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A new profession: The Professional Simplifier

17 08 06 - 23:26 - Bookmark this post

One of the fun things about blogposts is you can talk about a subject that has been posted long ago and still be current about it. Not all blogs talk about the here and now. Most of them address issues that are of all times and the ideas need to be spread to a wider audience.
Today I want to give you a translation of a dutch blogpost by my good cyberfriend Annedien Hoen. Eventhough we never met in person we have some sort of email/social network contact about GTD. I call her a uber-networker, but she's also a devoted productivity geek.
In january of this year she wrote a blogpost about a new profession she would like to see. The Professional Simplifier. I have the permission and the honor to translate this article in English and present her idea to my readers. So...what is a Professional Simplifier?

Most people today really have a problem with the information overload. We see how this kills productivity because people can't say "no" to everything they get offered and they keep on using everything they once said "yes" to. I think this calls for a new profession, the Professional Simplifier or PS.

What does he or she do for you?

• He analyses all subscriptions you have and checks what you really don't need. And he checks what you don't read because you drop it on the "to read" stack which eventually gets deleted or thrown away
• Analyses how much phones you have and if you can cut in that. Why (especially here in The Netherlands) would you need a business line, personal phone, mobile phone and Skype?
• Analyses how you deal with incoming information. Do you have notes everywhere? Or do you have a Palm and a Moleskine and Post-Its and Tasks in Outlook and...PS brings it back to one Incoming informationstream and a consistent way to deal with it all (Hmmm....sounds like GTD to me! -- FM)
• The PS analyses how you deal with your way around the house. Do you run to the supermarket every day just before closing time or do you stock on a saturday morning for the whole week?
• How do you spend your time? Do you run around like a madman during the day? Do you get gas when your car is running on it's last fumes of gas? Do you use your discretionairy time useful? And by the way, "Useful" can also mean turning your cellphone off when you are just thinking, pondering, getting at ease.
• A PS will also be a great advocate of stopping the ABC-syndrome. Always Be Connected. I can see the PS urging with cellphone companies to create some sort of functionality to filter your phonetraffic between normal phonetraffic and really important messages you must answer. Must be really easy to implement I guess? You can have various themes around this. "Interruptable by family", "Interruptable by my wife". But especially "Not interruptable by ...". Is Interruptable a word?
• A PS will analyse all rooms in your house where you have some sort of receiver. DVD players, radio's, PC etc. Why? Because you don't always need to receive everything in certain rooms.

Ofcourse, in the near future books will appear about this idea, more blogs will emerge about this and there will be new guru's on this field of expertise. We will have some oldskool thinkers like David Allen an Buddha on this subject

This article originally appeared in dutch on The Future Institute and was written by Annedien Hoen.

How do you think about this new profession?

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Professional simplifiers exist – we’re Professional Organizers – we help people create systems for their homes, businesses and lives.

With shows likes Clean Sweep, Mission Organization and Neat, people think Professional Organizing is just about the home, but really it’s about creating systems to make lives easier, at home, at work and for life in general.

There are 4 National Associations of Organizers in the US, Canada, the Netherlands and Australia.

You can find out more about organizing by visit the National Association of Professional Organizer’s website at http://www.napo.net or the Professional Organizers in Canada website at http://www.organizersincanada.com

Cheers,
Alex
Alex Fayle - 06 09 06 - 08:25

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Frank Meeuwsen