Since my late teenage years, I have longed for a method to organize my books. From the large collection I have accumulated in my early twenties, and to this day store at my mother’s house, to the current somewhat smaller, heavily curated and restricted to two wide IKEA Billy shelfs (which despite my commitment to minimize is in a constant state of overflow).
I tried many of them – a Windows XP program which promised wonders and never delivered, a professional library software that I somehow got my hands on but could not easily mastered, a simple Excel sheet which overwhelmed me with its volume and the amount of data entry needed in the process. Not even Goodreads could help me, although in this case it at least helped me register what I actually read in a year (and needless to say, results from the past few years have not been satisfying and my goals not attainable in the slightest).
What always had been a deterrent, even in those earlier days was not the data itself but rather the trust that I could not even place in myself when it came to categorizing all my reading materials. Because let’s face it, these were not only just easily identifiable hard and paper cover publications. There were xeroxed copies from my high school and university days, from a time between Microsoft’s first attempt at a tablet and Apple’s iPad (also known as the early 2000s), pamphlets and brochures from civil society organizations I either worked with or have met in my tenure as a human rights activist, coloring books for adults, sticker albums, and other hard to classify objects many of which have in the end found much more suitable owners and readers.
Throughout the years I clearly developed a tsundoku habit, that is the art of purely buying books and never reading them and leaving reading materials in piles while never coming back to them. Letting go of some of those possessions was not easy – I have grown accustomed to them over time and could not imagine myself without them. At the same time, however, I knew that in relation to my living arrangement, the space available for a book collection, and my own understanding that despite of how much I try, some physical copies of various publications will eventually make it to my apartment, some adjustments would have to be made.
With these few reflections, I knew how my collection related to myself, other people (such as my husband who shares the apartment with me) and living beings (our dog who can’t safely walk between piles of books, and plants who need room and sunlight to thrive), as well as in relation to issues that feel a bit more abstract (although not without influence on physical reality) such as affordability of space in New York city or our own financial situation.
Determining my position meant that I was ready to develop a strategy for this process, build a plan based on said strategy and later on observe how that plan functions in reality. In other words – our living room became the site of a strategy management process, or at least one of the many faces of it. As even a simple search online will tell you – strategy can be developed from various perspectives. A small business will use different tools than an established corporation, so will a non-governmental organization with a handful of volunteers in comparison to a large counterpart able to hire a dozen staff, not to mention funding entities that rely on fundraising versus those spending an endowment.
The life of a strategy cycle is as unique as the institution and the people initiating it. And in this case, there was no institution. Just me and my impatient family, ready to freely use the space we have just moved into. Where the issue of organizing a bookshelf gets tricky, is the question of what we treat as a project and what is actually a strategy. In reality, these two processes have very similar components – they need to be initiated with appropriate preparation and information acquired beforehand, they need to be planned in relation to objectives, outcomes and timeline, both require an understanding of their execution (who does what when and with whom) and, of course, they have built in components of monitoring, control or management, depending on the scale of objectives or activities and the size of the team implementing the strategy or the project. And while timelines can be similar – sometimes a project can even span across two or more strategy cycles – scale and focus are be the two major aspects that differentiate between the two.
In my very personal example, organizing the bookshelf is the project. It has a clear outcome, it is time-bound and is easily quantifiable (there are 400 books which need to be properly categorized and distributed within the apartment in the most user-friendly way, and by user-friendly I of course mean – according to what is most comfortable for me – the target audience). This project, however, can become a part of an actual strategy which in my case includes long-term objectives such as having a clear approach to acquiring books. To determine this objective, I can ask myself questions about hypothetical scenarios, for example:
- Do I donate one book or another piece of printed media every time I buy a physical copy of a new publication?
- Do I do the same when someone gifts me a book or should I determine a different approach to them?
- Do I establish any financial boundaries around purchases, no matter the medium? Would these be then connected to our family’s overall spending and saving plan?
There are many questions we can ask ourselves in developing a strategy and the more we ask, the more analysis we can bring into the process. A SWOT analysis (a clear picture of strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats) is something that many of us have had experiences with and have probably felt the dullness of these four categories, especially when at the start of something very ambitious and groundbreaking (such as advocacy on an issue not very well-known to the public), where it seems everything that is an opportunity can also constitute a threat, and what we can determine as a strength can also – in another context – be seen as a weakness. In other words – while some models of planning can be useful, it is important to understand that they are as useful as we see them as such.
In my case – organizing the bookshelf turned out to be a much easier task than thinking about how it fits within the entire context of my love for books and reading. Instead of thinking about the big picture, I decided to deal with only one problem, rushed by the fact that our living room was drowning in a sea of chaotically stacked publications. The next day, I had a perfectly looking collection – every shelf dedicated to a different category which was in turn organized alphabetically by author – it looked and seemed perfect.
Unfortunately, my lack of forward thinking in this task (that is – lack of strategy) became apparent just a few weeks later when a friend asked to borrow one the books. Not only did I not remember which category it belonged to, I also did not have a clear plan on what happens with the collection when a publication is removed or added to it. In other words – I had a perfectly looking but not at all functioning bookshelf. I failed to properly address my target audience’s needs, despite the fact that it was me whom I tried to accommodate.
Because of more than 15 years of experience in project management and strategy development, I thought that I could easily take care of what looked like a straightforward task and in turn was reminded of the fact that even the smallest – or seemingly mindless – of projects require appropriate preparation.
Today, my book collection is still plagued by the chaos caused by my careless approach, and it will remain so until I’m ready to face it again. And when I do – I will give it the attention it deserves, just as I would for a project developed for someone else.
References
- G. Deeb, The Top 6 Steps Of Strategic Planning, Forbes, 2018.
- Four Alternatives to a SWOT Analysis, NMBL Strategies, 2021.
- R. Martin, It’s Time to Toss SWOT Analysis into the Ashbin of Strategy History, medium.com, 2021.
- S. Nogawa, 5 Steps to Quit Your Tsundoku Habit – Buying Books and Never Reading Them, medium.com, 2019.
- The Strategic Planning Process in 4 Steps, OnStrategy, 2016.
- What Is Project Development? With Steps and Tips, Indeed, 2021
1 Comment
Leave your reply.