Did You Know?

Fun Facts.

• 23% of adults pay bills late and incur fees because they can’t find their bills, Harris Interactive
• 80% of the clutter in your home is a result of disorganization, not lack of space
• According to Forbes ASAP, the typical executive today wastes 150 hours a year, almost one month, searching for lost information.  The Wall Street Journal reports that the average U.S. executive wastes six weeks per year retrieving misplaced information from messy desks and files.  — We are not sure which one is right, but they are both big wastes of time.
• Using the correct organizational tools can improve time management by 38%, Mobile Technology Product
• Paperwork has been voted the biggest burden for small businesses
• The average office has 19 copies of each document. Spends $20 in labor to file each document. Spends $120 in labor searching for each misfiled document.  Loses one out of every 20 documents. Spends 25 hours recreating each lost document, PricewaterhouseCoopers
• It costs about $25,000 to fill a four-drawer filing cabinet and over $2,100 per year to maintain it, Gartner Group, Coopers & Lybrand, Ernst & Young
• A four-drawer file cabinet full of paper holds 18,000 pages
• It costs businesses $120 in labor to track down a misplaced document or $250 in labor to re-create it
• Perfectionism costs 50% or more of the total effort to squeeze out the last 10% or so of quality, Jeff Olson, The Agile Manager’s Guide to Getting Organized, 1997
• The National Association of Professional Organizers says we spend one year of our lives looking for lost items office workers waste an average of 40% of their workday.  Not because they aren’t smart, but because they were never taught organizing skills to cope with the increasing workloads and demands, Wall Street Journal Report
• In a 2008 NAPO survey of 400 consumers nationwide:
  • 27% said they feel disorganized at work, and of those, 91 percent said they would be more effective and efficient if their workspace was better organized.
  • 28% said they would save over an hour per day.
  • 27% said they would save 31 to 60 minutes each day
• The average American spends one year of their life looking for lost or misplaced items at home and in the office, US News and World Report
• According to the American Demographic Society, Americans waste more than 9 million hours each day looking for lost and misplaced articles
• For every hour of planning, 3 to 4 hours are saved from redundancy, waiting for information, not being prepared, and poorly managed tasks
• 40% of adults say if they had more time, they would spend it with family, Day Runner Survey