March 2012

Mar 31

How to Use a Planner to Organize Your Life Monthly

By Sherry Borsheim Blog, Business Organizing, Expert Articles, Free Articles, Home Office Organization, Home Organizing No Comments

Life can get crazy busy and before you know it, another month has slipped by and you didn’t get your new product launched. Every day, things creep into your schedule and typically the most pressing issues or emergencies get dealt with and suck up your time. Your schedule is jammed packed, you have a business to run, a household to manage and you have all these great plans and aspirations you want to make happen this year.

What if you were to lighten the load and streamline your life, so you could spend 100% of your time on the things you’re most passionate about?
How often are you leaving things to the last minute and missing important due dates when it comes to your marketing plans or getting your marketing ideas launched?
How much money do you think you are leaving on the table because you don’t have a solid plan in place for marketing your business?
What vacation time are you taking this year and how many weekend get-a-ways have you planned for?
How often have you thought you didn’t need to learn how to use a planner?

I’m too busy to plan and learn how to use a planner….

One of the biggest challenges as a business owner is finding the time to plan and market their business. When you’re taking care of clients all day long you probably have little energy to focus on marketing at night or on weekends. Most businesses fail because they haven’t taken the time to strategically plan and market their business to keep their marketing funnel full with a steady stream of clients. Being consistent in planning your days, weeks and months is the missing link for most small business owners. Planning keeps you focused, helps you stay on track and before you know it your great marketing idea has turned into a successful product launch resulting in more clients and more money in your pocket.

It’s Winston Churchill who said “He who fails to plan is planning to fail”

Set yourself up for success and automate your planning time

The first step is to automate your planning time in your calendar. A regular schedule for planning will keep you on track with your desired outcomes and ahead of the game when it comes to your marketing strategies and getting more clients. Go ahead and create three recurring appointments in your calendar for:

Weekly planning session, 1-2 hours
Monthly planning session, 2-5 hours
Yearly planning session, half or full day

A regular planning time on a weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly basis will help you to stay on track and you adjust your plan accordingly when things aren’t working or you hit the sweet spot in your marketing efforts. These time blocks are important first steps in knowing how to use a planner. During your planning sessions, you can ask yourself these three questions:

“What went well today, this week or month?”
“What didn’t work?”
“What do I want to do differently?”

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Albert Einstein

If you are checking in on a regular basis with planning your days and weeks, and you’re not getting the results you want, you have two choices:

Keep doing what you’re doing and get the same result, or
Do something different and see what new results you get.

Here’s a great tool for planning

Begin by mapping out the next 3-12 months of your marketing calendar, vacation time, product launches, programs you want to launch, speaking engagements, when your newsletter goes out, monthly goals, and other important marketing dates. Check out the video I made for you on how to plan your life using a monthly planner.

Many of you already have this in your computer using Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal or some other calendar system which is great. For many business owners who have a lot on the go and long to-do lists, it’s beneficial to have something visual to look at-a-glance for the bigger picture. A large visual-aid can also keep you focused and on track with your marketing efforts.

A full year dry erase calendar is the ultimate in visual planning and enables you to map out, in advance, an entire year of planning in one place. No more flipping from page to page or screen to screen on your computer to plan important marketing and product launches for your business. These year-at-a-glance calendars display the entire year’s plans in an easy to read format and are available in vertical and horizontal formats. Using a yearly wall calendar is a great way to keep track of future events, quickly adjust plans, write out your goals and helps you schedule plan for the entire year.

Sometimes when everything is in small print in your computer and you can’t see the bigger picture, a wall calendar is a great way to plan out your product launches and marketing strategies first, and then schedule it into your electronic calendar system. Either way, having a big visual plan posted on your wall that you can see every time you’re in your office is a great reminder system of what you’re up to in your business and for making quick decisions on the fly.

Recommended Products

You can find these year-at-a-glance yearly dry erase calendars at Staples

http://www.staples.ca/ENG/Catalog/cat_sku.asp?CatIds=&webid=325754&affixedcode=WW . You can also get artistic looking calendars at Nextag and they will ship to your door

http://www.nextag.com/erasable-wall-calendar/stores-html. If you want larger yearly calendars, check out this great resource at Printed Dry Erase http://printeddryerase.com/year-calendars.html.

If you find the calendar squares too small to write in, you’ll love these extra-fine tip dry erase markers from Grand & Toy

http://www.grandandtoy.com/product/EN/99855_Grand__Toy_Dry-Erase_Low-Odour_Markers.aspx

Be and Stay Organized

Schedule time at the end of each day to briefly organize your desk and work area and plan your tasks for the next day.

Learning how to use a planner will pay off!

Mar 24

Love0

Organizing Microsoft Outlook: How Categories Save You Time

By Sherry Borsheim Blog, Business Organizing, Expert Articles, Free Articles, Home Office Organization, Organizing Microsoft Outlook No Comments

Sending and organizing emails is not how we want to spend big chunks of our business day. The problem is email communication is essential to most businesses. So how do you save time with this task? Use the categories feature with your contacts when you are organizing your Microsoft Outlook.

Putting your contacts in categories helps to group their information together. You are not limited to one category per contact. Your contact can be both in your “resource” and “advertising” categories for example. When you begin organizing Microsoft Outlook you will see that it provides you with standard categories to use. These can be edited, deleted, or added to for your personal needs.

How does organizing Microsoft Outlook with Categories save time?

You can drag and drop. Want to email all of your clients about a promotion? When you have spent the time organizing Microsoft Outlook you can just drag your entire clients category over and your To: field will populate with everyone in that category. (remember for your recipients privacy you should cut and paste emails into the BCC area)

Need to export all of your Vendors into another program? No problem you can grab all of their information at one time.

Follow up is easy! Want to send out an after event thank you? Create a category for your event, include everyone who is involved. After the event simply drag and drop your category and send your thanks. No going through endless contact lists and checking and double checking for fear you’ve missed someone.

While organizing your contacts into categories may take some upfront time, it will save you much more in the end! Start by making a complete list of the categories you will want for your contacts. Brainstorm them on paper to get a good visual. Once you have a full list go to the Master Categories list and add or edit your categories.

Now you’re ready to get started organizing Microsoft Outlook. I would love to hear how it goes in the comments below!

Mar 23

Love0

How to Organize Office Supplies

By Sherry Borsheim Blog, Business Organizing, Expert Articles, Free Articles, Home Office Organization No Comments

Every office has office supplies and typically the supplies are all over the place. I know this, because I see this in almost every office that I’ve organized. Very few know how to organize office supplies. How many times have you gone looking for the printer cartridges, couldn’t find them, even though you know you have them somewhere. So you run to the store to buy more and a week later you find the missing cartridges. How about the 150 pens and pencils stuffed in your drawers? Just because you can buy in bulk, doesn’t mean you will actually use them before they get too old, dry up, or you don’t like writing with them.

Too often, I see boxes and boxes of old file folders, paper, and torn hanging files that are so dusty and smelly no one wants to use them. I’m telling you, it’s time to be realistic about how many office supplies you really need to have on hand. I want you to recycle or toss any office supplies that you don’t use, don’t love, or aren’t useful. PURGE, PURGE and PURGE!

Whether you have a small supply area or a large supply room, the time wasted looking for supplies and the cost of duplicate purchases costs you time and money. I guarantee that once you master how to organize office supplies, you will feel a sense of calmness and peace in your office, because you know what supplies you have, and they are at your fingertips when you need them.

Your office is “prime real estate” for being productive in your work and/or business. Keep your office supplies to a minimum and contained in an area that you can easily access. More and more people are going paperless and using fewer office supplies these days. Now is the time to consolidate and assess what supplies you actually need. Just because you spent money on it, is not a reason to keep it. Let it go, pass it on!

How to Organize Office Supplies:

First Step: Group like things together

In the video I made for you, I shared many examples and organizing products that I use when “organizing office supplies.” The first step to an office supplies system is to group like things together. Some broad categories are paper, files, notebooks, stationary, adhesives, binder dividers, pens, felts and pencils, mailing supplies, printer cartridges, cables, and blank DVD’s.

Second Step: Purge

If you have duplicate items, like three staplers, then use the “in another room” box or put them in the donate box. Anything that is broken, you don’t use, smells or is not functional, get rid of it. If you have more than 40 pens and pencils, donate the extras to a school, daycare or charity (they must be in new condition).

Third Step: Designate a space

Decide where you are going to store and organize your supplies. Keep like things together.

Fourth Step: Containerize & Label

Time to get your office supplies system together! For paper, use metal stacking trays to maximize vertical space. Use functional containers or drawer units to contain pens and adhesives. Each space is different, so customize how you want to containerize and give yourself easy access to your office supplies. After you’ve designated and space and/or containerized the office supplies, make sure you label the containers, drawers, stacking trays or shelves to identify the supply zones. This also helps to put things back in the right place and to let you know when you need to re-order.