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DISORGANIZED ORGANIZER SPREADS GOSPEL OF SIMPLICITY 

By Polly Summar
of the Albuquerque Journal

Liz Davenport has five cats, two dogs, 10 finches, four hens and a rooster. The walls in her North Valley home and office range from shades of cantaloupe to chartreuse, and a china cabinet stuffed to the gills sits next to her desk. This does not seem like the home of an organizational consultant — someone dedicated to getting rid of clutter and creating order from chaos. It seems much too warm and cozy and alive. But Liz Davenport is living proof that unruly creative types can get organized, and she wants to spread the gospel. "The thing is: Organized people cannot tell disorganized people how to be organized," she says. "They're two different species." And Davenport has figured out the system. "I'm the disorganized organizer," says the 5-foot-9-inch brunette. "I'm just like my clients." Now ... how could that be? Most disorganized types can't wade through the piles of clutter in their junk rooms — er, home offices — much less tell anyone else how to get organized. But Davenport, 48, was born legally blind. "My vision is 23/60," she says. "What most people can see at a quarter of a mile, I can't see until I'm 20 feet away from it." As a child, she couldn't tell her Lincoln Logs from her Tinker Toys when they were scattered on the floor of her room. "So I always put my toys away," she says. "I had to have a home for everything or else I couldn't find it again. I can't 'look' for stuff. 'Looking' is a learned skill." A correct diagnosis of her condition wasn't made until she was 30, when contacts helped correct her vision. Still, to read something, she has to hold the text 8 inches from her nose. But while her vision may be a bit fuzzy, her mission is not. Today, those organizational skills she first learned in her bedroom have grown and developed into expertise that she uses to whip into shape clients that range from Intel and Coldwell Banker to your next-door neighbor in his home office "I just do offices," she says. "If you try to organize homes, you get into marital issues, family issues and then family-of-origin issues — they refuse to pick up after themselves because their mother made them do it." 

Defining goals
The first thing she asks all her clients is: "Why am I here? What isn't working for you?" And the strategy has paid off. Davenport has parlayed her one-woman company, Order from Chaos, into a Web site (orderfromchaos.com) with related products for sale, classes that she's taught to more than 10,000 people and now, a just released book, "Order from Chaos: A 6-Step Plan for Organizing Yourself, Your Office, and Your Life." It's just that kind of fast-paced creativity that can cause organizational disasters. "Those of us who are disorganized are creative genuises," she says. "We are great optimists — we think we can run back to our offices and do everything in 60 seconds and then we don't. We go off and chase the next wild hair." Taming her own creativity was something that happened gradually. As the child of a professional secretary and an artillery and tactics instructor in the U.S. Army ("he taught the fusiliers, those guys who marched and twirled guns — we called them Daddy's 'hup-hup' boys"), Davenport admits she may have had an edge on the subject of organization. But her parents simply expected her to explore and embrace life. "I just think it's in my DNA," she says. "Both of my parents were the only members of their families to leave their hometowns." Her mother, who died last year, was lauded in her obituary as "the heart and the historian" of the State Bar of New Mexico, where she had worked for more than 25 years. Davenport was a talented artist even as youngster — a pursuit she still follows today as a fine artist in watercolor and oils — and she continues to seriously explore fields that capture her interest like astrology and tarot. After dropping out of the University of New Mexico during her first semester, Davenport logged stints as a pizza delivery person, professional dancer, cocktail waitress, bartender, hostess and artist's model. She also raised cotton and milo on a 750-acre farm in Deming, owned a Laundromat and, with her dad, a detail shop.

Changing direction
After she was laid off at Intel, and then rehired there as a consultant, she went into business as a free-lance project management trainer for other companies, continuing to work for Intel and other companies throughout the country. And then, in '93, two things happened that made her think of changing her business. "My father died and my mother wasn't comfortable with me flying all over the country," says Davenport. At the same time, a good friend of hers, Loralee Makela, a feng shui practitioner, was working with an organization consultant who moved away. "I told her, 'Liz, you'd be good at that,' '' Makela recalls, adding that she thought Davenport would be great with clients. "She's funny and very flamboyant and very practical." So Davenport called up the consultant to confer and came to the same conclusion. And now Davenport and Makela often refer clients to each other. "If somebody says, 'I don't like to be at my desk,' I might pull out my feng shui info and see if maybe it should be facing a different direction," says Davenport. "If that doesn't work for them, I might refer them to Loralee." Makela, in turn, may see a client whose clutter seems out of control and suggest Davenport's help. Davenport recognizes that different strokes work for different folks. "The great thing about hiring women who are in their 40s," she says, "is that you not only get their technical wisdom, you get their life wisdom." Hiring Davenport is like getting an earth mother to hold your hand, while calmly pointing out your blind spots. She once suggested to a client, whose office was piled high with notebooks, that a bookcase might be in order. "She said, 'Omigod! You're a genius!' I felt guilty for charging her." Her "spousal unit," as he calls himself, Bob Tierney, says he was never surprised by Davenport's success in business. "She has a charm, a drive," says Tierney. "All good minds have this underlying drive to be the best and go from there." Today, Davenport feels she has hit upon the thing, the talent, she has to contribute to the world. "My mission is to increase people's productivity while decreasing their stress," she says. She keeps a bust of Nostradamus in the place of spirituality and knowledge, per feng shui, on a tall cabinet behind her desk. "He's a symbol to me to not be too attached to anything I'm doing," she says. "If you're going to be successful in business, you have to stay on the bleeding edge of what's going on." Davenport thinks that in time, the business of organizing will be called the simplicity movement. "And in a sense, that's what I'm doing now," she says, "telling people how to simplify their lives."

EFFICIENCY BEGINS WITH A CLEAN DESK

By Lynn Ruth Miller

Do not squander time,
For that’s the stuff life is made of.
--Benjamin Franklin

   Eight a.m. Monday morning. You arrive early at the office so you can get that letter out to the big account in Denver. That’s the one you meant to do on Friday but the telephone rang off the hook and then you had that big presentation to send to the client in Monterey that couldn’t wait any longer. You grab a cup of coffee and sit down at your desk. The folder with all the information in it was right next to your in- box when you finally got out of the office at seven o’clock Friday night. You reach for it, but it isn’t there. It must be under all those papers you ran off from the web for the Monterey event. No. It isn’t there. Well, maybe it slipped behind the basket and is under that other pile; the one with the envelopes; and the solicitations from the non-profits. No. It isn’t there, either. 

   You don’t remember filing it but maybe you did. You yank open the file drawer but just as you suspected the Denver folder isn’t there. It isn’t behind the file cabinet either or next to the water cooler. Maybe you took it with you when you went to the bathroom . . . OH,NO! If you did THAT, the custodian would have thrown it away by now. You shuffle through every paper on your desk, look on the floor under it, run out to the kitchen where you made your make shift dinner last Friday and then began going through every paper in the file cabinet. It is now 10:30 a.m. and you still haven’t found the folder. Now, what do you do?

   YOU STOP. You look at the chaos on your desk and you decide that NOW has to be the time to get organized. In fact, you should have done this months ago but so many new projects came pouring into your in box, pushed at you on your e-mail, jangled your nerves on the telephone, that you just never got around to it. It’s too late now for Denver. You actually made a mess of Monterey as well because you had lost half the file. “The average business person receives 190 pieces of information each day . . . and wastes 150 hours just looking for stuff,” said Liz Davenport, author of ORDER FROM CHAOS: Six Steps to Organizing Yourself and Your Business, published last year by Random House. “Add ten hours to that and it equals an entire month’s work hours. Just think how much more you could get done if you got organized.”

   We all know that we could work more efficiently if our desks were in order, but very few of us are willing to take the time to get it that way. Instead, we have many organizing systems going on at once: one for our computer material, one for dealing with the mail, one in our calendar and one for meetings and conferences. The problem is that these systems don’t always work as well as they should and they often overlap. There are categories that either fit in several slots or none at all. “What everyone needs is one, simple easy to maintain system, “ said Davenport. “Until you have that, attempting to clean off your desk will only thwart, exhaust and annoy you.”
If you have only one system of organization, you don’t have to make thousands of decisions every time a paper crosses your desk. Instead, the minute you get record a call or receive a letter you know just where to file it. It has only one home in only one place and that home is NOT on your desk blotter. 

   “You need to change the way you think about those 190 pieces of incoming information,”said Davenport. “The biggest mistake disorganized folks make is believing there is a later. All the things we optimistically put off till later end up just laying there for days, weeks, months or years.”

   All right. If there is no later, you need to start figuring out a good system right NOW. Where do you begin? 
You begin by organizing what Davenport has labeled THE COCKPIT OFFICE. “I recommend spending at least one week accomplishing each step in my six step plan, but I don’t care how long it takes to do them,” said Davenport. “This is a very simple system for business people that works for everyone.“

   What is the COCKPIT OFFICE? It is a method of setting up the tools and files you use based on frequency of use. You arrange the things you use daily within immediate reach, the things you address weekly an arms length away and the rest in files you need to stand up to retrieve. “If you follow this plan, you never have to interrupt yourself,” said Davenport. “Remember, every time you leave your chair, you will be gone an average of TWENTY minutes and frequently return having done everything BUT get whatever you left for in the first place.”

   No one in business will disagree with Davenport’s theory. But few are willing to force themselves to implement it. “We get so caught up in the feeding frenzy of other people‘s emergencies that we don’t take the time needed to create an effective workspace for ourselves,” said Davenport. “If people follow my plan, I guarantee they will save an hour EVERY SINGLE DAY and will alleviate much of the stress caused by always searching for things they cannot find.” 

   The whole idea of the cockpit office is to keep the things you need immediately at your fingertips and get rid of all the material you do not use. “Consider your desk your cockpit,” said Davenport. “Inside your cockpit, you want only “now” kinds of things, not old, moldy objects that have not seen light for several years.”

   Once your get rid of the obsolete files and put your information in logical order, what is next? 

   Next, according to Davenport is to establish Air Traffic Control. You need to route your papers to their logical homes immediately. You must establish a separate section for appointments, one for to-dos and a third for important notes relevant to the day you are in. Schedule all your activities ONE DAY AT A TIME. You only have to address them when you need to act on them instead of letting them clutter your desk and remind you of all the work that will be driving you up the wall tomorrow. 

Once these two basic steps are achieved its time to create a pending file where you can see at a glance what needs to be accomplished the next day or by the end of the week. “After step three is completed, you will have one simple, all encompassing system for all your papers, appointments and to-do’s in your life.” said Davenport. “Then it is time to deal with your attitudes about those 190 pieces of information that come in each day.”
Sounds sensible doesn’t it? You can read about how to accomplish the first thee steps of Davenport’s plan in her book ORDER FROM CHAOS. Then you will be ready to reorganize your decision-making abilities and constantly revise your priorities daily to meet your current needs. Your last step is to CLEAN OFF YOUR DESK AT THE END OF THE DAY. 

   There you have it. When your desk is organized logically and you can find the projects you need to address when you need them, you will be organized. You will have saved one month of fruitless searching and you can actually begin thinking about that vacation you have never had time to take before. 

Take care of the minutes, for the hours will take care of themselves
--Lord Chesterfield

Elizabeth Davenport is the master of disaster.

As owner of Order from Chaos, she uses organizing techniques and a little bit of psychology to clean the clutter that plagues desks, office spaces and minds.

Ever since she was a child Davenport said she was an organizer. Her mother, a former secretary to Gen. Douglas MacArthur during World War II, attired her in frilly white dresses that stayed spotless. Her father, who used to run Post Exchange stores on military bases, was also an organized person.

"We never knew disorder in my family, my toys were always put neatly on the shelves," she said. "I learned early on that if everything has a place, it's easier to get those things there."

Davenport is also legally blind another reason why clutter can't rule her life. "I have 20/360 vision," she said. "If something isn't where it belongs, I can't see it.

"But everyone knows how to do a certain task well and mine is that I know how to organize." And that motto has made a lifelong career for her.

She's run her own organizing businesses since 1989, and also worked for Intel Corp. as a project scheduler and a consultant for the computer chip giant.

Under the name Order from Chaos, she has organized small businesses like Garfield Laundry and Attwell Glass, and also worked with larger organizations such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Colorado Springs, Colo., City Council.

Recently, Davenport brought her expertise to Judie Framan, a consultant with Framan & Smith Communications.

In Framan's Corrales home/office space, Davenport is introduced to a closet full of old files in boxes and stacked on desks.

Framan's working desk, adorned with a stuffed replica of "Babe" the movie pig is buried under piles of papers. Cubbyholes are stuffed with office supplies and even more paperwork.

"I'm trying to bring this business out of bankruptcy," Framan said. "The pig is a reminder to me that if Babe could do it, I can do it."

After a series of consultations with Davenport over a week, Framan said the experience of working with Davenport was "very freeing to me."

"I think it's because of her approach " Framan said. "You understand everything you're doing because it's taught in a hands-on sort of way.

"Plus, I'm saving time," she said. "There's not a lot of fumbling for phone numbers or files. Because of that, I'm able to achieve another goal --being able to take a walk by the river instead of being frantic at 5 o'clock."

Davenport straightened out Framan's life by first purging years-old files. Cross-referencing remaining files made information easy to find.

Additionally, she taught Framan how to effectively use a daily calendar and a pending file --a place for things that don't need immediate attention.

Davenport said she takes advantage of her business degree and an additional advanced degree in adult education.

"I'm familiar with the issues that businesspeople face," she said.

Every client is told to think of their workspace like the cockpit of a plane. "Things that are used at least weekly should be kept within arms' reach," she said. "Otherwise, it needs to go to a less critical space."

She also tells her clients never to share a desk. Ever.

"I don't care if you're husband or wife, or even if you have a Siamese twin," she said. "No two people work the same. If you have to share a desk, take some masking tape to cut the desk in half and each person gets to do things the way they need to."

Davenport prefers to work with small businesses up to 10 people who "have a lot of things to keep track of, that don't have good systems to start out with and then get overwhelmed."

Elizabeth Davenport's five rules to Organization

1-  Write everything down; trust nothing to memory. Keep one calendar. Keep paper on the front of the fridge to write down grocery items as they are needed. If someone asks you to do something, write it down, right then.

2- Have a method to remind yourself when things need to be done. Your calendar and a pending file are just the ticket. Make a note on the calendar to remind you of the thing to do and keep the corresponding paperwork in the pending file.

3- If items have an assigned home, they will gravitate toward it. If they have no assigned home, they will wander into aimless piles on your desk. Decide how you might use an Item in the future, create a place for it, and put it there. Extra tip: Group things whenever possible.

4- Incoming information is the enemy. Don't ignore it or put it off. Have a station for dealing with all forms of incoming data mail, e-mail, faxes, phone messages. Have your calendar handy, your to-do list and a huge trash can. Write appropriate notes in your calendar and toss the supporting documentation, unless it will be needed.

5- Ask yourself, "If the house was on fire, would I grab this?" If not, why save it? Don't keep anything you can find somewhere else. Clear away as much as possible, then clear away more. Form the habit of throwing things out the emotional cost of being surrounded by useless paper is higher than you realize.

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