Ronald M. Andersen’s office at the University of California at Los Angeles used to be a mess. A professor of public health and department chairman, he could hardly sit in his office without feeling buried alive -- piles of papers, stacked as high as a small child, sat on the floor and every other flat surface.
Thanks to Dorothy K. Breininger, the piles are gone.
Ms. Breininger works with academics who can’t help themselves when it comes to organizing their offices, files, ideas, and even their lives. A former executive assistant to deans at UCLA and at Northeastern University, she is now executive director and owner of the Center for Organization and Goal Planning, based in Los Angeles. Half of her clients come from academic institutions throughout the United States.
Ms. Breininger had begun helping people organize their homes and offices as a part-time gig when she was executive assistant to the dean of public health at UCLA. But when the dean decided to step down three years ago, Ms. Breininger parlayed her consulting work into a full-time job. UCLA has turned into one of her major clients; she charges corporations $125 an hour but charges the university (and her individual academic clients there) only $75 an hour since she’s grateful for all the business it has sent her way. This year alone, she is on track to earn $300,000, a far cry from her executive-assistant salary.
The main organizational problem in academe is not that professors are more attached to paperwork than other professionals, but that there aren’t enough administrative assistants available, she says, as many colleges, especially public ones, have downsized thanks to budget cuts. In the corporate world, by comparison, offices are set up so that most managers have administrative assistants to help them organize.
Organizational problems result from what Ms. Breininger calls “the self-sufficiency fallacy,” in which people erroneously believe that with the advent of personal computers and wireless handhelds we can do our own scheduling and faxing and need fewer administrative assistants. A lot of these positions, she says, are disappearing in academic institutions, and she sees the result: “There are piles and piles of paperwork and no one to take ownership.”
That’s the message she took to a staff retreat that John D. Miller held for his office last year. Mr. Miller, director of major gifts at UCLA, asked Ms. Breininger to conduct a seminar for his professional fund raisers and administrative staff members.
“When there is a shortage of administrative support, it is all the more important that the administrative staff that is available is used most effectively,” Mr. Miller says. Too often, his fund raisers were spending time filing reports and doing more correspondence work than was necessary, rather than using the administrative staff to help them.
“The personal computer has seductively pulled management professionals into performing what for generations had been secretarial work,” he says. “It’s so easy to do your own scheduling and administrative work because of all the resources a personal computer provides you that potentially, even though it’s a convenience, it undermines a professional fund raiser’s availability. Rather than freeing you, you find yourself doing administrative work simply because of the convenience of it.”
One of the issues Ms. Breininger discussed, he says, was how to delegate tasks to administrative staff members. Now administrative assistants meet with development officers daily to discuss what things they can do to free them up for making phone calls and closing gifts, Mr. Miller says.
Mori Morrison, administrative assistant to the dean of engineering at UCLA, is especially thankful for the work Ms. Breininger’s team did in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. The last person to organize the school’s files had retired in 1992, and been succeeded by many inexperienced temps. Last year Ms. Breininger brought in a team of three people to reorganize the files. At one point, a 35-foot line of paperwork snaked across the floor, Ms. Morrison says. In the end, the team got rid of enough unnecessary paperwork to reduce from 12 to 3 the number of file cabinets needed. That means, Ms. Morrison says, “I don’t have to look through piles and piles of stuff for what I want.”
“The way things are in universities these days, there’s always a budget crunch,” Ms. Morrison says. “They get rid of senior staff first and replace them with junior staff. Frankly in university offices there’s no continuity. So you can benefit from having someone who knows what to do in these situations.”
Few faculty members have the luxury of administrative assistants, and organizing their own offices is a low priority, which is why the mess grows exponentially.
Mr. Andersen, the professor of public health with the messy office, says his department’s chairman and administrative assistant made a deal with Ms. Breininger four years ago to help him organize his office. On the first day of the overhaul, he recalls, “I had to teach a class, and Dorothy came in with two assistants. I started teaching at 9. By the time I came back at 12, she had completely reorganized my office.”
In his absence, she had cleared off all the tables and removed 27 boxes worth of material, which she hid, he says, because “she felt I should not be distracted or involved with the boxes until we had gone through them systematically unless I really needed something desperately.”
After the initial clean out, Ms. Breininger would come back periodically to check up on Mr. Andersen to see whether he was keeping his office tidy. Mr. Andersen says his “disability is filing and organizing after the job is done” because he gets distracted on multiple projects and just lets files build up in his office. Sometimes, he says, she’d leave incentives such as flowers to reward him for good behavior.
Ms. Breininger, or one of her staff members, continues to stop by his office once or twice a month to sit down with him and go through the paperwork that’s accumulated as a result of his publishing 200 scholarly articles and 25 books, as well as giving “various and assorted” talks. They hope to finally finish the effort this summer. Four years is not a long time for Ms. Breininger to work with someone on organizing their stuff, as all of her clients are “repeat customers” who don’t leave her unless they move or die. “It’s a maintenance program,” Ms. Breininger says.
“I’m deeply indebted to her for her commitment and orderliness,” says Mr. Andersen, who does not have his own administrative assistant and is using money from his endowed chair to pay for Ms. Breininger’s services. Ms. Breininger says that Mr. Andersen spends about $200 a month for her services. “I was labeled a disorganized office person,” he says, “and now people come in and are still amazed at how organized I seem to be. As a result, Dorothy’s gotten a lot of business because of me. People feel if she can do this for me, she can do this for anybody.”
For those who can’t afford her, Ms. Breininger suggests five ways professors can organize themselves:
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Once you find a hand-held calendar, a day planner, a cell phone, a brief case, or a software program that works for you, stick with it for a while. Constantly changing equipment and software creates more clutter and means you lose time spent transferring the data or learning the new system.
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After attending a trade show, a conference or a retreat, immediately sort through the material and keep only the necessary information.
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If you find it difficult to find reports, meeting minutes, or teaching notes, or if it’s difficult to even work at your desk because of clutter, book a five-hour appointment with yourself (and corral any willing work-study students or family members) to overhaul your office.
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When trying to decide what to do with all the incoming mail -- in all its present-day forms -- use Stephanie Winston’s system. According to Ms. Winston, the author of The Organized Executive (Warner, 2001), you only have four choices for every letter, message, journal article, or report you receive: You can toss it, route it to someone else, act on it, or file it. The point is, deal with it now.
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If you have absolutely no assistance, you must become your own file clerk. If possible, arrange with your department to provide you with a student worker. If not, assign yourself the task weekly and book a time on your calendar.
