saying they didn't want to be on this list and could he please unsubscribe them? And then he'd have to go through the database, find them and take them off. Understandably, he got a bit fed up with this and spent the summer between Year 1 and Year 2 of MTS building a MySQL database and PHP website with in-built security so that staff could create email lists (e.g. ECU all, staff only, Arts faculty only, Mission committee only, etc.), and students could unsubscribe themselves and update their own contact details, thus saving Ben (and the rest of the staff team) plenty of time. Plus the site had the capacity to act as an information repository so that staff wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel every time they wanted to do something that had already been done before. (Of course, these things only work when people use them. I suspect no one's been using the information repository.)

But returning to the beginning of my post, how can organisation be loving?

• It gives people realistic expectations: If you tell people that your meeting will go from 6 pm to 8 pm, they can work the rest of what they're doing around that. It's helpful for people to know stuff like how much stuff will cost, what they should bring, what they should expect, what they need to prepare, etc. I arrived at a weekend camp once to find that there wasn't going to be accommodation for married couples. This was quite annoying as I'd only packed one queen-sized sheet, one doona and one tube of toothpaste for the two of us.
• It doesn't encroach or presume on others: A friend told me once that a staff member at her church was always holding meetings that went for hours and hours. People would get up to leave and he would say things like, “Before you go, let's just talk about ...” and the meeting would go on for another 40 minutes. I realise that it's good for people to be committed to church but at the same time congregation members have other responsibilities that they have to attend to and surely with a bit of preparation this particular staff member could have accomplished what he wanted to do in the meeting without it dragging on and on.
• It frees non-admin type people to do other things: Specifically, things that they're good at which aren't admin.
• It helps get things done or make things happen: It's quite exciting when talk turns into action and you actually start to see stuff happening! One of the guys from the Christian Comics Corroboree is organising an anthology of Christian comics, including stuff arising from the workshop. He's aiming to get it out in time for Supanova. I'm so looking forward to seeing the completed publication!
• It motivates others to do stuff: If the guy I mentioned above hadn't been so enthusiastic about getting stuff happening, I wonder whether the rest of us would be as productive or as enthusiastic. It seems to me that seeing stuff happen just gives people a boost—it pushes them to want to do stuff themselves.
• It helps others take responsibility: Good organisation will engineer things so that they do not fall on just one set of shoulders. Delegation is really one of the key tools of MTS, and sharing responsibilities will help reduce stress as each person only has their little area to take care of instead of a million different things that need tending to.
• It helps to train other people: Sharing the responsibility means that others can have a go at doing things they wouldn't normally do. Sometimes it's training on the job and you learn as you go. Sometimes you can work alongside somebody else so they can learn from you. It takes extra time because obviously it's easier just to do it all yourself, but the pay off is that next time you have someone who knows what they're doing and can run with any task you give them.

Obviously any kind of organising needs to allow for flexibility and spontaneity should the unforeseen happen. That's a trick I haven't quite learnt yet. But in the toss-up between structuredness and unstructuredness, I would lean more towards structuredness as the better way of loving your neighbour.

However, I'm not an unstructured person. Perhaps my unstructured spontaneous brothers and sisters have their own thoughts on how unstructuredness can be loving?

Twitter

Blinks:

Feeds

• Full posts
• Full posts and del.icio.us feed
• Excerpts only
• del.icio.us feed only
• All comments

Social media

• Flickr
• Goodreads
• Last FM
• LibraryThing
• Listal
• Pinterest
• Ravelry
• This Is My Jam
• Twitter