Describe a Person You Know Who Is Very Organized

The person I'll describe is my former manager, Anneke, who is the most organised person I have ever worked with and who I suspect operates on a completely different system from the rest of us.

I worked for her for about two years in my first proper job, so I saw the machinery close up rather than just the results, which is the interesting part.

What she does is less about tidiness than people assume. Her desk was ordinary. What she had was a system for everything that could possibly recur. Every meeting she ran had an agenda circulated the day before, and it was always genuinely short — three items, never eight. She wrote down every commitment anybody made, including her own, in the same notebook, and she reviewed it every Friday afternoon for about forty minutes, which was the only time in the week she was unavailable. She answered email twice a day rather than continuously. And she had a habit I've since stolen: at the end of any conversation where something was agreed, she'd say back out loud who was doing what by when, which takes about eight seconds and prevents an astonishing amount of confusion.

The result was that she never chased anybody and nothing was ever lost. I don't remember her once being unable to find something or forgetting a commitment. She also left at half past five almost every day, which I initially assumed meant she wasn't very busy and later understood was the entire point.

How I feel about her approach has shifted over time. At the beginning I found it faintly exhausting — the agendas felt bureaucratic and the Friday review looked like a lot of process for its own sake. I was twenty-three and had the usual idea that being busy and slightly chaotic was evidence of working hard.

Now I think she was simply the only person in that office doing it properly. What she'd actually done was move all the effort to the front, where it was cheap, instead of paying for it later in crises, which is where everyone else spent their week. I've adopted perhaps a third of what she did, which is a fairly poor conversion rate, but even that third has made a noticeable difference. The eight-second habit alone has probably saved me weeks.