Hints for Maintaining an Organized Home Office

Whether your home office is your primary work site or an adjunct to your main office, here are a few tricks that will help you stay organized.

Define a space for your home and personal documents and a separate space for your work documents. It can be as simple as two separate drawers or ends of a shelf with a divider.

Create a filing system with titles that make sense to you and use colored folders for quick identification. For instance all your folders dealing with finance could be green; all folders dealing with warrantees could be purple, etc.

Create a folder for immediate response and handle it before the end of the day. Finish up by filing the documents in appropriate folders.

Keep a planning calendar handy either on your computer or PDA or in hardcopy close to your telephone and computer so it can be updated as your schedule changes.

Use ergonomics (the science of designing the job, equipment and workplace to fit the worker) to make sure your workstation is comfortable and allows you to do the job efficiently. The computer monitor should be directly in front of your face to put your body in a neutral position. The keyboard should be placed so the forearms are parallel to the thighs when your feet are flat on the floor. The chair should be adjusted to maintain appropriate alignment with the monitor and keyboard with feet flat on the floor. The mouse should be located on right side if you are right handed and on the left side if you are left handed. If you use a document holder, place it on the opposite side of the computer from the mouse.

Put items you use the most frequently near the workstation. These may include telephone, fax machine, printer, scanner, stapler, resource books, or editing tools.

If your equipment is placed to minimize physical strain and optimize convenient access to the things you use most often, you will be less likely to rearrange items and pull work to other areas of the house. Comfort and convenience will help you maintain an organized space.

Beverly & Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net

Manage Your E-Mail

After a couple of days away from the computer, I return and find I have four hundred e-mails waiting for response. Fortunately, this is an infrequent occurrence and I have a system for managing my e-mail that will allow me to deal with this backlog in about an hour, two at the most. This was not always the case. When I was first introduced to e-mail in the work environment, I would often get several hundred e-mails a day. About half of them would go unread until I missed an important event or blundered into a meeting unaware of a breaking development. I had to find a way to cut through the pile of messages while I was still employed.

Folks still struggle with managing e-mail. Seventy per-cent of employees in Fortune Five Hundred Companies admit to having more e-mail than they can effectively handle. Another study states that the average computer user spends about an hour a day searching for stored documents and e-mail messages.

Here are a few tips that work for me:
Check e-mail once or twice a day. Setting up an alert and answering it every time a message pops up is inefficient use of time. Waiting more than twenty-four hours to review your inbox may result in a backlog and in your missing time-sensitive information.

When reviewing e-mail, start with the most recent messages first. This will eliminate answering serial e-mails about the same subject.

Spend no more than two minutes with each message. Make a decision about response to the message at the time you read it. Productivity expert Sally MaGhee suggests the Four D Method. When you read the e-mail make a decision to delete it, do it, delegate it or defer it. When delegating something, turn it into an action item for follow up. When deferring something, turn it into an action item or an appointment so you won’t forget about it. Microsoft Outlook provides tools for doing this quickly and provides good instructions at www.microsoft.com.

Create an effective reference system for items you need to save. (of course you save only the information that is relevant is not stored anywhere else and will be used in the next six months). Create files and search rules that are meaningful for you and the way you work. Purge the file when you no longer need the information.

These simple steps made a big difference for me and now I can afford to spend a day away from the computer when necessary.

Beverly & Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net

Organize Essential Documents

The National Association of Professional Organizers reports that most people identify paper as their biggest organizing problem. The most daunting task is knowing where to start.

Consider dividing your paper problem into categories. Some suggested topics are current mail, bills, correspondence, essential documents. Then decide how you will separate each major category into smaller segments that will allow you to file the documents as they come in, act on them in a timely manner, then archive them for an appropriate amount of time.

Give special consideration to essential documents-those records that you might need for emergency, legal or financial consideration. These documents need to be safeguarded in a waterproof, fireproof safe that can be removed from the home if there is some type of emergency that requires evacuation. Some folks keep these documents in safety deposit boxes in banks. If that is your choice, you should consider keeping copies safeguarded at home so you can easily access them if, for some reason, the bank is not open to you. That scenario happened recently in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. With copies you can at least transact business and obtain substitute originals from the source if necessary.

Here are a few essential documents to include in your emergency file:

Documents that deal with identification like birth certificates, Social Security cards, adoption orders, citizenship papers, marriage certificates and divorce/separation papers.

Documents that deal with insurance like life and health insurance policies including dental and disability, home owners or renters insurance policies, automobile and boat insurance policies and umbrella insurance policies.

Documents that deal with personal and business finance including checking and savings account information, investment accounts, titles and deeds to real estate and other personal property such as cars and boats, stock and bond certificates, and loan agreements.

Estate planning documents including will and trust documents and durable power of attorney for health and finance.

Pulling these important documents together and filing them in a safe place is a good start to organizing paper.

Beverly & Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net

Taking Care of Little Things

Even after we organize our desk, our sewing box, our craft area, our toolbox, it is the little things that cause problems with maintaining our neat space. Paper clips, straight pins, little beads and tiny nails find their way to the bottom of our stuff.

Here are a few low-cost suggestions for corralling those pesky items and keeping things in order.

Ÿ Items with blunt edges do well in small zip-lock plastic bags. Beads can be separated by colors and then placed together in a larger container.

Ÿ Egg cartons provide a handy way to sort items like nuts and bolts. Glue a small magnet in each section to keep them in place. Be sure to store on top of heavy tools or the container will get crushed.

Ÿ Slip a plastic ice cube tray in your desk drawer to hold various size paper clips, staples and other small items.

Ÿ Baby food jars and spice jars can be re-purposed to hold small items. Spice jars in a discarded spice rack can keep sewing items like snaps and pins handy for the seamstress.

Organizing doesn’t have to be fancy; it just has to work.

Beverly & Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net

Organize a Bedroom

Is Your Bedroom a Sanctuary?

We just celebrated Valentine’s Day. That led me to think about intimacy and, for some reason, I started thinking about bedrooms.

We often work with clients who want their bedroom to be a sanctuary, but the habits of their mate or the dictates of their living space present challenges to fulfilling their goal.

It is hard to feel tranquil with dirty socks on the floor and a pile of laundry at the foot of the bed. Sometimes the space must house a home office or a crafting station or fitness equipment. The reality is that the bedroom is often used for more than sleeping and intimate moments. Many folks find it the only place they can grab the solitary time to pay the bills, read a book, watch a favorite program, ready a project for deadline.or sweat to the oldies.

Here are a few suggestions for making the space more orderly and serene even when you have to deal with the realities of life.

Make the bed a no-drop zone. It will keep your bedding clean and you can rest without clearing a spot.

Create defined spaces for activities that must occur in the space. If you have to have an office in your bedroom, designate a small desk or table for the task and gather the materials you need close to that space. If you must house exercise equipment, put it in a corner farthest from the bed and use a folding screen to keep it out of sight when not in use. Put your ipod and earphones, shoes and other ancillary items in tote bags that can hang from the equipment and keep them handy. Use a small bookcase or decorative basket to hold books, music and DVDs close to the spot you use them.

Keep clothes off the floor and furniture by placing an attractive hamper in the room. A clothes valet or industrial three arm clothing rack can hold outfits for the next day or clothes waiting to be put away.

If the laundry is inevitably going to land in the bedroom prior to storing, use a pretty hamper and designate a bench at the foot of the bed or under a window as its temporary home. It might not look beautiful, but it will look neat and not detract too much from the room’s order.

Real life bedrooms often do not meet the expectation for “sanctuary” promoted by Extreme Makeover and HGTV, but, with a little thought and organization, they can be orderly, tranquil places to escape for personal pleasure.

Beverly & Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net

AVOID HOME OFFICE CLUTTER

A home office has become standard for most residences. In addition to the usual bookkeeping and filing tasks that come with running a home, many workers now do almost as many work related tasks at home as they do during their regular work day. The latest statistics available from the Bureau of Labor indicated that 20.7 million workers bring work home on a regular basis. With home and work related projects crowding the limited space, it is no wonder we sometimes end up with a less than orderly office.

Here are a few tips for avoiding clutter and making it easier to get the work done.

Create separate filing systems and storage areas for home and work files. If you do not have two filing drawers available use a portable box or rolling file that can be kept in a space way from children and pets.

Place only frequently used items on the desk. Store everything else on shelves, in drawers or in stackable filing bins.

Place the things you use most often on your “handed” side of the desk. If you are right handed they go on the right side. For left handed folks they go on the left.

Put the most urgent projects where you cannot forget them. Desk trays and desktop filing systems are some tools that can neatly keep these items in sight.

File frequently used resources on nearby shelves in coordinated binders to create a neat appearance

Use magazine folders to corral professional journals and resource articles

Hang a bulletin board or magnetic board within easy reach for posting notes and reminders

You can find inspiration for organizing your home office at the following web sites:
www.officemax.com
www.target.com
www.potterybarn.com
www.getorganized.com
www.levemgers.com

Beverly & Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net

Process, Workflow and Planning

Recently, we have been working on organizing an office space that houses a variety of activities and a combination of full time, part time and volunteer employees. Consequently we have been giving a lot of thought to workflow and process as we design a plan.

Processes are easier to understand because they have defined purpose and specific inputs that produce a specific outcome. If you want to bake cake you know the materials and equipment you need. You know you need a pan, a mixing bowl and utensils. You have a recipe to follow that tells you what inputs will produce the cake. They include the ingredients, the mixing sequence the temperature and the baking time. Put all those thing together and you have the process for producing a cake.

There would be another process prior to baking the cake that would include gathering the necessary ingredients and another process after baking the cake that would include cooling time and decorating.

When the processes are ordered to interact with each other in the most efficient manner you have a workflow: gather ingredients, bake the cake, decorate the cake.

When designing any workspace it is important to consider what processes will occur in the space and the workflow for the various processes. That will dictate where people, tools and equipment are placed

A plan is a description of the logically necessary, ordered set of activities required to accomplish a specific goal. It takes into consideration the processes that need to happen and the best sequence, or workflow, for them to occur. A good plan also includes resource allocation and a schedule for the activity to accompli8sh the goal.

These are important concepts to incorporate into your organizational planning whether you are re-organizing your closet or putting together a business office design.

Beverlya nd Kristen
http://www.keytransitions.net/