Chapter 19 It Pays to Travel Light

Now you’re making hay. So far in Part 3, (“Communicating at All Speeds”) you’ve learned how to make big decisions in record time (Chapter 17, “Decision Making: Step it Up and Go!”) and the magic of doing one thing at a time (Chapter 18, “The Art of Concentration”). Now you’re 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 files (and other 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. When I speak to groups, I tell them that once you let go of all that stuff you’re holding onto, you will experience the same reward as a good garage cleaning or unblocking that backed-up plumbing will provide. Freedom!

Conquering the Pack Rat Syndrome

Consider 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 just the beginning. How would your life be if you merged and purged these items on a regular basis as they came into your life? Well, for one thing, you’d have far more time. Why? Because accumulations by nature rob you of your time. First you receive them, then put them somewhere, look at them, move them, attempt to arrange them, file some items, 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 slowing you down. When are the best times to merge and purge what you’ve retained? Try these on for size:

• Anytime you approach a birthday is a good time, 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 Year’s is a good time, especially if it’s the change of a decade, such as the year 2010.
• Merge and purge right after you’ve filed your taxes. If you procrastinate (and a lot of people do when it comes to taxes), not to worry. After you’ve finished filing, there are all kinds of benefits awaiting. For one, you can get rid of most receipts and documents from the tax year three years prior to the one you’ve completed. The law says 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.)
• Spring-cleaning has traditionally been a 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 the movers to haul stuff to your new location that you’re never going to use anyway.
• 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, getting a major raise, and anything on that order—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.
• As you finish reading this particular paragraph, put down the book and actually go ahead and merge and purge in some area of your life. Make it an easy win, something you can tackle and master in 10–15 minutes.

Breaking it All Down

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 holder 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 12 years now, and no one has ever gotten hold of it. The power and efficiency it gives me is awesome. 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. Is this a fabulous time-saver? (Major, major hint: The answer begins with “Y.”)

• 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, watch out—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 need to move things (knowing what you now know) 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?

  Can you consolidate family-related records so that you’re in greater control? For example, all of Johnny’s documents related to grade-school enrollment, immunization, early-school-dismissal policy, and summer camp could be put 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.

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   A Stitch in Time It’s better to keep your car records in your home office if that’s where you make phone calls and payments concerning your car. You can always keep a back-up of much of the documentation discussed here, buried someplace deep in your car’s trunk.

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  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.

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   Time Out! If you’re high on the prospect of streamlining your life, then you’ve got to think about paring a little at a time; there is no other way. You already have a full-time job and a raft of responsibilities.

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  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.

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   A Stitch in Time An easy way to organize lots of little items is to use individual 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.

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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 kill one Saturday morning getting these systems into place, you’ll find that the payoffs come back to you over and over again.

Discard as You Go

Don’t attempt to tackle all arenas of your life on the same Saturday morning. Not only will you not finish, but 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 ready to tackle some other major, intellectual pursuit at the moment, pare your holdings as a form of transition. For example, if you recently finished a big report, can you now delete previous versions on your hard disk? Can you get rid of rough drafts and notes that are no longer applicable (items you’ll never use again)?
• If your plans go awry because it’s raining, the bridge is out, or the plane has been delayed for an hour, pare. Despite the availability of all manner of electronic gadgetry on airplanes, I know high-powered executives who will have none of it. Their seats in airplanes, they tell me, are among the few sanctuaries they have. It’s where they get to open their briefcases and impose some order, merging and purging, updating lists, chucking what’s no longer necessary, and getting that little office-in-the-air back into shape.
• The same holds true if you commute by rail or bus. Use the tiny moments of the day to pare. Instead of lugging around whole issues of Forbes, Business Week, or Working Woman, fly through them like wildfire and extract only the articles that look relevant. Leave the rest for the next passenger, or drop them at the next recycling bin. Stay light.

The Red Tape Demon

A stifling array of government laws and regulations hampers business, allowing the United States to support 70 percent of the world’s lawyers, says Barry Howard Minkin in EconoQuake. Thus, it becomes vitally important for you, a mere pawn in the game of laws and regulations, to keep your own systems as uncomplicated as possible. It won’t be easy; there is a pervasive tendency among organizations and individuals to over-complicate their lives. You can see its effects every time you fill out your tax forms.

Are the forms getting any easier to fill out each year despite the IRS’s long-term commitment to simplifying them, or are they getting more difficult? Have you bought any property recently? Are there more forms, or fewer? Without question, there are more. Some states now have double the number they had 10 years ago.

If you’re an entrepreneur, or if you supervise others, think about the last time you tried to fire someone. Is it getting harder or easier from the standpoint of completing paperwork?

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 Time Out! All too often in the business world, if you can create a new reporting form, you do. Thereafter, it becomes difficult to eliminate. If anything, such forms get longer, more complicated, and more time-intensive.

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Your mission, if you decide to accept it, is to examine the forms you’ve created in your organization, department, or venture, and re-examine them. What can be eliminated? Here are some immediate benefits you might experience from eliminating a single form:

• Paper reduction: Less ordering, fewer costs, less receiving, less handling, and less storing
• Reduced printing and associated costs: Less retrieving, less printer use, less electricity, and lower cartridge and toner costs (or lower outside costs if purchased from a printer or forms vendor)
• Reduced need for storage: Less collecting, less transporting, less storage space used, less employee time used
• Reduced distribution costs and labor: Less retrieving, less disseminating

You’re not the only one who’ll benefit from the elimination of that form. Here’s what you’ll be doing for the people who used to have to fill it out.

• Less writing, less handling, less ink used to complete it
• Less walking, less faxing, and less mailing or e-mailing because there’s no form to have to submit

Finally, there are benefits for the people who used to have to process the form:

• Collecting: Less walking, less opening mail, less handling faxes
• Compiling: Less sorting, less calculating, less totaling
• Reporting: Less writing, less presenting, less mental energy expended

”No” for an Answer: A Parable

I was called once by a marketing representative from a well-established investment company. Usually I listen to them for a minute and then find a polite way to end the conversation. This particular caller seemed to know his subject well, so I listened and even responded. He talked about his company’s various investment options and told me that he could send a brochure listing the 35 different investment vehicles available, plus his company’s annual report and prospectus.

“Wait a second,” I told him, “I have no interest in reading about 35 different investment options. Please, do me and yourself a favor by boiling down your information to a single page. Then send a paragraph on the three options that you think would be best for me.” I also told him I was not going to read his company’s annual report, so there was no reason to send it.

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 A Stitch in Time Now would be an excellent time to sharpen up those skills you’ve learned for dealing with junk mail and managing your correspondence. Chapter 9, “Volunteering a Little Less—and Liking It,” and Chapter 13, “Are You a Slave to Your Beeper?” will give you a refresher course.

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If I liked what he sent me on the single page, I could always get the annual report at another time. I told him that while I’m an MBA, am certified as a management consultant, and have worked with hundreds of companies, “I’m not fond of reading prospectuses, so please don’t send that either.”

At the end of our conversation, I repeated to him that I only needed to see a single page with the three investments he thought were best for me—and perhaps one slim brochure about his company.

Several days passed, and I forgot about the call. When Monday’s mail came, I noticed a thick package from his investment house. I cringed. I opened it, and voilà: a brochure on the 35 investment vehicles, an annual and a quarterly report, the company’s thick prospectus, and other useless brochures and fliers. I grabbed the pile and tried to rip the whole thing with one flick of my wrists, but it was too thick. I tossed it and (rest assured) did not become a client.

If that broker had sent me what I asked for, who knows—I might have made his day.

Keep Only What You Use: The Replacement Principle

When you boil it down, uncomplicating 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).

Table 19.1 The Replacement Principle

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