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2010-06-30 15:37:30
Business opportunities can easily get lost amid piles of papers and
disorganized hard drives. Here s how to structure your time and space more
productively.
Whether it's business plans or business cards, conference binders or marketing
copy, entrepreneurs have a lot of information to keep track of. When you're
running around like a chicken sans head, it's hard to put a tidy workspace high
on your priority list. Even if you can afford a personal assistant, that won't
necessarily solve all of your organizing problems.
One obstacle to getting organized as an entrepreneur is that a lot of
organizing advice sounds intuitive and even obvious once you hear it. But
there's a broad gap between a back-of-the-mind comprehension and successfully
implementing strategies for getting organized.
"If somebody doesn't know how to [organize their workspace] they shouldn't feel
ashamed or guilty," says Laura Leist, president of the Mount Laurel, New
Jersey-based National Association of Professional Organizers. "I'm not good at
graphic design or accounting, I hire those services out."
This guide will teach you the skill of organizing both your time and your
workspace, and hopefully, increase your personal productivity.
Organize Your Workspace: The Different Categories of Organizing
"When you're talking about organizing your workspace you need to make a
decision about what needs to be organized and there's five areas that you can
look at," Leist explains. These five areas are paper, general stuff such as
office supplies, your space and furniture layout, electronic information, and
time management.
Here are some tips for navigating each of these organizing categories:
Paper
The way you name your files can dramatically improve the organization of both
your physical and your digital documents. Leist recommends that, "versioning
control and consistent naming conventions are really key to document management
and being able to easily retrieve files." These are just fancy ways of saying
that a document's name should reflect which number draft it is and that the
name should be consistent across versions. Having the date the document was
created in the name can also be beneficial.
Dig Deeper: How to Switch to a Paperless Office
Stuff
Leist has observed that people will often rush out to buy more folders,
containers, and staplers, before assessing what they already have. She
recommends grouping all like items together and considering what role they play
in your broader organization system before going out on a shopping run.
Dig Deeper: Is Alibaba a Good Place to Buy Office Supplies?
Electronic Documents
The paperless office is a neat freak's nirvana but even with an ever-expanding
arsenal of electronic tools it's a rare office that has completely done away
with dead trees. Which doesn't mean you can't make big strides in that
direction.
Adam Pash, the editor-in-chief of Lifehacker.com, a website that offers daily
productivity tips and tricks, sees a paperless office in the near future.
"Getting every aspect of your analog life into a digital format is the
direction that a lot of people want to head and will continue heading," he
says.
But going digital is not a silver bullet. Pash notes that many people use their
computer and physical desktops as a de facto to do list. As a result, all the
things they need to remember accumulate and create disorder. Go here to read
the Lifehacker post on digitizing your life.
Dig Deeper: The Era of the Electronic Medical Record
Space
Small business owners "wear so many hats, they usually have pretty limited
support staff, and they're idea factories," says Julie Morgensten, a
productivity consultant and the author of Organizing from the Inside Out. "Your
workspace has to be organized in a way that accommodates that." Morgenstern
calls her system for organizing a workspace the kindergarten model: items and
documents are organized by role into what she calls activity zones.
In addition to helping you keep your things in order, it improves your time
management skills as well because it gives you a better idea of whether you're
neglecting one part of your business. For example, maybe you start to notice
that you never go into the corner where your financial files are kept because
you're always excitedly puttering away in the corner with your marketing files.
Dig Deeper: 5 Ways to Save Money on Office Space
Time Management
One useful time management trick is distinguishing between events and ordinary
to-do items. An event needs to take place at a specific time on a specific day,
whereas another type of to-do, such as a follow-up call with a networking
contact, can be taken care of on a more flexible schedule.
Dig Deeper: 7 CEOs Share 2010 New Year s Resolutions
Organize Your Workspace: Measuring Productivity
So you're thinking of giving organizing a try but you're not persuaded of its
concrete benefits: You were only searching for those client records for
forty-five minutes, but to stay organized is starting to sound like a lot of
work.
While it's true that the benefits of being organized can be tricky to quantify,
Pash says that the best gauge of being well organized, "is just the lack of
anxiety that comes from a clean comfortable workspace where you feel like
things aren t piling up and overwhelming you."
However, Leist mentions results that demand far more attention. She claims she
has taken clients from pulling in several hundred thousand dollars a year to
bringing in several million just by helping them run a tighter ship.
Particularly, clients who restructured the way they handled customer relations
found it very remunerative.
Dig Deeper: 5 Ways to Increase Your Productivity
Organize Your Workspace: The Sources of Clutter
Just because your office looks like a hurricane hit it doesn't necessarily mean
you are disorganized. "Some people work incredibly well out of piles," says
Morgenstern. "Their desk is covered with piles but if you ask them to find
something they can find it in an instant." On the flip side, other people keep
their workspaces looking neat by shoving important papers into closets or under
their desks.
Still if you're swimming in a sea of paper you should probably do some degree
of organizing. Common sources of clutter for entrepreneurs include business
cards, printouts from the Web, and literature from conferences and seminars.
A good way to get rid of clutter is to turn each piece of paper that you're
keeping around into an action item in your planner. For example, "if it s a
stack of business cards that you've come back from a networking event with,
really it's a series of actions that you need to take and what you want to do
is not leave them even in a file, you want to convert those into actual to-dos
or calls that are going to go into your calendar," says Morgenstern.
Dig Deeper: The Real Consequences of Office Clutter
Organize Your Workspace: The Value of a Personal Assistant
Bringing on a personal assistant can be an invaluable step for the small
business owner but choosing one is not an easy process. A personal assistant is
"a hard hire to make for most entrepreneurs because you feel like 'am I making
enough money to justify that?'" says Morgenstern. "But I think there's a
certain point in your business where you have to spend the money so it can free
you up to make more money."
Once entrepreneurs have taken the plunge and added an assistant to their
payroll, they often don't use that person to their best advantage. Assistants
often excel at taking tasks such as writing your blog posts, handling
scheduling, and reminding you about following up with clients but they
sometimes fall down when it comes to your business' big picture.
Essentially you need to be somewhat organized already for an assistant to have
an optimal impact. "The problem is [personal assistants] are really great at
maintaining systems but they're not good at looking at the overall business
process and strategizing, so they don't really know how to come up with those
[organizing] systems," says Leist.
Additionally, an entrepreneur typically remains with a company well beyond the
tenure of most assistants and so they need to be the keepers of the
institutional memory regarding how the organizing system works so that a new
hire can be brought up to speed quickly.
Dig Deeper: How to Delegate Properly
Organize Your Workspace: Adjusting to a Home Office
Many of the rules for getting organized at your work office can also be applied
to your home office, says Leist, who largely works from home. She stresses,
however, that a key difference is that a home office worker needs to
"understand that they definitely need to have a dedicated workspace."
Partitioning your work life from your home life is partly mental; it's easier
to enter and exit a state of productivity if it's cordoned off in a separate
space. But the separation can also have more tangible benefits. For example,
having a separate computer for your kids to play on can be crucial to avoid
nasty viruses that can muck up your business and endanger sensitive data.
Dig Deeper: How to Set Up a Home Office
Organize Your Workspace: Common Mistakes
The first organizing mistake business owners make is not even making time to
assess their mess.
"Clutter is so often the result of a time management problem rather than an
actual organizing problem," explains Morgenstern. "Entrepreneurs are often so
overwhelmed, they have so much to do, and the last thing they want is to
'waste' their time on putting things away. But if you can, build in 15 minutes
at the end of the day to put everything back where it belongs."
Another common mistake is storing your papers and your stuff wherever there's
room for it rather than where it gets used. If your filing cabinet is stuffed
into the hall closet rather than sitting next to your desk, the documents
inside it are likely to get overlooked or misplaced when they are needed most.
A final mistake that entrepreneurs and others often make is confusing the
process of throwing away with actually getting organized. While organizing is
putting systems in place to find what you need when you need it, "decluttering
is what you do when you're trying to make a significant change in your life or
your business. You're in some form of transition and you re feeling stuck,"
says Morgenstern. It's "about identifying what is obsolete and getting rid of
it to make room for what you plan to do next."
Dig Deeper: How to Organize Your E-mail Inbox
Organize Your Workspace: Tools
Leist counsels, half in jest, that the best tools for organizing your workspace
are the recycling bin and the shredder. Here are some products that can help
you keep your workspace in order:
If you've digitized a substantial portion of your business' information, it's
probably wise to invest in a service that automatically backs up your data.
Pash recommends Mozy.
For business owners who haven t yet digitized their paper, Pash recommends the
Fujitsu Scansnap scanner.
Even with the iPad, accessing your information remotely can be a hassle but
Leist suggests that LogMeIn is a good tool for accessing the data on your work
computer from anywhere. Morgenstern favors gotomypc.com.
When you're investing in filing drawers for your office make sure you get a
model that extends fully. Otherwise prepare for frustration and unreachable
documents.
When it comes to CRM tools, the experts we interviewed point to Salesforce,
Act!, and, for those on a budget, the business contact manager in Outlook.
Pash recommends the Brother P-touch labeler for setting up an organizing system
and whipping your files into shape.
Dig Deeper: 10 Free Software Programs for SMBs
Organize Your Workspace: Resources
The website for the National Association of Professional Organizers lets you
search for its members by zip code.
Lifehacker.com is a website that offers daily productivity tips and tricks.
The Unclutterer is a site that is even more focused on the issues surrounding
getting your space organized.
Julie Morgenstern is a productivity consultant and the author of Organizing
from the Inside Out.