Every few minutes, more communications are being sent your way. Emails, text messages, voice mails, instant messages, twitter messages, facebook posts…and the list goes on.

Your human response? You simply try to stay afloat. You peck away at the latest communications at the top of your many inboxes. And since the flow of communication never ends, you slip into a life of what I have come to call “reactionary workflow.”

For those of us with great ideas and bold goals for the future, reactionary workflow is a big problem. If we spend our working hours reacting to the incoming barrage of communication, we will fail to be proactive with our energy. Our long-term aspirations suffer as a result.

For the past five years, i’ve been interviewing uber-productive leaders and teams – people at companies like Google, IDEO, and Disney, and individuals like author Chris Anderson and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. I’ve never asked them how they come up with ideas. I’m not interested. My fascination is how they make their ideas happen, time and time again. The outcome of this long project is MAKING IDEAS HAPPEN, being published this month.

Many of the people I met have developed ways to combat reactionary workflow. Here are a few tips on how they do it:

Create windows of non-stimulation.
Once you open the door to communications overload, you could spend all day reacting to what’s thrown at you. Piers Fawkes, founder and editor of the marketing consultancy PSFK, reserves a good chunk of his morning –  from 7-10am every day – to do research and digest the day’s trends and news prior to going through his email. Proactively blocking out time for creating and absorbing – rather than just responding – is a key tactic of productive creatives.

Keep Two Lists
When it comes to organizing the day’s tasks – and how your energy will be allocated – create two lists: one for urgent items and another for important ones. Long-term goals and priorities deserve a list of their own and should not compete against the urgent items that can easily consume your day. Once you have two lists, you can preserve distinctly different periods of time for focus on each.

Schedule intense periods of processing at a consistent time every day.
During the research for the book, I met a number of people that swore on the benefit of “power hours.” These individuals would try to compress all response-related work into pre-determined short periods of time every day, usually 1-2 hours of un-interrupted in-box clearing. The notion of compartmentalizing reactionary workflow was a theme across the most productive leaders I met.

Don’t hoard urgent items.
Even when you delegate operational responsibilities to someone else, you may still find yourself hoarding urgent items as they arise. When you care so deeply about a project, you likely prefer to resolve things yourself. Say an e-mail arrives from a client with a routine problem. Even though the responsibility may lie with someone else on your team, you might think, “Oh, this is really a quick fix; I’ll just take care of it.” And gradually your energy will start to shift away from long-term pursuits. Hoarding urgent items is one of the most damaging tendencies I’ve noticed in creative professionals that have encountered early success. When you are in the position to do so, challenge yourself to delegate urgent items to others.

Don’t dwell.
When urgent matters arise, they tend to evoke anxiety. We dwell on the potential negative outcomes of all the challenges before us—even after action is taken. Worrying wastes time and distracts us from returning to the important stuff. When it comes to addressing urgent items, break them down into Action Steps and challenge yourself to reallocate your energy as soon as the Action Steps are completed. It is also helpful to consider whether or not certain concerns are within or beyond your influence. Often your worries are for the unknown and there is nothing more you can do to influence the outcome. Once you have taken action to resolve a problem, recognize that the outcome is no longer under your influence.

How do you avoid a life of reactionary workflow? You need discipline and a dose of confidence. Recognize your tendency to surf the stream of incomings, and gain confidence in the potential of being proactive. It is easy to sit there and react all day. You’ll never run out of work to do. But your bold ideas will suffer unless you take your energy by the reigns.

Scott Belsky studies exceptionally productive people and teams in the creative world. He is the founder/CEO of Behance and is the author of Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision & Reality (Portfolio, April 2010).

Mention the word “audit” and most people run screaming. But an Organizing Audit has nothing to do with taxes, so you can come back now. Don’t worry.

An Organizing Audit gives you an opportunity to look at your home from an objective viewpoint. The old saying “familiarity breeds contempt” can be paraphrased for your home to “familiarity breeds blindness.” When we use the same space every day, we learn to not notice the little tasks that aren’t done, or the things that don’t have their own storage place.

Going through the space in an Organizing Audit creates a list of all those little things that need doing. This allows you to schedule priorities and work at your own pace to end up with an organized home.

An Organizing Audit also helps clear the obstacles to success in your life. If you’ve heard the phrase: “If you want success, clean up your mess” then you know that you are less likely to achieve you goals and objectives if you have cluttered areas and uncompleted tasks in your home.

How to Audit Your Home
In its noun form, the term audit means: An examined and verified account. If you are going to examine and verify something, both the examination and the verification need to be done systematically.

To perform an audit therefore, you need to have the right tools at hand and need to go through your home room by room without missing any space.

Fortunately, performing an audit is really simple. The only tools you need are a pad of paper and a pen or pencil. To make sure you don’t miss a single space in your home, you should start at the top or the bottom of the house (or front door if you are in a one-level condo or apartment).

In each room start at the door into the room and sweep all the way around it in a circle until you come back to where you started. If there is another room (or large walk-in closet) that leads off the room you’re in, do not start auditing that space until the room you’re in is complete.

This sounds quite simple, but it is very easy to get sidetracked. I call the getting sidetracked experience the Ooh-Shiny! trap. That’s when you’re pulled out of your current train of thought by something that calls attention to itself somehow.

To avoid falling into the Ooh-Shiny! trap, be aware that you are going to be distracted by things, but don’t let them take over. In your pad of paper have one sheet for Ooh-Shiny! thoughts. As these come up, jot them down, then go back to where you were.

What’s in the Audit
An Organizing Audit does not just cover what’s disorganized, cluttered or out of place, it also covers those little household tasks that you’ve never got around to finishing.

You want to look for these household tasks because you will always be more tempted to clutter a space when it is not finished. It might just be a small wiring hole in the wall or a scuff on the dresser waiting for a paint touch-up, but each little thing not done allows you subconsciously to say: “It’s okay to clutter here because it’s not really finished.”

So, you are looking for the following in your Audit:

• Rooms or sections of rooms without a purpose (thus allowing clutter to fill them up by default);
• Things without a place to store them;
• Things with a storage place but aren’t in that place;
• Storage spaces (like closets) that are too full or are a jumble of many different things without any order; and
• Little jobs that need doing (e.g., fixing the carpet where the cat pulled it up 2 years ago)

No Judgment
As you go through the audit, you’ll likely begin to feel guilty. You’ll also probably feel resentment or anger over all the little things others in the home don’t do. When these feelings arise, remember that the Audit is not an opportunity to point fingers at anyone (including yourself). It provides an objective opportunity to view the contents and daily-living processes of your home.

Also make sure you recognize well organized spaces in your home. Pat yourself on the back, give yourself and your family a reward for the job well done and remember this success when the uncompleted tasks threaten to overwhelm you.

When to Perform an Audit
Audit frequency depends entirely on your living style and your tendency to backslide into disorder. If you can find everything and you’re happy and comfortable, then you may need to do an audit only once a year.

If, however, you’re like me and tend to want to “nest” (fill every available space with something of yourself) then you may need to do the Audit monthly. I tend to get distracted from my list easily (I fall into the Ooh-Shiny! trap a lot), so a quick monthly Audit re-focuses me.

For most people, once or twice a year is usually enough.

When you do the audit, make sure others in the household are involved. If you have children, make it a game, awarding points for the highest number of tasks noticed and completed in the audit and implementation period. A less competitive game would be to have children and parents go through the home together and make it a treasure hunt for organizational gems – things done well last time – and rough diamonds – things that could improve.

Achieving Your Goals
When you’re done, there are three things you need to do:

• Congratulate and reward yourself and your family
• Decide what you’re going to get done off the list and when, and
• Set up your next audit

You will also notice that as you clear through your list of tasks uncovered in the Audit that other areas of your life will become more organized and clearer. You will likely become more productive at work; obstacles that seemed insurmountable suddenly become molehills to step over; and you’ll also notice that the house is a calmer place with more harmony.

Remember: what you focus on expands. So if you focus on the chaos, chaos abounds; if you focus on creating space and time in your home, you’ll be more productive and find abundance flowing into your life.

For more from Alex Fayle, check out his blog, Someday Syndrome, subscribe to his feed or follow him on Twitter.

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