Are you ready to learn about merging and purging – clearing out what you don’t need so you can have more of a “life” each day?

Merging and purging the things you’re hanging on to is more than good housekeeping; it’s an emerging discipline among winners in society today. It’s essential because even with all the new high-tech tools, paper will continue to mushroom for the foreseeable future. Once you let go of all that stuff you’re holding on to, you’ll experience the same reward as a good garage cleaning or unblocking that backed-up plumbing will provide.

The Benefits of Paring Down

Contemplate all you encounter in the course of a day, week, month, and year: faxes, memos, reports, newspapers, newsletters, bulletins, magazines, bills, calendars, promotional items – and that’s only the beginning. How would your life be if you merged and purged these items on a regular basis as they came into your life?

You’d have far more time. Why? Because accumulations by nature rob you of your time. First you acquire them, then handle them, look at them, move them, attempt to arrange them, file some, discard others, try in vain to find the items you need, and then put up your hands and say, “I can’t win.”

You know you’re hanging onto too much stuff, and it’s weighing you down. When are the best times to merge and purge what you’ve retained? Try these on for size:

• When you approach a birthday, particularly a zero-year birthday. If you’re about to hit 40, this is one of the great times in life to get rid of the stuff you no longer need. Age 30, age 50, and age 60 work as well.
• New Years is a good time, especially if it’s the change of a decade.
• Spring cleaning is good time for clearing out the old and making room for the new. The arrival of fall (toward the end of the summer around Labor Day) works as well.
• Merge and purge when you move. There’s no sense in paying movers to haul marginal “stuff” to your new location.
• When you change jobs or careers, you’ll have to clean out your old desk at work. That’s usually a given.
• Passing one of life’s milestones – the birth of a child, the death of a parent, graduation, retirement, or getting a major raise – can often serve as a reminder to re-examine what you’re retaining. Rearrange your affairs to accommodate the new you.
• Any time the spirit moves you is a good time to merge and purge.

Merge and purge right after you’ve filed your taxes. If you procrastinate — and who doesn’t? After you’ve finished filing, there are benefits accruing. For one, you can get rid of most receipts and documents from the tax year three years prior to the one you’ve completed. You have to hang on to the forms filed, but not the nitty-gritty details. (If you’ve been audited, or if you anticipate problems with the IRS, that’s a different story.)

Case by Case

When you don’t feel in control of your time, everything in your life may seem as if it’s running together into one big blur. Thus, the easiest way to approach merging and purging is to examine the most important compartments of your life one at a time. Examine your desk and what needs to be there, then your entire office, then where you live, your car, and other important areas of your life. Here are some suggestions:

• Do you have a file folder, a notebook, or a magazine box where you keep all travel-related materials? This might include booklets on hotel and air fares, frequent-flyer numbers, passports, numbers for taxis and other transportation, and vacation club folders. I keep such phone and membership numbers in one long file on my hard disk; a print-out in a small point size tucks into my portable appointment calendar. Wherever I am, day or night, I have the information I need.
  
  I’ve maintained such a list for more than 15 years, and no one has ever gotten hold of it. The power and efficiency it gives me is tremendous . Whether I’m at an airport, in a taxi, at a hotel, or in a phone booth, I have all the phone numbers, membership numbers, card numbers, codes, and everything else I need to stay efficiently in motion. You easily can do the same with a palm top.


• You can undertake the same type of exercise in merging and purging items at your desk when it comes to key service providers, records related to your automobile, insurance forms and policies, banking information, and other areas where efficiency matters. In all cases, it takes a little time to merge and purge what you’ve retained and get it into a streamlined, highly useable form. Once you do, your efficiency level will soar.


• The same maneuvers can be undertaken around your office. What can be consolidated, reduced, eliminated, relocated, or donated? Is your office configuration serving you best? Do you now need to move things to improve your daily efficiency? Can hard-copy items be scanned to see if they’re now on disk and you no longer need the hard copy? If you have four stacking trays, can you reduce the number to three? Do you even need an in-basket anymore?


• At home, if you maintain a desk or any type of home office, reapply all these methods and go a step further. For example, could you use a 31-day tickler file in your home desk as well as the one you use in your office? If you use scheduling software at work, do you need to update your system at home?

2-4-6-8 What Can You Consolidate?

Can you consolidate family-related records so that you’re in greater control? For example, all of Tommy’s documents related to grade-school enrollment, immunization, early-school-dismissal policy, and summer camp could be kept in the same three-ring binder. All records related to your car (purchase documents, registration, tax information, inspections passed, repair records, special installations such as a CD player, and so on) could fit into one file.

Your car is also an important area of your life and, based on what may have accumulated, requires merging and purging as well:

• Can you get all your credit cards, library cards, and the like into a secondary wallet to be hidden someplace in the car? I do this rather than carrying a wallet with 25 different cards in it. Why? Because at any given moment, the only cards I actually need are my driver’s license, one ATM card, and one credit card.
  
  Anytime I might use one of the other cards, I’m usually with my car. By safely stashing the cards I would only use with my car someplace within the car, I free myself from carrying all of them. This has several time-saving advantages. One, you’re less likely to lose a majority of your cards if you lose your wallet. Two, it’s far easier to find your license, major credit card, and ATM card if they are the only ones you carry in your wallet.
  
  As a safeguard, you might want to copy all your credit cards and library cards on a copier, and keep a backup sheet at home and hidden in your car. (If cars disappear frequently in your neighborhood, skip this one!)


• I also find it a great time-saver to have all my maps in one place, within reach while driving. I use side pockets built into the driver’s-side and passenger’s-side front doors. You may use your glove compartment, a compartment between your two front seats, the trunk, or whatever space you have. Essentials such as car registration and proof of ownership stay snug at the bottom of my glove compartment.


• An easy way to organize lots of little items is to use individual buy diazepam safely envelopes, small plastic sandwich bags, or clear zip-lock baggies. This enables you to see what’s inside and keeps the items dry and together.

Your Possessions and Your Time

Half the trouble of staying in control of your time is staying in control of your possessions. Let’s face it, there’s so much you have to keep tabs on that merging and purging could almost be a full-time job. If you’re willing to occasionally consume one Saturday morning getting these systems into place, you’ll find that the payoffs come back to you over and over again.

Don’t attempt to tackle all arenas of your life on the same Saturday morning. You won’t finish and the process itself may scare you away for a year or more. Try these ways to cut down a little at a time without breaking your stride:

• Anytime you’re waiting for someone at work, at home, or in your car, use the extra few minutes to pare something where you are. If you have to drive your children around town a lot, after a few days you ought to have your car’s glove compartment and trunk whipped into shape.


• When you’ve finished a big project at work and you’re not yet ready to tackle some other major, intellectual pursuit, pare your holdings as a form of transition. For example, if you’ve finished a big report, can you delete previous versions on your hard drive? Can you chuck rough drafts and notes that are no longer needed?

Un-complicating your own systems is synonymous with getting into a replacement mode. When you take in something new, something else has to go. Table 16.1 offers some everyday examples of non-replacement policies (left column) contrasted with replacement policies (right column).

If you’re not constantly reducing what you hold on to, you’re at the mercy of an era that keeps offering more than you can respond to. Seize control of your time–merge and purge and then go splurge!

Traveling Light in Actual Traffic

The bad news about traffic in most urban and suburban areas is that it continues to get worse. there may be no meaningful solutions for another decade or more. All the prognostications about people telecommuting and using video phones and wall-size screens to conduct conferences with participants at remote locations simply haven’t panned out to any significant degree.

In most metro areas, progression into the downtown centers is still essentially a one-way flow in at the beginning of the day and a one way flow out at the end of the day. I have been self-employed since 1984, so I have been out of the traffic loop for a long time. When I was mired in it, I couldn’t believe that anyone would ever endure it for the duration of his or her career. I knew I wouldn’t.

In my last job before becoming self-employed, I actually moved across the street from my office. I lived in a high-rise building, and my balcony was literally in sight of most of the peer group with which I worked. However, no one actually figured out that my condo was at that location. So, even sitting out on the balcony at 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. for years never resulted in being spotted by a coworker. All the while, however, I had a four-minute commute to the office, and that was on a bad day.

Expect delays. Delays are now the norm in our society, especially when it comes to travel. This is an unfortunate aspect of our social evolution. Delays are costly in numerous respects to you, the individual being delayed; the carrier or transportation provider; and the environment as oil and gasoline are burned that aren’t resulting in forward motion.

Airport congestion continues to grow abominably worse. Except for a few notable exceptions such as the Denver airport, which is located so far from town you have to add another hour onto both ends of your trip, there has been little development of significance throughout the U.S. Consumer protests have left a lasting impression on the airlines that are scrambling to find ways to maintain any semblance of customer service. They have voluntarily prepared an airline customer’s “bill of rights,” but on any given day, you are likely to experience delays, frustrations, and confusion along with hundreds of your fellow passengers.

Conventional wisdom used to be that time spent commuting by bus, rail, or even plane essentially was lost time. You could do some light reading, but between passing cups down the aisles, trying to keep from bumping into other passengers, and simply having a pleasant journey, no heavy-duty assignments could be tackled. Increasingly, however, all commuting time is fair game for getting serious work done. Can you be effective and still travel light? You bet!

If you are just boarding a short flight, with your palm top, you can dial up and download your e-mail just before getting on the plane–no papers, no wires, very little weight. During the flight, you can answer all e-mails, sending them to the outbox. You can read correspondence, correct it, make notes, add to a database, calculate complex cash flow analysis with spreadsheet software, listen to a lecture, you name it. The moment you step off the plane, you can send all your e-mail, pick up any new e-mail, and answer calls.

In actuality, there is no need for lugging weighty work loads or incurring long bouts of lost time anymore; it’s a traveler’s choice. The key, of course, in every travel encounter, is desire and preparation. What do you want to get done, and will you take the time and energy to assemble the tools that will ensure your high productivity? For the seasoned traveling business executive, this is a no-brainer. If you’re just starting to travel for business, a new world of efficiency awaits.

In any case, always bring precisely what you need to be at your working best. I find checklists to be extremely handy. For example, before I leave for a speaking engagement, I use a checklist so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time, racking my brain to determine if I have brought everything I need.

The Ever-Powerful Palmtop

As we proceed into the future, capabilities of your palmtop will likely expand unabated, and hence it will become even more useful while traveling. Increasing numbers of Internet sites will be available and the speed and flexibility with which you can send and receive e-mail will increase. Powerful palm tops can contain huge data bases, scheduling software, spreadsheet software, and other key applications that will only become easier to use and more efficient. Therein lies the trap. If you are undisciplined, it is easy to fall prey to:

• checking and rechecking for e-mail all day long,
• surfing sites when there is other important work to be done, and
• using other components and capabilities of wireless technology for that which does not support your career or long-term prosperity.

Hence, handheld devices can be the antithesis of effective time management. It all depends on how you use them.

To Summarize:

• Merging and purging what you’re retaining is an emerging discipline among winners in society today.
• The best times to pare are a birthday, a change of year or season, one of life’s milestones, or anytime you have the spirit to do so.
• Pare a little at a time; biting off too much may tempt you to think the situation is hopeless when it’s not.
• Examine your work environment to determine what forms can be eliminated. It all counts.
• Un-complicate your own systems by not volunteering to be inundated by junk mail and irrelevant stuff; rely on the replacement principle.