Organizing and productivity

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 19

Love0

Reclaim Shelf Space and Organize Your Books with a Kindle!

By Sherry Borsheim Blog, Business Organizing, Closet Organizing, Expert Articles, Free Articles, Home Office Organization, Home Organizing, IABO Weekly News, Quick Organizing Tips, Resources No Comments

Before my Kindle

Are you tripping over piles of books on the floor? Is your bookcase bulging at the seams with no room for all your new books? How much time and money are you wasting finding a book or on duplicate purchases? Are you like me, someone who loves to highlight and tag your books for future reference?

Are you feeling a little nervous about letting go of your precious books? I love my books too and when we went to Hawaii a few weeks ago, we decided to buy an e-book reader and test it out on our vacation. We also thought it was about time to get with the times. Someone said to me, everyone in Hawaii has an e-book reader by the pool or on the beach. So we thought we would give it a try.

Having an e-book reader also let’s you travel light. Instead of packing three books each, I only took one book with me and Glen had his new Kindle. The first day by the pool, I looked around and sure enough, 80% had some form of e-book reader. Also, my husband kept saying to me, you’re going to love reading from the Kindle. It’s easier to hold and much lighter than a pocket book, and the wind doesn’t flip your pages around. Oh, and another cool feature is you can change the font size, which for some of us, and I won’t mention any names, is a bonus when the fine print is too small to read.

So, after two days, I finished reading my paperback and I was going back and forth, do I buy a second e-book reader or do we share? We still had another 12 days in Hawaii and I planned on reading several more books. So we decided to go to Best Buy and buy another Kindle. A few days later, we found a vending machine at the Sheraton Waikiki that sells high-end electronics – iPods, iPhones, iPads, Kindles and other items you wish you had while on vacation. How cool is that?

Anyways, all I can say is, why did I wait so long? I absolutely LOVE my e-book reader! I can highlight, makes notes and refer back to my notes easier than I could highlight in a book. No more yellow highlighter to fiddle with, its super light to hold and read, no glare from the sun, long battery life (5-7 days), love the larger print size, and I read faster because I’m not straining my eyes to read the small print. We opted to buy the basic e-book reader because we don’t need a ton of fancy features and a data package. We just wanted an easy way to read and organize our books. We can even share our books with each other.

After my Kindle

Four weeks later, I’m in my office and I notice a very full bookshelf. I thought I had purged as many books as I could and for some reason I was holding onto way too many books. Now that I have my Kindle, I don’t need all these books. As you can see from the before photo, the bookshelf is bulging at the seams. I want you to know that I practice what I teach. So, I approached my bookshelf with a new frame of mind. Knowing that I have my Kindle to store all future books, I asked myself “what’s the reason I’m holding onto all these books?” Here’s my answers:

It’s out of print and its a book I refer to sometimes.
I wrote the book or I’m a contributing author.
The book is a key resource in my business or personal life.
I want to read this book.
I paid a lot of money for this hard cover and I should keep it.
It’s a classic and I want to keep it.
A friend published a book and it was a gift.

Here’s the new question I asked myself because I now have a Kindle, “what books can I let go of, write down in my OneNote file, and if I ever want to refer to it, I’ll buy it on my Kindle?” Here’s the after photos of all the books that I am letting go of and if I want to refer to one of these books someday, I will purchase it on my Kindle. The cost of buying it a second time, if I do, is a fraction of the cost of the space that is now available in my office. I have room to breath and I don’t need to go out and buy a new shelving unit with doors (which I was planning on doing) because I didn’t like looking at all these heavy books.

If I can do it, so can you. Go ahead and purge your bookshelf. If you’re like me and thinking that a Kindle costs too much, think again. I spent less than $90 and the freedom and flexibility I now have is a wonderful feeling. It’s much easier to take my Kindle with me wherever I go instead of a thick book. No more “making room” for books on my bookshelf. The stress I released and the space I reclaimed on my bookshelves and in my office, priceless!

Mar 17

Love0

The Best Tips to Organizing Microsoft Outlook

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

How many emails do you have in your Inbox? 100, 1500, 5000, or 20,000+? The larger the number the more time you waste and increased stress. Although many dream of getting to ground zero and only processing today’s emails, the reality of this happening is not high on the priority list. Organizing Microsoft Outlook is easy with all the new features in Outlook 2010.

Go ahead and look at the number in your Inbox. Do you feel like you have a 100 pound weight sitting on your shoulders or are you smiling because you are one of the rare few who only has this week’s emails waiting for you to deal with? The number of emails sitting in your Inbox affects the speed of your Outlook searches and how much time you waste scrolling past the same email over and over.

How to Start Organizing Microsoft Outlook

The key to getting a handle on your emails, improving your response time and staying on top of critical actions and time-sensitive tasks is to develop an approach to process your emails both from your computer and on your mobile devices.

1. Synchronize all your devices so you only process an email once.

For small business who don’t have access to a company server, set up a Google Business Account and use Google apps to connect your Outlook, phone and iPad to access your email, calendar, contacts and tasks from all your devices. You can even access your Gmail account from anywhere and the sync will update your Outlook the next time you are at your computer. If you only want to sync your email to your phone and iPad, you can use the free Gmail account, (note that you won’t be able to access your calendar, contacts and tasks).

2. Use the Conversation Feature – in Microsoft 2010 when Conversations is turned on, messages in your Inbox and other email folders can be organized by Conversation and Date. This is handy when there are several emails in a conversation because you can delete all the previous emails and only keep the latest conversation.

To turn on or off Conversations – On the VIEW tab, in the CONVERSATIONS group, select or clear the SHOW AS CONVERSATION check box. Next, click ALL FOLDERS.

3. Set up your Action and Reference Folders

Action Folders – are for emails that require action

Reference folders – are for emails with no action required. You keep these emails to refer to them later, are permanent records or are for tax and legal requirements.

When you create your Action folders, type a period “.” in front of the action folder name. Adding the period changes the sort order a moves your Action folders to the top of the list and your “Reference” folder under your Action folders. You can also use numbers 01, 02, 03, 04 if you prefer to organize your Action folders in a certain order. Suggested Action folders:

..This Week (there are two periods here)

.Delegated – Deb

.Leads

.Parked

.Projects

.Receipts to Print

.Travel

.Waiting For/Pending

To create Reference folders, create a main folder called “Reference” and then second level folders using broad categories (example. Accounting > Budget 2012)

Separating your action and reference emails helps you gain control on what requires your attention. No more wasting time scrolling past emails that don’t require your attention.

Arrange your emails by Conversation, From – In Outlook 2010, on the VIEW tab, in the ARRANGEMENT group, click one of the arrangement options. One of the fastest ways to process your emails is to arrange by Conversations.

Organizing Microsoft Outlook emails is easy when you customize it the way you want to process your emails. Now that you have your new action and reference folders set up, you can use the next four steps to process your Inbox and get it to ground zero, or close to zero depending on your preference.

Organizing Microsoft Outlook with F.A.S.T.

Use the F.A.S.T. Workflow Decision Making Process to quickly decide what the next action is. With the F.A.S.T. process, you have four choices:

File – file emails in your Reference folders that have no action. Drag and drop emails into the appropriate Reference folder. A word of caution, at some point you will need to clean out these folders or move them to your Archive folder.

Act – these are emails that require action by you. Drag emails that require action

Schedule – get your appointments into your calendar and save as an ALL DAY EVENT or at a SPECIFIC TIME. If you are keeping the email to refer to at the appointment, simply drag the email to your calendar and all the info will be saved in the appointment. Delete the email.

Toss – Read and delete whenever possible. Be ruthless with the delete key. You can set up your Deleted Folder to delete emails manually by you, monthly or whatever time frame you prefer.

If your inbox is overflowing with emails and organizing Microsoft Outlook seems like a daunting project, here’s a fast way to get your Inbox close to ground zero immediately. Create an Action folder “.OLD EMAILS.” Next, drag emails that are older than 7 days into the new .OLD EMAILS folder. You’ll need to schedule time in your calendar to deal with this old emails. This strategy gives you instant relief since you only have 7 days of emails to process. You’ll be motivated to process the old email folder.

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