Work Daze

Spring has sprung, but don’t expect a lot of poetic blather about butterflies and buttercups. The only signs of Spring I recognize from my windowless cubical in the dark recesses of the middle-management maze are the sneezes and sniffles from my co-workers as the corporate air conditioner filters out the fresh air, while pumping our workplace full of pollen.

Still, I would be lying if I said that the change in seasons had no effect. As if by magic, when the snow on the boss’s putting green starts to melt, signaling the return of the vice presidents from their winter hideaways in Bermuda and Hawaii, I find myself moving into total spring-cleaning mode.

And why, in spring, does a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of dumpsters? Blame it on the brain which, sensing the onset of winter, turns up its neural receptors, the better to take in all the stimulation available and thereby resist our body’s innate tendency to hibernate.

Unfortunately, for many of us, the stimulation available is not sufficient, and despite our best attempt to tantalize and energize our brain cells with repeated viewings of the “O.C.” and “Gilmour Girls,” the need to hibernate wins out. [If someone can tell me what happened in our office between November 15 and February 22, please immediately email to the address below.]

When winter ends and the sun returns, our neural receptors red line and we launch into the annual and familiar spring frenzy of mating, or, if we’re married, cleaning. But how exactly do you tackle the mountains of paper that have piled up on your desk since you last attempted to organize your work life, which probably occurred during the Presidency of Grover Cleveland? And how will your manager react when you explain that you have entered a new realm of efficiency by getting rid of useless time-wasters, like your telephone and your computer?

These are exactly the questions in a survey fielded by the helpful folks at Pendaflex to introduce their new PileSmart product line. Targeted at “pilers” (those who pile their paperwork rather than file it), Pendaflex surveyed the administrative assistants of important executives at Fortune 500 companies to learn their secrets for success—assuming you define success as being an underpaid lackey for a corporate wind-bag.

What could you learn from these highly organized individuals? Pull up a file folder and let’s get started.

1. Tackle a tickle

Fill a file draw with 31 file folders, one for each day of the month. This will not only help sales at Pendaflex, but will help you know when specific projects should be tackled. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for months which don’t have 31 days, like February, which has about six days, I believe, and June, when other people get vacations, and which lasts for 93 days. On the positive side, the tickler system will help you determine exactly how late you are with your assignments, and that should be good for a laugh.

2. Reference this

According to the assistants, “reference books are a great way to stay organized and a unique scrapbook of your career.” Items to keep in your reference book are phone logs, memos and contact info. Nice idea, and in later years, if it doesn’t make your heart sing with emotional memories of your time with your boss, it will be invaluable when you blackmail the creep.

3. No pop-ins

Rather than constantly popping in on your boss, the executive assistants suggest you “keep a running list of the questions and comments as they occur to you.” You would use this list for an end-of-the-day meeting to tidy up trifling issues too unimportant to interrupt your lord and master, like “Your fly is unzipped,” “You’re wearing one black shoe and one brown shoe,” or “Your new Jaguar is on fire.”

4. KISS

Truer words were never surveyed: “When it comes to working with your boss, make things as simple as humanly possible.” The assistants suggest using colors to help simplify the process, like red for urgent, and yellow for medium-priority tasks, and blue for “cold” files. Clearly, this is far too complicated for the average boss, who, when seeing a red file, would likely implode with fear and trepidation. I suggest you simply burn all your files. That’s the kind of forward-looking employee every executive wants, and wouldn’t all that empty file space make a wonderful location for hibernation when winter rolls around again?