Posted by Rich Stewart on May 16, 1999 at 11:17:01:
Hello--I hope this is not completely inappropriate,
but I need help badly, and maybe you can point me in
the right direction.
First of all, and this is why I don't know if I should
be bothering you, I'm not an entrepreneur or even a
partner or manager in a small business--I'm a mid-level
manager in a big urban library--a very bureaucratic
setting.
Second, I'm afraid I don't fit one of the basic
assumptions that all "getting organized" books and
programs seem to make: that you're already successful
and doing things well, but just need to fine-tune.
The sad fact is, while I'm not dumb, I've never in my
48 years been good at organizing my time or my work
and as a consequence have never really reached my
potential. Over the past year in particular, partly
because I was stretched so thin with part-time jobs
that I was half asleep much of the time, I made some
big mistakes related to follow-up and the organization
of my time and work, and while I have started to turn
things around, right now my career is on the line.
In some ways, I think I'll do OK, though of course
once you have a really bad patch in your files, it
haunts you forever. I've cut back my outside work (and
hope I'll still manage to cover the bills), and just
being fairly rested and alert makes a huge difference.
But I'm still (naturally, I guess) a bit apprehensive.
I don't know if someone my age can really go from being
a flat-out failure at organizing to being fairly
functional, and I don't know if this is an appropriate
resource for me to be consulting (part of the problem
being that the bureaucratic setting strongly rewards
linear, left-brain approaches, and I'm trying to fit
my own weird and, so far, not very effective mix of
left- and right-brain approaches into this structure).
Sorry this is so long--as I said, my problems may be
just completely outside the scope of this forum. But if
you do have any ideas (early retirement? learn urban
foraging techniques and cardboard-shelter
construction?), I'd be glad to hear them.
Thanks in advance--this looks like a really fine
resource.