How to stay organized without reading

Great photo by Moose Photos

​Oooh. Now there’s an intriguing title, isn’t it? Especially if it’s posted by Copel Communications, where we specialize in writing. 
 
How can you say organized without reading? 
 
Think about it. Everything you employ to stay organized—such as calendars, emails, and files—all require reading. Is there some secret trick? 
 
Why it’s hard
 
There are countless articles out there about getting your business organized. And lots of them are self-serving: They’re basically promoting Slack, or Asana, or Evernote, or Things, or Monday, or Trello, or OmniFocus, or Habitica, or Notion, or Todoist, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea. 
 
So we’ll go you one better. Not only will we show you how to get better organized without reading, we’ll also show you how to do it without purchasing any new apps.
 
Take that, Slack! Or Asana. Or Evernote. Or.... well, you get the idea. 
 
What don’t you read?
 
There are basic sensory inputs that you can use, and respond to, which don’t require reading. There are, we suppose, scents. Or even tastes. But we’re not going to suggest lemon-flavored sticky notes. (Do those even exist?) 
 
Stay with us on this. (If you’re not ahead of us already.) 
 
There are sounds. Come to think of it, you already rely on a ton of these all the time. There are alerts for every time you get a text message. Or an email. And of course when your phone rings. There are even little sound effects embedded within LinkedIn: when you successfully make a post or reach out to a connection, you'll hear a little click or warble. 
 
Conceivably, you could use sounds to help you get organized; you could create your own, and link them to certain events, and spend you day, Pavlov-like, waiting for the next ding.
 
Naaah. That ain’t it. 
 
There are also tactile cues. If you have low vision, you may already rely on a Braille reader. Your phone likely has haptic feedback: When you type or select an icon, you can feel a little click or buzz to help reinforce the action. 
 
That’s good. It’s out there. But it’s not something you’ll create yourself. 
 
Which leaves one more choice. 
 
The universal language
 
The Big Element here is color.
 
It’s so simple. Yet so astonishingly under-used for productivity purposes. 
 
We learned about this trick decades ago, in which someone we respected used different-colored index cards to create a project. All the things relating to Topic A would be yellow, and all the things relating to Topic B would be blue. 
 
When this person put the deck in order, they could easily see, simply by looking at the stack of cards, how evenly divided the project was between Topics A and B. 
 
Brilliant. 
 
Picture that: A little deck of cards, sitting atop a desk. You look at the stack, and if there’s a big cluster of blue in there, you’d know the project needed adjusting. 
 
And you'd never read a word. Even though each index card was covered with words. 
 
Now fast-forward from the age of index cards, to the days of mobile devices and computers. 
 
Some of this you may be doing already. But there are opportunities to expand on this. 
 
Your calendar program—whatever it is—lets you create categories, and assign colors to them. So if, say, your “Personal” category is blue, and your “Work” category is green, you can see your work-life balance when you simply zoom out to the week, month, or year view. You'd never read a single word. 
 
And you can add categories that are similarly color-coded. We know a guy (admittedly an old-fashioned one) who sets his daughter’s category in pink, and his son’s in blue. (His wife? Purple. Stuff he hates doing? Brown.)
 
Read without reading
 
Here’s another. In Word (or any word processor, for that matter), you can set text in different colors. You’ve surely used red to call out important stuff. 
 
But we’ll also use colors like gray to denote work-in-progress passages that likely will get deleted later, or simply pastes of source material, to set them apart from the passages we’re actively working on. 
 
Again, like a calendar, you can zoom out—to the point where the text is too small to read. Which is what you want! Like our old friend with the deck of index cards, you can see how a Word doc is stacking up, in terms of its content balance. 
 
Mac-specific tricks
 
Here at Copel Communications, we use Macs. So here are some tricks you can employ if you use them, too. (There are likely Windows analogs for everything we’re about to suggest here.) 

• Icon labels. Apple now calls them “Tags,” but they’re basically little colored dots you can assign to any item in the Finder. The great thing is that you can instantly sort items by tag. We’ll often use this when searching through tons of stock photos for an assignment. If something is really good, it’s “red” hot. If it’s almost as good, it’s orange. If it’s pretty good, it’s yellow. Below that, we don’t assign colors. But after searching through scores of stock photos, it’s great to sort the downloaded samples by assigned color tag, so all the best ones float up to the top, properly ranked in groups. 

 

• Desktop backgrounds. Here’s a simple way to stay organized, on-the-fly, during the work day. Include a photo, for each client, within their client folder, and name it “Desktop Background for Client A.” Pick a photo that’s relevant to what they do; sometimes you can simply use their logo. Then assign that photo as the Desktop Background on the Mac, and use one for each desktop, client-by-client. Then when you zoom out in Exposé mode (do they still call it that?), you’ll be able to quickly see which desktop belongs to which client, without the need to recognize any of the open windows on that desktop, nor without having to memorize the “Desktop 1” or “Desktop 2” name which the Mac arbitrarily assigns to it. 

 
These are just a few tricks. Do you have others to share? Contact us. We’d love to learn them!

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