There’s a right way to sort things and a wrong way, but doing a pre-sort is generally not the best way.

I’ve read books and attended seminars on how to organize one’s life. Most of the information I’ve consumed deals with work – office files and paperwork that come across my desk. There are good systems out there on how to streamline the processing of paper, requests and tasks to maximize your time.

I worked for UPS when they first came to Canada. I was their first part-time employee hired. It has been interesting to watch the company grow from about fourteen vans in one corner of a warehouse to the whole warehouse and a fleet of the large package delivery vans we see on the road today. 

I started by washing those vans and then moved to an office job of processing the drivers’ time cards. I even drove the package delivery vans for a summer when I was in Bible college.

Thousands of packages got picked up every day and needed to be sorted to get on the right delivery truck for the next morning. That was the job of a particular crew. 

They would arrive early in the morning, somewhere around 2:00 am. Their job was to take all the packages and place them in the trucks for delivery later that morning. 

They were called the pre-sort crew. It was a pre-sort because later the drivers would come in and organize their parcels in the precise order they were going to deliver them in. 

But that pre-sort was essential. It provided the driver with all his packages. He didn’t have to go searching or sorting around a big pile of packages for the ones that would be on his route.

A pre-sort may not be the prescribed way to handle office files, paper and requests. But it might be the best for my situation right now. 

The proper way to deal with office mail, paper, phone messages, etc., is to handle it once. When you pick up a piece of mail, you attend to it, file it or trash it. And if something can’t be processed that quickly, you schedule a time when you are going to deal with it and then move on to the next item. … Simple, right? 

Well, I’m in the process of cleaning out my office. It’s a slow process; I’m doing it, bit by bit, over about seven weeks. But I’m realizing, to my wife’s chagrin, that much of what I’m bringing home from my office is only a pre-sort.

I’m not done determining exactly where some of this stuff will go, so there are books that are lining one wall in our basement and boxes of files that are being stacked in a corner. Lots of it is just a pre-sort. I will have to spend more time organizing where it will all specifically end up. 

… It’s not the right way of doing it, but it’s the best way for me right now. 

Here’s the thing: Life is uncertain at the best of times. We don’t know what is around the corner and the end of life is an even greater mystery. That scares people. You can’t know what’s around that corner, but you can pre-sort your life so you get it in the right place. Place your faith in Christ. You may not know what heaven will be like, but you will be sure of your destination. 

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What do you have trouble sorting in your life right now? Leave your comments and questions below.

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