November 2012

Nov 19

Conquer Your Paper Chaos When You Business Travel

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

Has this ever happened to you? You’ve just returned from a business trip and your briefcase is bulging with receipts, meeting notes, business cards, travel documents and other essential paperwork. You’ll probably spend your first day back in the office just sorting through the chaotic mass of paper before you can even think about getting down to business!

Or, perhaps you travel all over the city attending one meeting after another. By the end of the day your briefcase is a pile of to-dos with no particular order. Phone messages are scattered on various pieces of papers and you just know that an important message is hidden somewhere in the mess. Then there are the business cards you collected, some require follow-up, but you’re not sure where you put those important numbers. If only you had kept it in a safe place so you could remember where you put it.

At this point, all those good intentions to take action and follow-up on hot new business leads fizzle into frustration. But there’s no time to think about how you misplaced those essential items. The minute you’re back in the office you find there is a pile of emails waiting for your response in addition to a large pile of papers on your desk begging for your attention. You dive right in to the emails and before you know it the morning is gone and it’s lunchtime. You work through lunch in order to attack the pile of paper on your desk. Then you realize you reviewed your messages, so you abandon the paper pile and listen to all your messages. It’s a never-ending circle of paper, email and voicemail, and you haven’t even cracked open your briefcase. You just spend the day reacting to emergencies and interruptions with no planned scheduled time to deal with the important issues that you had hoped to get to.

This continues day after day and you’re still dragging all those papers from your business trip in your briefcase and you’ve been adding to it during the week as you attended more meetings. Now you have no idea what’s what and it all melts together into one big mountain of paper begging for your attention. How long do you let this go on before you decide to take action? For some its days and other’s its weeks or months. Those hot new leads you made on your business trip aren’t so hot now and the longer you leave it the more you procrastinate on taking action. Eventually you take mountain of paper out of your briefcase and drop it on the floor by your desk and say you’ll deal with it later because you have more important things to take care of in the office. Guilt sets in and it constantly nags at you to do something but you don’t. You know you should get your business receipts handled but you’re not sure where they all are and it ends up costing you money when you could have been reimbursed.

Nov 04

Love0

Home Organizing: Going on an Information Diet

By Sherry Borsheim Blog, Business Organizing, Home Office Organization, Home Organizing, Organizing Paper Files No Comments

Our day sets us up for information overload. Social media, Magazines, T.V., Online Subscriptions, Newspapers, the list goes on. If we don’t learn how to regulate our information you can become overwhelmed. Your home and mind become cluttered. Business and home organizing suffer. We are far from the productive people we could be.

Here’s four simple steps to decrease your information and improve your home organizing, business organizing, and mental space:

Step 1 – Limit Times Checking Email

Harvard Business Review did a study on multi-tasking and time wasted on the psychological switching gears back and forth. Multi-tasking decreases your productivity by up to 50% and the switching back and forth between tasks or projects also wastes time of 10-45 minutes.

No wonder our to do lists are bulging, desks are piled high with unfinished paperwork, and people are drowning in email. Think about the business and home organizing you could get done with almost an entire hour added to your productive time.

Step 2 – Group like Activities Together

Depending on your type of work, set 2-5 times a day to check your email. Turn off all notifications and ringers.

For other activities like project work, making phone calls, responding to emails, meetings, coaching hours, service hours, invoicing, home organizing, and planning to name a few, block out times in your schedule to do similar tasks. This is also known as batching. Want to know where your times goes, track your activities for a week! It will be an eye-opening experience and you’ll get to the root issues of your productivity much faster.

Step 3 – Set boundaries

Get clear on your desired outcomes and goals and you’ll be more selective on what type of information you keep and let into your world. Create space by organizing your paper, books, magazines, photos and electronic files. Only keep what is useful, relevant and easy to access. Keeping something for “just in case I may need it someday” doesn’t cut it. This is where people get into overwhelm, waste time, procrastinate and create unnecessary piles of clutter in their offices, homes and computers. Home organizing suffers greatly!

Also, keep a small basket for magazines and reading material. When it’s full, its time to purge! When the filing cabinets are full, it’s time to purge and the same goes for bookshelves, your Inbox and other areas of your office and home.

Step 4 – Decrease Volume

When you know what your retention guidelines are for keeping computer files, financial files, project and paper files, meeting notebooks, emails, client files, magazine and newspaper subscriptions, and so on, deciding what to keep and what to purge is simple. You take the heavy thinking out of business and home organizing. Write out your retention policy for the different areas of your business or home office and have it handy on your computer for easy reference.

Recently, an Office Manager asked me what to do with 17 years of meeting notebooks. After discussing it for 30 minutes and talking with the Health Director, we were clear that all meeting minutes and financials were saved electronically and any other information that may be lingering in the notebooks were safe to let go. A week later, I received an email saying “I did it! I shredded 17 years of notebooks and I feel better. Out with the old, towards the future we go. The past is the past!” A huge load of stress was released, freed up some mental space for creative thinking, and space opened up in his office.

High performers practice the above steps because they are clear about where they are going, what information to let into their world and focus on doing the right actions on a consistent basis. Going on an information diet will free up physical space as well as space in your mind to be more creative and productive.