Key Areas of Your Business

While in Toronto in early November at the Professional Organizers in Canada annual conference I attended a workshop delivered by Deanne Kelleher from Kaos Group called “Essential and Powerful Business Tools”.  The session made me realize how many systems all of us small business owners should have in place and perhaps don’t, myself included.  If only I could find the time!

Here are the key areas of our business that Deanne suggests we have systems for:

1. Customer Relations Management – simply using the Notes field in your existing customer contact database to record conversations, TY notes sent and referrals is a good place to start.  Also keep track of who subscribes to your newsletter.
2. Marketing and Networking – set goals for your newsletter distribution and track how many subscribers you have, how many you want and how much business comes from your newsletter.  Track how many business cards you give out in a year.  Look at your website analytics regularly.  If you write articles which ones create the most website traffic?
3. Email – create an FAQ section on your website to handle potential customer inquiries and create a standard email in your ‘Drafts’ folder for respond to routine inquiries.  Create a thank you email to send to each new person you meet asking them to subscribe to your newsletter.  Consider including a link to your newsletter in your email signature.
4. Process and Procedure – create an Operations Manual (ugh!) which includes administrative procedures, communication processes, goals, year end procedures, and much more.
5. Social Media – think about what you are saying and to whom.  How often are you saying it and where.  Does it work?  Is your goal to educate or acquire?  Are you connected to your ideal clients?
6. Tracking – what will you track and when?  How will you track it?  Why are you tracking it?

I don’t know about you, but I think I need to hire Deanne to help me figure out how to get all of this done!

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Can You Live a Good Enough Life?

I am fascinated by how the concept of ‘good enough’ relates to being organized and our many attempts to be what we perceive as ‘well organized’.  What does being organized mean to you?  Most likely not the same as it does to your spouse, your best friend or your children.

What if, instead of constantly striving to be more organized, better organized or even, heaven forbid, perfectly organized we strove for ‘good enough’.  According to Sarah Hampson the author of an article entitled, The Secret to happiness? Live a ‘good enough’ life,  “. . . when you don’t expect much, when you manage the ideas of what you think your life should be, you can be pleasantly surprised – and grateful – for the good fortune that comes your way.”

Somehow this sounds like lowering expectations, reducing the standards of what is acceptable and seems to me like settling for mediocrity.  Not acceptable to someone like me who is a recovering perfectionist and still battling with doing my ‘best’ instead of striving for ‘perfect’.  So, the concept of good enough doesn’t sit well with me but I know for many of you it might be just what you need.

If your kitchen drawers are organized so that you can find what you need but you don’t have those fancy dividers that you saw in a friends kitchen that might just be good enough?  If your clothes are all hanging up but not on matching hangers is that good enough?  If your papers are all off the floor and in tidy piles on your desk where you can put your fingers on what you need that might just be good enough.  If your email inbox is down to 50 messages, instead of 500, maybe that is good enough?

I like the idea of good enough as opposed to perfectly organized as it does allow us to lower our expectations of what organized means and move towards a level of organization that is achievable.  I think this concept is especially important for those who don’t like to spend their time organizing or find it difficult to know when to stop organizing. 

What we see in magazines and on television is often not realistic and perhaps that is where some of our expectations of perfectly organized come from?  Have you ever noticed the desk in the corner of the living room on a makeover show with a computer on it but not a single cord in sight nor a stitch of paper – no matter how organized we are our space will never look like that so perhaps lowering our expectations is exactly what the doctor ordered!

Everything in life seems to come back to deciding what matters most.  As long as your home and office are organized ‘enough’ so that you can function effectively and enjoy your space, forget about what others may think and go with what works for you.  I think the summer is the perfect time to try some ‘good enough’ thinking – at least for you my dear readers even if not for me!

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Planning for Success – A Few Tips

Most time management experts agree that many of us get to the end of a week and wonder where it’s gone and why we haven’t accomplished anything significant.  Each and every time I work with a client to teach them the planning process, I realize I could do a better job of it myself. 

Why is it that we put off planning even though we know that the most successful businesses and individuals dedicate time to planning weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually without fail?

In my experience working with dozens of clients on becoming more effective and figuring out how to get the ‘right’ things done we discover that no planning takes place each week therefore the important activities slip through the cracks in favour of the urgent activities or the priorities thrust upon us by others.

So, here’s what you might want to do to start to ensure that important activities and projects are on your radar and that you delegate more effectively:

1. Block 1 to 2 hours with yourself in your calendar every Friday afternoon
2. Start the weekly planning process by going back over the current week and looking for any promises you made to others. Note them on your ‘To Do’ list or in your calendar
3. Look forward to the coming week and do the same
4. Go through each item on your ‘To Do’ list and decide which ones you will do this week and which ones someone else could do for you
5. Go over all of the other major projects on your plate and block time with yourself to move them forward

Do this faithfully every single week and you will become more productive.

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Procrastination – Perfectionism or Impulsiveness?

A couple of weeks ago I travelled to Moncton to deliver a workshop on Overcoming Procrastination at the IAAP Atlantic Conference for a group of over 80 very enthusiastic women.  Wow, it was good fun and we had some interesting discussion about procrastination and why we do it.

We brought up the topic of laziness – is procrastination laziness?  Some people thought that sometimes it was laziness but most of the time not so much.  It seems to go much deeper than that in a lot of instances.

Is procrastination due to perfectionism?  In many cases it may very well be.  We often wait for the perfect conditions, saying to ourselves, “I’ll do this when …” or “I can’t do this until …”.  However, as the quote says, “Opportunities are easily lost while waiting for the perfect conditions.” (Gary Ryan Blair). 

I have this article that I cut from The Globe and Mail several months ago which I pulled out in preparing for the workshop.  It’s all about perfectionism and procrastination and how they may or may not be linked.  According to the article perhaps it is not about perfectionism even though studies show that it is.  Apparently perfectionists who procrastinate are more likely to seek help from therapists so they turn up in research numbers more often.  Gee whiz, I needed therapy for that, who knew!  If you are a perfectionist you feel worse about putting things off and therefore seek help to overcome it. 

Hmmm . . . being a recovering perfectionist myself I still think that I wait for the perfect conditions to start or finish certain things and somehow they always get done before the deadline, always.  Perhaps that’s my perfectionist standards or just the nature of the expectations of others that Professional Organizers always do everything ahead of schedule – how’s that for a little added pressure!

The article goes on to postulate that procrastination is, in fact, a result of impulsiveness.  Say what?  Impulsive people (you can tell I’m not one) live impatiently in the present moment and want everything right now.   Showing self-control or delaying gratification is difficult for impulsive people.  So, anxiety over a deadline leads directly to procrastination.  And impulsiveness, they say, causes disorganized procrastinators who are mighty distractible.  Impulsive people find it difficult to plan work ahead of time which leads to a lot of late nights just before the project deadline. 

Wow, pretty complicated stuff, don’t you think?

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Time to Look for Something but No Time to Put It Away?

Here are some wise words from my good friend Georgina Forrest from Smartworks Organizing in Calgary, Alberta from one of her recent newsletters. 

Doing Small Things Can Make A Big Difference.  Have you ever taken something out to use it …

• a file from the file cabinet
• the hole punch out of the supply cupboard
• a book off of a shelf
• something – anything – out of a drawer

. . . used it but didn’t put it back? You know, because you just didn’t have time to put it away.

Then you needed to find something – perhaps a file or a hole punch or a book or something – only to SPEND time digging through the piles of stuff that had accumulated because you didn’t have time to put it away in the first place.

It’s a funny paradox of life:

Why is it we always have time to look for something yet we don’t always have time to put it away?

Don’t just put stuff down when you’re done with it, put it away. It really only takes a few additional seconds to do this, but can save you oodles of time wasted looking for it again in the future.

Every little thing you can do to keep order, results in huge benefits for you down the not-too-distant road.

So put that file or hole punch or book or whatever away – right now.

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Is Email Overload Turning You Into a Hamster?

Yup, here I am yet again ranting about email productivity, or lack thererof!

I’m reading this great book about email entitled The Hamster Revolution. Though I’ve studied this subject a lot, I like the creative approach to explaining what email overload can do to us – it can turn us all into tiny hamsters running on a hamster wheel 7 days a week trying to keep up.

The book really brings home two keys to managing email before it manages you.

1. Reduce Email Volume
2. Improve Email Quality

The authors explain three key questions to ask yourself as you work on reducing email volume.  The idea being that if  you send less email you will receive less email. 

• Is Your Email Needed? Does my busy recipient truly need this email to do his or her job? “Send we-mail instead of me-mail“, the authors suggest.  Don’t you love it!
• Is Email the Appropriate Communication Tool? Email is company property and is stored forever and can be reviewed or forwarded at anytime anywhere.
• Is Your Message Targeted? Is your message being sent to the right people in the right way? Decrease your use of Reply All, CC and Distribution Lists.

Improving email quality has two components.  Write really good subject lines and sculpt the body of the message.

• Good subject lines are absolutely crucial to clear, easy and quick communication via email.  The book suggests putting 1 of 5 action words in every subject line: Action, Info, Request, Confirmed, and Delivery. And then writing a good descriptive title describing the project or using specific dates, times & places when referring to the topic at hand.
• The authors suggest sculpting the body of your email using a method called A-B-C.  A if for Action Summary, then B for Background and finally C for Close.  The Action Summary is a sentence that describes a specific action, purpose or key point.  The Background is the body of your message.  Try using bullet points, numbering and keep it short and to the point.  The Close is the place to include a nice comment, describe next steps, and include your automatic signature.

These are all concepts that I teach in each and every Take Control of Email workshop I do and in my Email Organizing Basics on-line web session.  However, clarifying them in this way seems to make the concepts easier to remember. Thanks Hamster Guys!

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Grow Your Business and Make More Money

Last weekend I attended a retreat with a business group I belong to.  We were very fortunate to have a session facilitated by Jol Hunter from Grant Thornton.

The most meaningful part of the 24 hours we spent together was something all of us as business owners want to know about and that is how to grow our business and make more money.

Jol identified 4 essential elements to making more money:

1. Know Your Business
2. Know Its Value Creation
3. Involve Your People
4. Be Disciplined in Execution

Here are the key points to consider in order to be certain we are on top of the 4 keys above.

• Know the formula for making money in your business.  For example, in a service based business that might be ((# of hours x hourly rate)-expenses)/# of employees = profit/employee
• Work the formula relentlessly
• Have a plan to improve the current performance of the formula.  For example, will reducing expenses have a positive impact on the profit per employee?
• Have a plan to make the formula produce more tomorrow. What should the formula look like in 2 or 3 years? More hours? Higher hourly rate?
• Execute on your plan
• Know where the value is created in your business.  What is your distinctive advantage?  Why do people buy from you?
• Work deliberately to increase your value-creating ability.  Enhance the reason people buy from you
• Ask your people how they would score your business.  There are several key questions to ask including – Do I know what is expected of me at work? Do I have the opportunity to do my best every day? Do I receive recognition regularly for doing good work? Do my opinions seem to count? (Wow, my last employer had it all wrong – no wonder I started my own business!)
• Ask yourself, on a scale of 1 to 10, how organized are you? (this point was music to my ears!)
• Have you analyzed how you spend your time? (Yes, I have – whew!) 
• Is it time to bring on more support so you can truly spend time on the important things that will ensure you grow your business and make more money? (Yes, it is!)

And, after we’ve done all of the above, Jol says we need to ask ourselves, “How can I make sure my business is ready for the future”? 

Holy cow, don’t know about you, but I’ve got a lot of work to do!

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I’m Suffering from ‘Paper Calendar Withdrawal’!

I think I’m in ‘like’ with my new Blackberry Style but not yet in ‘love’ with it.  Wow, do I have a whole new understanding for what many of my clients have gone through over the last few years as we switch from a paper planner to these wonderful electronic devices.  I am suffering from ‘paper calendar withdrawal’ symptoms – who knew it would be so difficult.

I suppose I should lay blame with the Tony at Priority Management who taught me oh so well to be totally reliant on my paper system back in 1993 – eeks, that’s a long time ago, no wonder I’m having such a hard time. Now I understand why so many people have an electronic and a paper calendar system – it’s hard to teach yourself not to automatically go for the paper planner and open it up to glance at that big monthly calendar and the weekly To Do’s all nicely organized by day.

So, the first two weeks I had my Blackberry, you guessed it, I kept the paper planner too and spent an inordinate amount of time entering all my appointments and tasks in both places.  Oh boy, that did not make me a happy girl.  There is nothing I hate more than wasting time getting myself organized. I’m all about quick and simple when it comes to keeping track of where I have to be and what I have to do when. So I tried entering everything in my computer (which syncs beautifully with my BB by the way) and then printing out my calendar and tasks. 

Suddenly I realized what I was doing – why on earth was I wasting trees printing all the information that was already in two places – my computer calendar and my Blackberry?  It was difficult to explain the compulsion that drove me to keep looking for these things in my planner.  I suppose it has been almost like an extension of my body for over 15 years. I never went anywhere without it, ever. Well, maybe on the weekends when I wasn’t working I left it in my office.

I am pleased to report that I am gradually weaning myself off my paper planner but I’m telling you it certainly isn’t easy.  I still have to carry around client files and reference information during the week so my plan is to purchase a new binder to carry those items in so I can finally free myself once and for all from a paper-based organizing system.  Fingers crossed that it all works more efficiently and effectively in the end.

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Save Me From My Smartphone!

Yup, that’s right, I did it, I finally moved into this decade – I’ve got myself a brand new Blackberry Style 9670 Smartphone – eeks!

Now, you would think that perhaps that was an easy decision and that my relationship with my new device is a love in.  So not the case, people.   Mostly because it’s been a very long three week journey to get the right smartphone and to get it all nicely synced with MS Outlook. 

I think I’ll start at the beginning.  I’ve been carefully researching smartphones for several months and added the associated cost to my budget all ready to roll for 2011.  Now, the trouble is ‘they’ keep bringing out new devices faster than you can figure out what the little buggers can do, or not do. 

So, I had my eye on the LG Windows 7 Smartphone – loved that big screen and the slide out keyboard with the nice size keys on it.  So, of course, I went to the phone store and purchased myself this little devil after asking several ‘techie’ types if the Windows 7 would sync properly with my Outlook Contacts, Calendar and Tasks – “of course”, I was told by various people. 

Long story short, after many hours of phone support attempts and two very nasty men at LG who treated me like a complete idiot, I turned to the online community hiding under my Google search bar – just wish I’d thought of that before I bought the phone.  Therein I found a YouTube video which showed me how to download the software and install it in order to have my new LG phone and Outlook talk nicely to each other – cool, I thought to myself. 

However, what I discovered upon successfully getting everything up and running is that they don’t really talk nicely to each other at all.    You need to download a Windows Hotmail Live Connector in order to have your Contacts and Calendar talk to your phone.  Tasks were completely forgotten altogether by our friends at Windows – apparently they think we have nothing to do all day long except go to meetings and email people- geez, get a life!  Anyway, once I figured out that I now had to maintain two sets of everything, I nearly lost it. Yup, that’s right every time you add an appointment to your Outlook calendar, you have to add it to your Hotmail calendar and ditto for Contacts.  All I have to say is, “I don’t think so …bleep, bleep, bleep …!”

After a final call to the nice people at Bell Aliant, off I went with the phone back to the store to be exchanged for the Blackberry.   And, low and behold, it only took me a week to get the Blackberry Desktop Software onto my computer and finally get it synced – gee whiz, just my luck.  One techie friend told me that 99% of the time the software downloads perfectly, you plug in your BB and you’re off to the races.  Why did I have to fall into the 1% who downloaded it 5 or 6 times, called various techie people, got really frustrated, took it out on my husband (sorry, honey!) and then talked to my husband’s amazing friend Andy today who had me up and running in 30 mins. flat.  Andy, you rock! 

Just goes to show you that I should stick to organizing and let other people set up my technology.  Rest assured I will have all kinds of things to say about managing time effectively when you own a Smartphone.

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Preparing Your Business for 2011

At this time of year I always start to get into what I like to call ‘Clean Up and Get Organized for the New Year’ mode in my business.  Somehow, I always look forward to this process. For me it involves several steps which many of you may find it helpful to consider.

1. Purging Paper & Electronic Information - like many of you I accumulate a lot of paper and electronic information throughout the year, some of which I never use. There’s no better feeling than going through all the paper files and shredding a bunch, going through my ‘My Documents’ folder and either archiving or deleting a bunch of files and finally going through all my email folders from this year and either archiving or deleting a bunch of that information.  Somehow this process always seems to shift the energy around a bit and make room for new and exciting projects each new year.
2. Getting Ready for Canada Revenue - I have to say that all of us small business owners certainly do have to be well organized on the financial records side of our business in case our friends at CRA come calling.  I firmly believe that if I’m well organized and keep good records there is less likelihood that will happen but if it does I’ll be well prepared. I can pull any piece of   information they may require on a moment’s notice including invoices, expense receipts, HST returns, my calendar with all appointments,  monthly financial statements and the all important Automobile Mileage Log (to purchase yours go to http://www.janetheorganizer.com/productsforsale_automileagelog.html)  for the past 7 years.  The two things that they love to audit us home-based businesses for are ‘office-use-of-home’ expenses and ‘vehicle expenses’, so be sure to have those records in tip top shape and easily accessible.  In addition, HST audits are quite common so being able to produce your records in a timely fashion can make this process almost painless.
3. Creating A New Budget - I always like to challenge myself to ‘stretch goals’ on the revenue side and then see how little I can get away with spending on the expense side while still growing the business.  This year I’m thinking about a few new budget items such as a Smartphone (yeah, yeah, I know I’m so behind on that one), a part-time Personal Assistant (too exciting), and maybe even my dream of a Training Video.  Having a monthly budget and reviewing it twice per month is one of the key success factors to any business, large or small.
4. Annual Planning - in addition to creating a new budget, I schedule a yearly annual planning session for 1 or 2 days with my mastermind group(s) to brainstorm ideas for the next year or so.  This will involve both my personal and professional life and is a chance for some free thinking with no limitations.  A chance to review outstanding projects and think of new ones.  A chance to dream big and share those dreams with others.  And finally the time to put it all in writing, decide my priorities for the next year, and make a committment to others in my mastermind group to work on those priorities or, if I don’t, to have a good reason for changing them.

Whew, aren’t you exhausted just thinking about all this? Now we all have to go and book time in our calendar over the holiday season to get working on #1 to #3.  In my business #4 will be happening in two phases, one in January and the other in March.  However, you may decide to do something completely different like attend a workshop or hire someone to help you through the process.  Remember the adage, “Poor Prior Planning leads to P… Poor Performance”.

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