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Entries Tagged 'Goals & Time Management' ↓
Organized Office
Have you ever worked in the following way in your office?
- Zipping back and forth between tasks? Moving papers around? Randomly checking email, facebook & twitter? Calling a friend and then moving some more paper around? OH, and maybe a couple of texts thrown in for good measure.
Have you every worked this way in your office?
- Feeling fully focused? Honed in on one task and one task only? So absorbed in what you were doing that everything around you felt like it went away while you worked? Kinda like love isn’t it?
What was the difference and which do you prefer? Why are we sometimes scattered and sometimes absorbed? I am organized (ahem, of course), but I still have days when I feel like I have undiagnosed ADD. And I don’t mean to be flip about that, sometimes I really do feel like I’m all over the place. Let me share some organizing tips to help you and I stay on the absorbed side of the line:
** Define your priorities for the day, create a reasonable and manageable list. One thing that puts me into random mode is not knowing what I need to work on. A list truly helps me feel centered and focused.
** Prioritize your list from most important to least important.
** Work on the most important tasks on your list first.
** Limit distractions. This is huge for me. Since I lot of my work is done solo, it is easy for me to text or accept a social call from someone while I am working. I have found the best cure is to turn off my text tone and place my phone in another room. If a client calls I will hear it ringing but won’t be tempted to see if I have a text waiting. Turn off email tones, shut the door, close facebook, this is not your opportunity to “phone a friend.”
** Work for concentrated amounts of time that work well for you. I used to think I shouldn’t do anything non-work related like throwing towels in the dryer during the day. But I have found that I actually do better if I get up between work activities and have a change in tasks. Do what works for you. Get up, stretch, meditate-take a short break. One rule of thumb is to work 50 minutes and take a 10 minute break.
Organize your time and tasks to increase your focus so you can get your work done and then go have some fun! Fun is good.
Tags: email, facebook, focus, office organization, organize your time, organized office, tasks, text, work, zone
Water, water, water, I need more water! Recently I’ve been working on organizing myself to implement some very basic goals for my health, one of which is drinking more water. I’m either good at it or I’m not. And recently, well, I’m not. Living in the northwest, it’s usually not that hot out to make me very thirsty. And I find it’s really easy for me to get busy during the day and ‘forget’ to drink water. So I will admit it, I created a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet of all the healthy things I want to incorporate into my days like vitamins, flax seed and water. Of course I included a place to check off each item as it is completed daily. But being busy, some days I would forget about my lovely spreadsheet and then all bets were off.
Over the weekend we had to hit the cream aisle at the grocery store for kid sleepovers. Right in the middle of the aisle were grocery carts lined up with sale items that I couldn’t resist peeking in and checking out. And there it was. On sale. My shiny, new water bottle. Not just any water bottle mind you… This is a 64 oz, BPA-free bottle with a molded handle, build in ice pack and spill-proof straw. SOLD!
What I love about this water bottle is that I can fill it in the morning and that’s it for the day. No more losing track of how many glasses I have put down. No more drinking two glasses but then nothing more once I leave the house for the day, I just have to take my bottle with me by it’s lovely, blue handle. There’s no guessing, I look at the bottle and I know how much I’ve drank and how much more I have to go. Knowing if I’ve met my daily goal or not is right in front of me.
I believe the simpler we can make it to reach our goals the the more likely we will reach them. Looks like I have about 40 more ounces to go-not bad for 10:00 am-I can definitely do this!
Tags: goals, spreadsheet, water, water bottle
Apparently my hopes & dreams of winning the “Mom of the Year” award for 2010 are over. I guess the positive side is I don’t need to lose 10 pounds to get into a glamorous dress for my walk down the red carpet and I can stop take up any more time practicing the perfect photo shot pose.
I’m thinking there probably isn’t anyone out there that can be too much more into home organizationthan me, considering I am a professional organizer and all. But I’m a person who makes mistakes and I’m a busy mom and, well, the evidence was in the backpack. Recently I was cleaning out the last few paper scraps from last school year and that’s when I found “it.” A note from the school from back in June at the end of the year. My daughter went to school with no lunch and only .25 cents in her account. Since it was the end of the school year there are no IOU’s for a warm lunch allowed. So she was fed a dry burger bun, a slice of cheese, fruit and a milk. Now thank goodness for the fact that our school district has provisions for kids whose mom’s mess up and she didn’t actually go hungry. But man I felt bad and wondered how I could have sent my child to school with no food.
It may have been a, “mom can I buy lunch?” morning and I just said yes. It could have been a “forgot to make lunch the night before” kind of morning. It could have been a “mom is running late and she thinks said daughter was downstairs making lunch” kind of morning. No matter now. Now we just need a plan of redemption. So I’ve been busy making the following changes for the new school year:
- My goal is to stay off the laptop until the school bus pulls away. Stay on task, stay on time.
- Lunch needs to be made the night before.
- Money needs to be on hand in their school lunch accounts.
- I’ve cooked up a bunch of breakfast foods ahead to make quick & easy breakfasts.
- I bought a timer for my daughter who tends to dilly dally to keep her on track.
I am organized and, heck, I’m even a good mom. But that dry bun got my attention and forced a few needed improvements. And who knows, maybe the “Mom of the Year” award actually has my name on it in 2011.
Tags: Home Organization, laptop, lunch, mom, morning, school
All good things must come to an end or, at the very least, curbed for the greater good. Sigh. So I find that, in my effort to stay organized, I must put down the BlackBerry down. I must resist the urge to text my best friend about the latest haircut I want to get or about the fact that my jeans are too tight this morning. Do you know if there a support group for texting? I might need one if I don’t stop breaking out in this cold sweat.
I can’t totally go cold turkey because I really do need my gadgets and gizmos, don’t I? For my business I have blogs to blog and tweets to tweet. I have clever (hopefully) facebook status updates running through my head that need to be shouted out. And then there’s business email and personal email, not to mention my personal facebook account. But how’s a girl to balance it all to prevent being behind a screen more than being present face-to-face?
Well, despite being a Blackberry owner, I don’t pay to have internet connection. I work a lot from home with easy computer access and I know that internet on my phone would take me further to the dark side. I have turned off my texting tone and parked my phone in another room while I work. That way I won’t keep looking over to see if I might possibly have a text waiting. I mean, I never know when a good friend might be trying to tell me she has a stain on her shirt or that she just ate three cupcakes. There is less texting temptation when I don’t see the phone and I know I will hear it ring when I have a business call coming in. So the really important work stuff won’t fall through the cracks.
I’m shutting the lid to my laptop at a certain point in the evening and the goal is to not open it again until the kids are off to school. I’m a task master and I love to get in there and feel like I’ve knocked out my emails and status updates first thing in the morning. Only that backfires when I get sucked in and find we are running late to get to the school bus on time.
So, although I haven’t completely broken up with my electronics, I think taking a “little break” will only make us stronger. I’ve also decided that iPods don’t count and I’m staying positive that there might be a patch coming out sometime soon.
Tags: Blackberry, electronics, email, iPod, laptop, organized, phone, texting
I try to do too much-guilty as charged! I know all about time management and how to organize my time, but often that Type A personality comes out trying to get as much done as possible before getting out the door. I want to throw in a load of laundry as I start my day or check email or clean out the dishwasher. And that can cause problems getting somewhere on time as well as leaving a mess in my wake. Of course I don’t have a bunch of clutter in my home, but I still have stuff and when I’m in a hurry that stuff gets left out which means I have to come home later and clean up behind myself. A classic example is getting ready in the bathroom and leaving jammies on the floor and a curling iron and make-up on the counter. Now it doesn’t take much time to put it back away when I get home, but it does take time. It is more efficient to provide ourselves with enough time to clean as we go so when we come home we have a fresh slate instead of having to back track to get caught up.
Here are some tips to to help all of us get out the door on time:
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Get up a little bit earlier than you usually do
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Review your schedule the night before to make sure you don’t have any surprises in the morning
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Be realistic about how much time you truly need to get yourself ready, we tend to underestimate
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Focus on what you need to do to get ready; wait to focus on extra chores once you are ready
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Allow enough time to drive to your first destination of the day. Don’t push yourself so late that you have 20 minutes to complete a 30 minute drive. Talk about stress!
Take some time to organize your time so you can reduce stress, reduce mess and start your day on the right foot!
Tags: chores, focus, home, laundry, mess, organize, schedule, stress, time
Whether you are working on a project at work or whether you are working on a personal goal at home, you can reach your final destination by organizing your projects.
- Step 1: Know what you want your final outcome to be.
- Step 2: Set a deadline of completion for yourself and add it to your calendar.
- Step 3: Decide how much you have to do each day or each week to reach your deadline. Give yourself a little wiggle room to expect the unexpected.
- Step 4: Mark off time in your day planner to work on your project; make this a critical task in your day, don’t leave getting it done up to chance.
- Step 5: Give yourself a pat on the back as you accomplish your small goals along the way.
- Step 6: Get help if you are struggling or find yourself falling behind.
- Step 7: Celebrate your success when you complete your project or reach your goal-way to go, you did it!
So, here’s an example of what I did for my own tasks on DIY Organization tonight. I am able to schedule blog posts and I wanted to make sure I have new posts coming out every few days. So, this is what I did:
- I decided I want a new post to go out every 3 days.
- I looked at the remaining dates left in the month of August and made a list of each day I want a new post to go out: 6th, 9th, 12th, etc.
- I then looked at my schedule and penciled in writing 2 blog posts on specific days on my calendar. It doesn’t seem like so much to do when I look at it as 2 posts.
- If all goes well and as planned, I will have posts scheduled through August 30th by August 12th. If something unexpected happens I still have plenty of wiggle room to make it up. If I’m on a writing roll and get done early-bonus!
You can reach your goals by organizing your projects and breaking them down into manageable pieces. Let me know how it goes!
Tags: blog, DIY organization, goals, home, list, organizing, post, projects
Delegation can go a long way toward home organization. Sometimes it is difficult to let go of being the one to get it all done. Sometimes it is hard to believe that anyone else will do the tasks or chores as well as we do. You might worry that something will get messed up, forgotten or simply not look at nice as when you do it yourself. Or that it is just faster to do it yourself.
Sometimes though, delegating duties will bring nice suprises. It can be surprising to learn that your kids may see something in a different light or have different ideas on how to do something that are even better than your ideas! When it comes to delegating duties to kids, in the big picture, you are teaching them life skills to help them toward their own independence.
So here we are at summer vacation and I have to balance business, kids, house, chores, etc. My kids are old enough to actually do some work for me this year which is pretty exciting. It’s also a little unnerving for a professional organizer who likes things done a certain way. My oldest recently cleaned out my twitter account to balance followers vs. following. She had a clever way of making notations on some accounts that I never would have thought of. Plus, the two hours she took to do it, opened up two hours of more productive work for me. Work that no one could do for me.
My youngest worked on Household Hub Notebooks and she pointed out a clever trick while she was working as well. So, just because I’m mom, I guess I really don’t know everything-who knew? So, don’t be afraid to get help to help you stay organized and get tasks done!
Tags: delegation, Home Organization
What a handy little gadget the Time Timer is to help you organize your time! The next time you need to make sure time doesn’t get away from you, pull out your Time Timer and make sure you are in control; be the boss! The great feature is the red shading that allows you to see and follow the passage of time. This can be a very handy tool for children as well. I had just a regular dial timer when my kids were small and I know how handy even that was for clean up time and many other tasks.
It can be easy to get sucked into a task like email and before you know it, a 10 minute task turns into a 40 minute task. That’s not good when you have a deadline to meet or a lot to get done in your day. Here are some handy ways you can use a timer to keep you on track:
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To set an allotted time for surfing the web
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To set an allotted time for spending time on social media
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To break down tasks into smaller chunks
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To allow yourself not to feel overwhelmed by a task-you can set the timer and do ‘anything’ for just 15 minutes!
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To give yourself 10 minutes of clean up/put away time at the end of a task or the end of the day
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To keep yourself from wasting time-beat the clock!
You can also purchase software to load onto your computer if you would rather have a Time Timer working on your screen while you are spending time on your computer. It’s so easy to spend more time than we mean to on the computer. A great tool to remind kids when their screen time is up as well.
Organize your time and strive to be more productive each day!
Tags: computer, organize time, productive, screen time, social media, software, Time Timer, tool
Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Biznik, Twitter-Oh My! These, aren’t even a fraction of the options that we have to choose from when it comes to social media. And with social media comes the expenditure of your time, energy and efforts. Which means you must organize your social media time and find a balance in how to use these sites as effective tools that don’t leave you sucked into the social media vortex.
Here are some tips on how to organize your social media time:
- Know why you are using social media sites-have a plan to make them effective for your business and use them as a tool
- Have a schedule for using these tools; don’t be random, create a time for it during your day
- Stick to the sites that work for you and your particular business. If a site is producing zero results-let it go
- Use scheduling tools: try hootsuite to schedule tweets on Twitter well in advance. You can input lots of tweets at one time, they will go out according to your set schedule and you don’t have to keep logging on to produce more tweets
- Don’t get sucked in, know why you are logging on and how long you want to be there. Set a timer, such as 10 minutes on facebook. It is so easy to start looking around, reading, responding and getting lost in cyberspace which can be a lot more fun that actual work sometimes.
We are so fortunate to have such powerful and amazing tools that bring the globe together and expose us to such a wide audience. Organize your social media time and make the most of it!
Tags: biznik, facebook, linkedin, organize, plaxo, social media, tools, twitter
What a handy little tool my BlackBerry has been to help me organize my office tasks recently! Do I mean I’ve used it to process emails? No. Do I mean I’ve used to to keep track of my schedule while on the go? Nope. Does it mean I’ve used it to sync my schedule with Outlook? Nada. I’ve simply used the alarm to help me put a cap on how long I am focusing on separate tasks-super simple!
Recently my interior design partner put a status on facebook that she had set a timer for 30 minutes while working in her office and just how much she got done during that 30 minutes. It can be easy to get caught up and lost in our tasks, especially on email and social media. Once you get sucked in, you can kinda get lost for a while. So, instead of feeling like I have to do any one task in my office for long periods of time, I am setting my alarm on my phone, actually for just 15 minute increments. It really is amazing how much you can get done in one focused 15 minute session. At first I had the alarm tone that I use to wake me up each day, which of course needs to be somewhat annoying. That doesn’t work when you are in the middle of concentrating unless you want to give yourself mini heart attacks all day. So I changed it to a soothing tone to shake me ever more gently out of my current task. And it seems to be working.
Organize your office tasks by breaking tasks into smaller chunks of dedicated time.
Tags: Blackberry, email, facebook, office tasks, organize, schedule, social media, sync, tasks, timer
