I’m an Organizing Junkie is home to Menu Plan Monday. I truly believe that menu planning is one of the best places to start in your quest to get organized. Each week over 200 ladies share what’s on their menus for the week and we’d love to have you join us! It’s a wonderful opportunity to keep your menu planning efforts on track week after week not to mention the many great ideas and recipes that come from reading the menus of the many other participants.

John Meyer is a professor of sociology (and by courtesy, education) emeritus, at Stanford; a faculty member at CDDRL; and a senior fellow, by courtesy, at FSI. He received his PhD from Columbia University, and taught there for several years before coming to Stanford. His research has focused on the spread of modern institutions around the world, and their impact on national states and societies. He is particularly interested in the spread and impact of scientific activity, and in the expansion and standardization of educational models.

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a 'structureless' group. Any group of people of whatever nature coming together for any length of time, for any purpose, will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible, it may vary over time, it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities and intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals with different talents, predisposition's and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate 'structurelessness' and that is not the nature of a human group.

And the work is: Only Collect; that is to say, collect everything, indiscriminately. You’re five years old. Don’t presume too much to know what’s important and what isn’t. Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read, even if it’s just one line saying “Never read this again”; collect newspaper clippings and email them to yourself; collect quotes; save your ideas for future papers, future projects, future conferences, even if they seem wildly implausible now. Hoarding must become instinctual, it must be an uncontrollable, primal urge. And the higher, civilizing impulse that kicks in after the fact is organization, or librarianship. You must keep tabs on everything you collect, somehow; a system must be had, and the system must be idiot-proof. That is to say, you should be able to look back on it six months for now and not be completely stymied as to why you’ve organized things that way.

lecture at umich, plus book search on his new book (note to self figure out how I did this embedded text search and do it again)

Graphic Organizers that Support Specific Thinking Skills. Structures for capturing data that map to specific evaluation, generation, or decision making efforts. (or, why you should never trust anyone who only thinks in a spreadsheet)

Forty years ago, Walter Pauk (1989) developed what is known as the Cornell notetaking technique to help Cornell University students better organize their notes. Today, Pauk's notetaking technique is probably the most widely used system throughout the United States.

Pauk outlines six steps in the Cornell notetaking system:

Record
Reduce (or question)
Recite
Reflect
Review
Recapitulate
Sample

this would be something to show to hawk

Discardia is celebrated by getting rid of stuff and ideas you no longer need. It's about letting go, abdicating from obligation and guilt, being true to the self you are now. (dinah's holiday)

Because the map shows networks rather than hierarchical standing, it is innately more community-enabling than a list, which automatically orders people into rankings or disconnected categories.

how to organize online, derived from community organizing efforts

Three basic steps can help make your practice more efficient and less stressful: (1) organizing your desk, office and practice; (2) implementing uniform systems to ensure accuracy; and (3) avoiding inattentiveness due to familiarity and routine work.

some quotes from the net re Karl Weick's "small wins" observation

Specifically, I would suggest that the effective organization is garrulous, clumsy, superstitious, hypocritical, monstrous, octopoid, wandering, and grouchy.

Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man’s odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity

Jason, two words for you: "Typer Shark". It will entertain Ollie too.

some notes on page design, as written in my pocket notebook. one of my most popular pages on flickr.

awesome collection of ways to visualize a problem or a result

Process this pile from the top down. Never re-sort, never skip a single piece of paper, never put a piece of paper back on the pile. Do what needs to be done with that paper, and then move on to the next in the pile. The options: trash it, delegate it, fi

for the individual researcher, classification is an endless and fruitless task

The Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule, basically says that in any pursuit, 80 percent of the consequences stem from 20 percent of the causes. Read through your to-do lists and bring to the top the items that will have the biggest impact on your overall

the more organized you are, the more likely you are to have a date night.

Now you understand the other thing I do in the first 10 minutes of any standing meeting: I think about how I can kill it.

I love the challenge of making products that will help women get organized and that will really mean something to them. There is no greater high than when people write or call and say they love our products.

My friend Ed knows that we are planning to move (soon, I hope!), so he sent me this Moving.kit to help me with the planning. It's the brain child of the folks at buttoned up -- a company that sells beautifully designed, and totally usable organizational t

The Prelinger Library is a small privately owned "public library" in San Francisco with the unique philosophy that browsing library stacks can reveal new knowledge, if the books are arranged for browsing. This is counter to most public libraries who rely

A public library in Arizona is the first in the nation to abandon the Dewey Decimal system. They've replaced it with something humans can actually browse. One of the librarians points out something we've all know for years: "People think of books by subje

the binder has a number of sections and forms to help you get your finances, insurance, emergency contacts, legal matters and other stuff organized,

buttoned up's myspace page w/interviews

Now I have discovered what should be every mom's new tool. It is called the Life.doc Your life buttoned up. It hold so much household information about you, the kids, and the property. It is great.

interview with Ann Arbor owner of Buttoned Up, personal organizer tools available at Target

Here’s the really cool part: I’m giving away a Life.doc binder to ONE lucky reader. To enter the drawing, simply leave a comment. The drawing is open to residents of the United States and Canada. I’ll randomly select a winner on Wednesday. GOOD LUCK

suggest this as a routine for people who must spend their days in front of a computer and want to accomplish more: Divide your day into online and offline. Studies have consistently shown that people with more screens open get less done. Multitasking slow

family binder / family planner notebook howto

the life.doc binder from Buttoned Up (available at Target) does exactly this

The founders of Buttoned Up Inc., a company that sells items like binders to help people organize their important papers, pitches their products through weekly advice columns in local papers with tips on how to overcome "organizational inertia," and how t

This binder, made by Buttoned Up, Inc., contains eight sections: Emergency Plan, Family Basics, In Sickness & In Health, Insurance, Dollars & Sense, Legal Ease, Caregiver Information, and Home Sweet Home. It comes with a CD-rom that allows you to key in t

They've created simple tool kits for everything from moving homes to getting your life's essentials organized, all in one spiffy binder. The Life.doc binder in particular is great for new parents, helping you to gather your insurance information, emergenc

tags in shopping space

Every successful organization—from a baseball team to a Fortune 500 company--has its leaders, its behind-the-scenes worker bees, its savvy strategists who excel at their jobs. They are the “go-to” people when something needs to get done. Business

This shelf was organized by my girlfriend in a fit of spring cleaning. She doesn't really know much about the content of these books, wasn't interested in finding out, and so used the easiest organization method available -- by color.

yet another gtd app.

most popular kaizen article in delicious

wobblies organizing the business school

writing for Lou

organizations create software systems that mimic their own organizational structures. is this part of systemantics? must look.

software reflects the organizational structure of the groups that produced it. originally from 1968

flash based task tracker

ikea cable basket for detangling cords.

moral: don't just throw out accumulated clutter, because there may be some treasure in it.

A couple of months ago, Jane M. Von Bergen, a longtime reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, set out to clean her cubicle and get organized -- in print. Her desk at the newspaper was, well, a mess.

well, spring must be in the air, because it's clearly spring cleaning time. a blog.

the observation that's key is that some set of things you own are worth less than the shelf space needed to store them.

on watching someone reach an aha moment as a result of your guidance

use clear envelopes, so you never have to label anything.

on conference organization

wiki page on cornell notes

todo: update the page with a scan of a notebook

How I fill up pages in my paper notebooks, and the difficulty of capturing that paper electronically

quarterly get-rid-of-things holiday starts each solstice and equinox