Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
Hey there, all your planner-loving, color-coding enthusiasts. Are you putting your organizational skills to good use?
We love organizing our to-dos, our file folders, our colored pens, our days, our weeks, and the list goes on. Organization is one of the biggest keys to success—especially for a busy professional.
Organizational skills are often overlooked in a job interview process. Like other soft or life skills, organizational skills are more of an umbrella set of skills that touch everything. What do I mean by that? Someone with great organization skills isn't just great with scheduling appointments and keeping a clean desk.
Employees with heightened organization skills know where everything is. They are unlikely to arrive late to a meeting or forget an important detail that is key to success.
Table of Contents
- Examples of Organized Employees
- What Are Organizational Skills?
- 10 Key Organizational Skills to Master
Many studies have shown that excessive disorganization and clutter can negatively affect mental well-being, especially in women. While physical clutter can lead to confusion, tension, and irritability, mental clutter is also harmful in the long term. Constant disorganization drains our cognitive resources, reducing our ability to focus and complete tasks.
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Examples of Organized Employees
An organized employee is also dependable, thoughtful, communicative, and detail-oriented. In this article, we're discussing key organizational skills, how to showcase them to employers, and how to become more organized in your day-to-day.
It makes a huge difference. Trust me on this one: I'm a Virgo.
- Organized employees effectively manage their time, prioritize tasks, and meet deadlines consistently.
- They communicate clearly and concisely, ensuring that information is conveyed accurately and understood by others.
- Organized individuals prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance, focusing on high-priority activities first.
- They create detailed plans and schedules to outline their daily, weekly, and long-term goals, helping them stay on track.
- Organized employees maintain a tidy and well-organized workspace, making it easier to locate and access necessary materials.
- They anticipate challenges, proactively identify solutions, and address issues before they escalate.
- Organized individuals are adaptable and can adjust their plans or strategies to accommodate changes in priorities or unexpected events.
- They keep thorough records and documentation of their work, ensuring easy retrieval of information when needed.
- Organized employees follow up on tasks and commitments, ensuring that projects move forward and nothing falls through the cracks.
- They set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals and regularly evaluate their progress towards achieving them.
What Are Organizational Skills?
Organizational skills are the soft skills that eliminate useless distractions so that you, the employee, can stay on top of your tasks, deliver dependable work, and use all of your extra time saved to look ahead.
As mentioned above, being organized is more than keeping a tidy house, so to speak. There are two main types of organizational skills: internal and external.
Internal Organizational Skills
Think of all of the things you worry about daily. These are the messy thoughts that crowd your tired, overworked brain. In these times, it's almost impossible to get productive work done.
Internal organization skills describe how you analyze information, tackle complex problems, and remain composed through stressful moments. Employees with excellent internal organizational skills always appear calm, collected, and prepared to take on any challenge—and they aren't faking it.
Folks with strong internal organizational skills often work hard to keep their mental and emotional well-being in check.
External Organization Skills
The external organization skills describe the physical evidence of an organized employee. This includes that hyper-organized desk, the color-coded calendar, and the exquisite paper planner that the entire team covets.
External organization is more than having the appearance of being organized. Folks who create a visually organized work environment are also more likely to have an internally organized mental environment.
Now, let's talk about what disorganization looks like. Here's an example of how disorganization snowballs.
- Monday: You need to write an email to a potential client that you met at a networking event, but you misplaced their email. So, you reach out to a mutual connection to get the email address.
- Tuesday: Your mutual connection doesn't reply to your email, so you make a note to follow up tomorrow.
- Wednesday: You totally forget to follow up.
- Thursday: You remember to follow up to ask for the email address again.
- Friday: Your connection comes through with an apologetic email, but they give the contact information that you misplaced. The only problem? You should probably wait until Monday to email your new contact.
In this scenario, two disorganized people transformed a small, easy task into a week-long ordeal. Okay, I am being dramatic, but you get the picture. This is a small circumstance in which a small amount of organization would have saved a week of time.
10 Key Organizational Skills to Master
Need to work on some organizational skills? Here are some of the most important organization skills, how they come into play at work, and how you can work to improve your own.
Physical Organization
Physical organization is the visual manifestation of all things orderly. It's the color-coded folders, the to-do lists, daily planners, labels, and a desk miraculously free of clutter.
Physical organization is the outward message that you are, in fact, organized.
How to Show Physical Organization:
- Organize your weekly calendar.
- Clean your workspace, including your desktop files, inbox folders, and any paper materials you might have.
Mental Organization
Mental organization is more than remembering dates and arriving on time. Mental organization likely requires a ton of scheduling, balancing, and special attention to your own mental health. Being mentally organized is key to keeping everything else in line. The most important aspect of maintaining a sound mental togetherness is by prioritizing a healthy work-life balance. This might mean toggling your Slack to OFF when you're home.
It's also creating long-term goals with short-term steps to achieve them. Organize your priorities and progress by re-evaluating them regularly. Re-organize what doesn't work and re-prioritize what leads to success.
How to Show Mental Organization:
- Keep a healthy work-life balance
- Create reminders (daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly) to check in with yourself or with colleagues about work progress.
- Keep an open mind about changing approaches that might not work.
Time Management
Employees with good time management skills can outperform employees who work the same hours (or even more hours) because they work smart. Those with strong time management skills
How to Show Time Management:
- Create an organized calendar that includes everything from heads-down work to downtime.
- Know when to delegate work that is time-consuming and/or not a priority for you.
Communication
Communication is the cornerstone of every successful career. Communication soft skills are the tools you use to clearly and effectively converse with others, set expectations, and work with others on projects. This includes everything from written communication to active listening.
How to Communicate Effectively:
- In written communication, create clarity by using bullet points, clear instructions, and a summary to highlight the main takeaways.
- Make actively listening to your coworkers, employees, or clients part of your weekly routine.
- Take opportunities to enunciate clearly, ask questions, and state your needs and wants at work.
Delegation
Sometimes, it's not about the amount of work you can magically pull off in an eight or ten-hour day. It's about delegating tasks to your team so everyone works to their strengths.
Self-Motivation
Motivation, both intrinsic and extrinsic, is vitally important in the workplace. Self-motivation acts as a kind of guiding light—one that enables you to achieve the seemingly impossible, exceed your goals, and outperform everyone around you. Self-motivation is especially attractive in more self-reliant roles.
How to Show Motivation:
- Learn how to manage up and proactively solve problems for your boss.
- Try mono-tasking or single-tasking instead of spreading your focus and energy too thin with constant multi-tasking.
Prioritization
Prioritization is essential when keeping your work organized, and it encompasses everything from overall workflow management to finding time for the equally important smaller tasks. Here's the thing: Prioritization isn't easy! In fact, in times when an employee has many tasks and responsibilities.
In these cases, many employees find prioritization matrices to be helpful in assigning a level of importance and urgency to a task or responsibility.
How to Show Prioritization:
- Address urgent matters promptly but without sacrificing the importance of strategic tasks.
- Set aside time at the beginning of each week to review and prioritize upcoming tasks.
- Be flexible in scheduling to accommodate unforeseen priorities or changes in project requirements.
Creativity
This last organizational skill presents a chicken and egg conundrum. Does organization foster creativity or vice versa? All I know is that my creativity soars when I feel most organized!
When my brain's resources aren't wrapped up in mile-long to-do lists and other anxieties, I have my best ideas. What's even better than having great ideas? When I feel organized, I have the energy and motivation to implement them.
How to Show Creativity:
- Approach problems with an open mind and a willingness to explore unconventional solutions.
- Establish designated spaces or times for team members to brainstorm and share ideas.
