I’ll admit I’ve lost my share of productivity to paper clutter. When my desk gets overtaken by bills and memos, it becomes hard to find what I’m looking for and to be focused.

However, by finding a system that works for me, I have been able to dramatically straighten things out keep clutter within reason. I’m going to share some tools and tricks I’ve incorporated.

Prohibit Loose Papers on your Desk

I keep all papers on my desk within a two-tiered paper sorter.

The top holder is my inbox, where things go before I know what to do with them. I’m free to dump anything here if I’m especially busy or don’t want to organize just yet.

The other level holds my “Current Papers,” which are papers I need to complete tasks.

Papers I need to keep, but which aren’t immediately necessary, get digitized or filed in a filing cabinet.

To make this system work, I’ll comb through my inbox each day. Everything I process is disposed of, addressed right away (e.g. paying a bill), moved to my current box, or filed away. Nothing ever goes back into the inbox.

Reduce External Paperwork

You keep things neater for yourself by reducing the paperwork that enters your house or that you simply don’t need to keep.

Remove yourself from junk mailing lists with tools like the iPhone/Android app Paper Karma. Or check out this tutorial on how to stop junk mail.

Consider incorporating a document scanner into your workflow. While you may want to keep paper copies of tax records and signed documents, you can digitize handouts, fliers, and business cards.

If replacing your paperwork with digital tools sounds intimidating, you may want to consider making yourself a Windows or Mac expert. You’ll find that once you’re familiar with these systems and their so-called “advanced” shortcuts, they’re far better to work with than analog tools.

Eliminate Paper for Lists, Reminders, Notes

If you’re using post-it notes and legal pads to take down ideas, reminders, and notes, it’s time to kick the habit.

Instead, make the conversion to a note-taking app like Evernote or Microsoft OneNote, and perhaps a to-do app like Remember The Milk or Outlook.

These tools make it easier to create notes, to store them, and to retrieve them. It’s the best of all worlds.

That said, consider a reusable writing surface like a board made of glass for writing down information you want to keep highly visible.

And if you really love your post-it notes, you can place them here instead of the edges of your computer monitor.

Make it Easy on Yourself

Use a system that works for you.

If you’re right-handed, make sure your paper sorter is on your right-hand side within reach. And if your trash and recycling aren’t where you can super easily reach them, you’ll be less diligent about using them.

Play around and rearrange if need be. The one-time investment of optimizing your work space can pay off over the following days, months, and years.

Image credit:  home office, by Dylan (newchaos), flickr, CC2.0

Note: links to products in this post are for illustration and do not imply endorsement of the specific products

The post Managing Paper Clutter for Greater Productivity appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

Anyone who knows me knows I love a chat

And if there’s anything I love better than a conversation it’s a good long conversation.

Sometimes that can happen serendipitously.

Say when a friend or colleague is in the neighbourhood or heading my way and calls to see if I’m up for a coffee and a chat. Or someone just decides it’s too long since we’ve spoken and calls me on the phone or Skype to catch up.

Usually I will seize the opportunity and put aside whatever I’m working on, on the basis that work will always be there and keeping connected with friends and colleagues has a high priority for me.

But sometimes it’s just not the right time

And when it’s not the right time, for instance when I have a project with a deadline, or I’ve just settled into something I’ve been delaying, I need to recognize that it’s not the right time and be prepared to say so.

Otherwise I’m not being honest with my friend or colleague, or with myself.

Isn’t that pretty obvious?

Well, logically it is. But we are not entirely (or mainly?) logical beings.

Unless you like the idea of being a hermit and having as little direct contact with others than is absolutely necessary, if you work from home there will be a few factors exercising an emotional pull towards just dropping everything else and giving up an hour or so for the catch up chat.

Emotion-based factors for taking the line of least resistance

I’m thinking of the following:

• From the way friends or colleagues have communicated in the past, you get the sense that they don’t take seriously enough your having a business from home, so you guess they might feel snubbed if you say no on this occasion and you don’t want to handle the fallout from that.
• Being your own boss you don’t have to explain to anyone else why you punched a hole in your day’s productivity.

These are emotion-based reasons for taking the line of least resistance, even when the more responsible you tells you to say no, or no, not today.

Another one, which I think for me is the strongest, is this:

• A sense of isolation is one of the key challenges in working from home, and this offer of a chat is a chance to break that.

So I need to recognize that and deal with it, as with any other reasons or feelings that get in the way of my taking what I know is the better course of action on this particular occasion, and saying sorry, no can do.

But adding, “today”.

Taking our business seriously will sometimes mean having to let others know that we do

While we might be concerned that the other person’s nose will be out of joint, we need to take our own business seriously enough to be able to say no sometimes. Hopefully they will respect that.

Then of course we can schedule another time.

In a post last week on the MYOB blog The Pulse I wrote about dealing with the challenge of the sense of isolation and other key challenges of running a business from home.

How do you feel about such unexpected interruptions? And what strategies do you use to deal with them?

Image credit: New Home Office, Zach Beauvais, Flickr, CC2.0

The post Just Because I Work from Home I’m Not Always Up for a Lengthy Chat appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

Some things, such as blogging, have not been kept up as we would wish.

And the local hospital, like our location here at the home office, has lousy roaming internet connectivity. So blogging from there, as patient or visitor, was not really feasible.

But the experience of recent weeks, difficult as it has been, has reminded me once again of one of the many benefits I gained all those years ago when I left the relative security of my “regular” job, well paid as it was and with such great benefits as paid (but scheduled) leave, to chance my arm as a work from home freelance consultant.

When, over a couple of weeks recently, I had to go to the hospital at various times, and now, having to do the occasional bit of extra driving to and fro, I have not had to ask anyone’s permission, I have not have to make arrangements for someone to fill in for me. I did have to ask clients for some flexibility on coaching times and even to change a planned face to face meeting to a Skype conference call: but I have such great clients there was no problem.

And I was able to reorganize my schedule to do catching up on weekends and in what the rest of the world calls “after hours” or “overtime” but what we who work from home just call “when we are working” or some such. Sure we may over-compensate, but it’s a price we pay for our freedom from the old, constraining systems we worked under.

No one wants to get sick or have loved ones getting sick, but I am pretty sure that when it happens no one who has to care for that person wishes they were back in the 9 to 5.

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The post Working from Home When Someone is Sick May Not be Fun But it Can be Handy appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

The links that were in that post were by now way out of date, so I’ve just removed them, but I felt the basic points made in the post were worth repeating and expanding upon in the new world of social media. These were that you can:

• use your blog as a journal, to map where you are going and track where you’ve been
• use it to get known
• use it to link and share with others in your line of business
• use it instead of a fancy web site – for which you may not have a budget right now anyway

Using your blog as a journal

This of course goes back to the origins of blogging (“blog” as short for “web log” etc) but still works.

I’m going to generalize wildly here, but I believe it is generally true that when we start a new business we are usually excited, inspired about what we want to achieve and how we aim to do it.

If not, why would we do it? To make money? That’s fine, but I doubt that the momentum can be built or maintained without some passion (as I indicated in a recent post).

So writing about what you are doing, sharing your excitement, sharing photos if you have them, is one way to build awareness of your business and to provide a reference point for friends and family to share with their circles of connections the word about what you are doing.

And you don’t have to blog just about your successes. Not that you have to share everything that goes wrong – that in fact could be a very bad idea – but by sharing some of the challenges you remind people that you are human, something a lot of businesspeople make the mistake of being unwilling to admit to.

I see it as a bit like those restaurants where the diners can see right into the kitchen, see their meals being prepared. And like the people in the kitchen, if we decide to share via our blog how things are going, we will need to be on our toes!

As with the chefs who open their kitchen to the patrons’ view, this one is probably not for the faint-hearted. But if you are good with that idea, you could make it a feature of your blog.

Use your blog to get known

Even if you decide to skip the previous suggestion and not use your blog to chronicle publicly your ups and downs in getting your business moving, you can certainly use it to get known.

In fact, that was my main motive in starting blogging back in 2003 and that decision has not only helped me promote my business locally, nationally and internationally, it has led to book deals, public speaking in Australia, the USA and China and, by no means least of all, a whole raft of friends and colleagues across the world.

There has been more to all that than just writing blog posts, but setting up the blog was a crucial step and continuing to blog has helped me maintain momentum and helped keep me up to date in my key areas of professional interest.

Through a blog, you can provide your clients and your prospects with a better understanding of your grasp of your field of expertise and also your style of communication and your values, than they are likely to get from one meeting with you, say at some networking function, or from a PR style brochure (offline or online version).

Use it to link and share with others in your line of business

One of the many great things about blogging for business is that it enables multiple conversations with your professional colleagues and peers. Even with your competitors!

The whole system of hyperlinking from and to blog posts, the use of RSS, and more recently all the cross-platform sharing with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and so on, give us unprecedented opportunities to share with others and learn from them in return.

I like to think of this feature of blogging as being part of an ongoing, international, virtual think tank.

And while there are many things we can share via other social media platforms, the long form style of blogging gives us, in practice, the opportunity to share at greater length, and in greater depth, than more instant forms of communication, notably Twitter with its 140 character limit, or Facebook, where the short and sharp usually trumps more extended communications.

Use it instead of a fancy web site

Actually, with the evolution of blogging platforms since I wrote that post back in 2004, it’s possible now to have a quite fancy site, but the key point I wanted to make back then is still relevant, namely that blogging software gives you the ability to have a perfectly good web site, even if you do not have a budget to pay a local web site developer the thousands of dollars they might indicate it will cost you to have a functioning web site.

Explaining how you do that, and particularly what it might cost, is a subject for another post.

In 2004 I suggested you might not have to outlay any money on the process, which was true in a sense, but could have benefited from a bit of explanation.

Even now, assuming you are going to pay for a web site to be hosted somewhere, it might cost you – even with a quite ambitious plan for a home based business, such as the HostGator Baby plan with unlimited sites – less than $7 a month.

Add to that a domain hosted by, say, Namecheap for under $10 a year, and you have a budget commitment of literally less than $100 for a full year’s operation.

That presupposes a lot of work by you to learn how to set up your site, configure it and manage it. If that bothers you, we can get you set up, through colleagues of ours, for under $1,000 provided you have a reasonably simple set of site requirements, and still very competitively if you have more complex requirements.  Just get in touch via the Contact page here.

Where to next?

Back in 2004 I was able to recommend some sources of advice and guidance on getting started with blogging. All the links in that original post are out of date so I’ve removed the links. Now I feel I need to provide some more up to date information to answer the “where to next?” question.

So I’ll be providing some information and links on that in the coming week. Watch this space.

In the meantime, any questions on the subject will be welcome.

Image credit: Hellenic Republic restaurant kitchen, by avlxyz via Flickr, Creative Commons licence

The post Start Promoting Your Home Business With a Blog appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

Late in 2009 I reviewed the book here in a video.

The authors also have a website with many resources for people working at home or thinking about it, and their blog provides regular updates on various matters of interest.

The site has just had a makeover. I encourage you to check it out.

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