Cooking shows are as addictive to watch as they are tantalizing. What’s easily missed, among the chopping, dicing and slicing is the constant clean up and maintenance of the workspace. They’re always moving! By taking a few moments during the preparation of a dish to re-sharpen knives, or clear away clutter, the chef is focused and prepared to get into the action with less hassle.

This is also a best practice for owners and employees, whether you are doing at your office (or home office, for that matter). Stay organized and keep moving and you’ll get better results.

In Twyla Harp’s landmark book The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life, she discusses a writer who believed there was a mental correlation between cleaning his room, and arranging his brain. While possible, Harp was convinced it was not just the idea of organizing that helped him focus but rather the physical movement and action involved that helped direct his efforts.

Fitting in three to five minutes to focus on your breath and fill up with nourishing oxygen, helps feed muscles tensed under the strain of thinking, and allows your brain to take a minute to replenish its focus for a fresh return to the task at hand. When you take breaks, stand and stretch while you organize your space or deal with files. Or perhaps take a walk over the lunch break while you strategize a business initiative. The idea is to keep moving.

There are innumerable websites with effective office exercises to be perused and sampled until you find a set that works for you. In your off-time, take meditation classes, yoga instruction or even arts like Tai Chi, that are very portable and only require a little space and a bit of privacy.

One last thing: encourage your employees to keep moving at work. Joining a friend, or starting a little group at the office, can open up more than just your mind to working harder, it can help develop better relationships.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

What do air traffic controllers, pilots, surgeons, real estate agents and many successful business owners all have in common? They all use checklists to ensure that they do the job right every single time.

As a means of ensuring quality control, reducing errors and improving productivity, there are few best practices that match the results of adopting the humble checklist.

I use checklists to keep track of tasks that need to be completed throughout the day. I use them in meetings to ensure that I cover everything and don’t have to follow up unnecessarily. I use them when I’m delivering consulting services. And I use them a lot when I’m preparing to deliver a presentation, since nothing gives you confidence like knowing you’re prepared.

Checklists aren’t just great for personal productivity. Put a checklist up on a big white board at the office and remind the team of objectives they need to accomplish as an organization. Or keep checklists by pieces of equipment that employees may only use once in a while and reduce wait times as they follow the simple list to get stuff done faster.

Now, for your first checklist, make a list of three things you’ve been avoiding doing in order of business priority (not order of difficulty). Commit yourself to following through and get them done today.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

If you want to make it easier to rustle up business opportunities, focus your efforts. And your best bet is to start from where you are right now.

When you first start out in business, market research helps you figure out the basics about prospective customers. After you launch, the theory may not align with what actually works – who you thought would buy vs. who actually buys.

Hey, business plans are great, but take it from me, text book answers are one thing, reality is quite another. Don’t fight it, sweat it, or criticize yourself, just observe. You had to start somewhere. Now you’ve got some experience under your belt and you get to figure out where to go from here.

Here’s a tip: follow the money. Also known as “leveraging your success,” though less jargon-y than the latter term, it means: Do more of what’s already working.

The theory vs. reality-check applies to long-term companies just as much as it does to newbies. In fact, sometimes experienced companies have more trouble making the adjustment. They lose track of who their customers are because they’re so used to selling to a certain group in a certain way that it’s become ingrained. They get caught off guard, especially when markets shift.

Make you business development a game. See what’s working and do more of that. To me, that’s just checking your coordinates on the compass and getting back on the easiest path. Do it regularly and it’ll be a small, smooth shift instead of a colossal 180 degree turnaround.

Liz Gaige
Market Navigators Consulting

There is one definite inevitability in life and that is, of course, death. Not usually a topic that most people want to talk about or frankly think about, but, nevertheless something that we cannot escape. Personally, my consideration of the concept is something that has given me an incredible amount of strength thus far. Whenever I have a desire to do something there is the almost immediate reaction from my mind. Sometimes it tells me why I can’t do it, sometime why I shouldn’t, sometimes it just laughs at my plans. I’ve heard many theories about why this happens, why do we get in our own way, why would we stop ourselves from giving something a try? We shouldn’t! We have to go for it!

When I watched the below video I was further convinced. The man on the video has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and given only months to live. In this, his last lecture, he gives a moving, practical, matter of fact speech about how and why to live a life in pursuit of your dreams. There is no time to put things off – we have to pursue those things that we have a desire to!

A version of Randy Pausch’s last lecture as seen on Oprah

All the best,

Heather White, CEO, 2020 Communications Inc.

Experience, hard word and talent are not enough to succeed in today’s workplace. You need to also focus on building a network that will bring you the success you want. Your career will likely span multiple jobs and fields and the best and fastest way to get where you want to be is having a network of people you can call on. Building an effective network takes time, planning and intention. Here are 5 rules that will help you out:

1. Talk to strangers. You never know who is standing behind you at Starbucks.
2. Build a network with intention; create a plan of the types of people you want to meet and work the plan.
3. Give as much as you get; don’t be stingy about looking for ways to help others out. This will repay itself many times over when you need a helping hand.
4. Reach out to people long before you need anything; do not be that person who only ever calls when they need something. That is not networking – that is using people and you will not be appreciated for it. Stay in touch regularly with the people in your network.
5. Ask for what you want, not what you think you can get. The simple act of asking will get you a lot more than you can ever imagine.

Remember: success does not come to those with a low tolerance for risk or those who are led by fear. Start talking to people – you will be surprised what you learn!

Fiona Walsh, CEO, FM Walsh & Associates Inc., www.fmwalsh.com

We don’t always appreciate what we have, whether at home or at work. That angst that fights against complacency is actually a good thing – the sense that the grass is always greener on the other side is what makes us jump into new opportunities. That said, making a team work together with real synergy is not an everyday feat. Learn to spot the successes in your collaborations, so you can replicate that synergy elsewhere.

Does your team actually seem to enjoy working with each other? Happy people are productive people. If you find yourself actually looking forward to seeing the people at your office every day – well, that’s no small thing.

Then there’s the skill set. With an optimal balance where everyone is assigned tasks and workload according to their talents rather than which person has the smallest stack of projects on their desk, you’ll get real productivity.

Next, look at how your group talks to each other. If discussions are fluid, with plenty of back and forth, engaging ideas, and everybody listening to what other team members are saying, you’ve got something special. Far too many groups are dominated by someone with a forceful personality rather than expertise in all areas that the team has to work in. Freedom of speech and thought are not just good for civil society – they make businesses work better.

If you do recognize your team is functioning very well, analyze what it is about this group that works well. Often, it is based on good habits rather than some innate ability to work well with others. Try to transfer these habits to your other collaborative activities and watch your successes add up.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

Productivity and disorganization don’t mix. I’ve been recommending and training clients on the GO System to help their operations remain organized and competitive. In tough times, telling your employees to just “work harder” isn’t an inspiring message – but providing them with simple, specific recommendations to decrease workplace stress and frustration will pay dividends.

Employees already come with project management skills and some effective organization and time-management habits (otherwise, why did you hire them?). But that doesn’t necessarily provide cohesive organization across a company. Without training in procedures, two employees working right next to each other in the same room, even doing similar kinds of work, may organize files, projects and effort in very different ways, making collaboration challenging.

Throughout your organization, all members of your team stand to benefit from standardized processes that can be adapted to your particular organization. You’ll want to focus on things like processing incoming items, prioritizing, rational time management, understanding personality and psychological issues and more. The GO System is particularly good at covering off these points.

For more information, check out the GO System at www.thegosystem.com/ or get help from a professional organizer.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

In my last post, I emphasized the importance of using your time according to the 80/20 rule, where you focus your efforts into your most profitable efforts. But how do you know which efforts are really paying off?

You’re going to have to log all your activities and how much time you spend doing non-productive work. For that, you’re going to need a spreadsheet.

Put together a simple Excel grid with two columns showing time range and the type of activity. Start recording the actual work that you do, going into some detail as to the types of tasks involved. This will help a lot later, when you’re not just focusing on what activities provide the most benefit, but also how efficiently you’re doing them. There may be ways to reduce the number of steps to produce virtually the same output.

If you’re being interrupted, record that as well – who’s doing the interrupting, who called you on the phone, who instant-messaged you, why you left your desk and so on.

Do this for at least one day, though if your week varies significantly, you may need to do this exercise for the entire period. This will also help you to arrange more consistent routines.

Finally, you get to the most important part – go through the logs you’ve recorded and note the activities that are providing a real measurable benefit to your business. This can also be the hardest part. You may want to consult with a business coach or time management expert to provide feedback on the best use of your time that you’ve recorded.

Now you’re on your way to designing a better time management system that you can use for the long term. You know what to do. There’s no time to waste.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

“I want to do it myself!” is the chant of every four-year old.  You have to admire their enthusiasm, but the end result doesn’t work so well for them a lot of the time.  As a business habit, it’s not so hot, either.

Our clients outsource because they know they can’t do everything themselves, and entrepreneurs need to recognize this about themselves. Particularly for those of us offering business-to-business services, we can have a habit of not taking our own advice.

We can’t wear all the hats and still feel passionate about our businesses. For instance, I outsource bookkeeping and some other administrative functions so that I can focus on the work that I’m passionate about: helping people and organizations by providing the tools and teaching them the strategies to stay de-cluttered, stay organized and manage time effectively.

Remember the 80/20 rule (organizations typically get 80 per cent of their results from 20 per cent of their efforts) and organize your tasks accordingly, ensuring you spend more of your time on the really productive work.

For small businesses in Canada, the future is looking a little brighter these days (CNW Group) and I’m definitely hearing anecdotal evidence about people (some of them recently handed pink slips) starting new businesses. It’s important for those new entrepreneurs and the experienced business owners among us to not attempt to wear too many hats.

Do what you love, spend your time on the high-impact activities and leverage off the activities you don’t like (but have to be done).

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

Looking back on your business campaigns over the past quarter, you get a cold feeling in your gut. The numbers don’t look good. All that effort…and for what? The returns are so meager that you may not even show a profit. Don’t get discouraged.

In any kind of business, there will come times when the returns just don’t measure up to what you expected. I’ve felt this. Everyone who stays in business long enough goes through it.

Often, the problem is external – just as a rising tide floats all boats, the reverse is also true. Few types of businesses are recession-proof.

If your analysis shows that the downturn for your own business was related to overall business conditions, and those conditions appear to be alleviating, then the answer is clear: you have to go back and replant those seeds of growth.

Go back to your customers and remind them about the value you’re offering. Relaunch your campaigns, get your business cards out, meet and greet the connections that can lead to bigger opportunities, and keep doing the things that helped your business grow in the first place.

Keep your workspace organized, manage your time effectively, and don’t forget to breathe – you can’t afford to burn out just as the upturn in the economy gives you a chance to make good your losses.

Times may seem tough right now, but very few people go into business with a get-rich-quick mentality. You’re in for the long haul, and that will mean riding out some rough patches. Cultivate your business, focus on those long term goals and your harvest time will come.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca