Offices

Small Business - Office at Work
Small Business - Office at Home
Home Office

Whether you're running your business from home or an outside location, the office can be one of the most challenging areas to keep tidy.

We suffer from information overload - there's so much information rushing at us from so many different sources - texts, phonecalls, voice messages, email, social media, and on and on.

Even if you're cutting down on paper as fast as you can, the paper just keeps on coming - bills, junk mail, newspapers, magazines, letters, appointment reminders, newsletters, receipts, tax forms, instructions, mail to be redirected, reminders you've written to yourself....

You may have tried to get organised. You did your best with the knowledge you had, and it got a bit better for a while, but then it reverted to chaos. Or maybe you moved some piles around, got overwhelmed and gave up.

Your piles and stacks of paper grow faster than you'd believe possible. It becomes very difficult to find anything, and you may be unwilling to risk being buried in an avalanche of paper.

With all that stuff clamouring for your attention and cluttering up your space, your mind gets cluttered too. You feel confused, stuck, overwhelmed, and stressed out, and you despair of ever getting out from under it.

When this happens, it's just too hard to work effectively or make good decisions. You find yourself on Facebook or YouTube, waffling off to find something to eat, reading or watching tv, or playing mindless games to escape from it.

Or just working harder and longer, in the hope that if you keep working hard enough for long enough, it will sort itself out eventually. (Yeah, right! I tried that one, too. It didn't work for me, either.)

You've heard about the concept of working smarter. That's all good and well - if you were smarter, of course you would work smarter. But because you don't know what you need to know in order to work smarter, it's pretty hard to implement!

So here's a clue: one way to work smarter is to stop muddling about in a mess, and clean it up. Working smarter is about systems.

Make the time to sort it out. Yes, you'll lose some time in the short term, but you'll soon recoup the time you invested because you'll feel more relaxed, think more clearly, work more effectively.

You'll end up with:

• A good, workable office setup, with a home for all your supplies and equipment.
• Simple, clear, effective, easy-to-maintain systems to handle all your paperwork.
• A home for every single piece of paper that comes in.

You'll be able to:

• Find what you need to do what you need to do.
• Quickly and easily put things away in the right place.
• Think more clearly and keep a sense of perspective and control.
• Work more productively - get more done in less time.
• Enjoy a better quality of life.

Small Business - Office at Work

You may have built your business up from scratch, and you didn't know what systems you'd be needing. (I can identify - that happened to me, too.) It didn't matter too much at first - you were fired up, and you had plenty of energy to deal with it all. But as time went on and business picked up, the lack of systems became apparent. You found yourself running to keep up, and never quite getting there.

Or you may have bought an existing business, and inherited antiquated and ineffective systems, systems with gaping holes, or a complete lack of systems. That's undoubtedly why the previoius owner got burnt out and sold the business to you!

It is very stressful trying to operate your business or your life without good systems - things keep falling through the cracks - deadlines missed, bills unpaid, penalty payments, paper piling up everywhere...

Your mind gets so cluttered and overloaded that it has hardly any room for thinking about your work, let alone doing it! It's exhausting trying to function like this - your days are spent fire-fighting rather than moving your business forward. You make the best decisions you can, but they never quite seem to be the right ones. You miss out on opportunities and lose money......

You know that you need to set up better systems, but you're up to your eyeballs in crises that keep happening, and you don't have the time or mental energy to even think about it, let alone implement anything.

You'll need to set aside a day or two of uninterrupted time - perhaps a Saturday or a whole weekend. I'll spend the day at your office, and we'll work together to set up a clear system for managing your workflow and retrieving the information you need.

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Small Business - Office at Home

If you're running your small business from your home, there are even more demands on the space, and it's easy for the distinction between personal space and business space to become blurred. Especially if you have young children, it's surprising what can make its way into your office space - craft projects, toys, kids' homework, socks, food ....

Perhaps the space you have available just isn't working. There doesn't seem to be enough space to set it up properly, so you've just given up.

Because you have so many demands on your time, you tend to just shove or stack stuff wherever there's room. You think you'll come back to it later, but in the day-to-day struggle to stay afloat, that never seems to happen.

I'll come to your home and we'll spend a day - or two if necessary - in the office, sorting your papers. We'll work out what setup will work best for you, and put your systems in place. Of course, if your space is just way too small for your needs, I can't fix that for you, but I can help you maximise the usefulness of the space you do have. With clearly labelled places to put everything, you'll know exactly what to do with any piece of paper that comes your way.

"Thank you for the information and advice, it has been received with a huge amount of appreciation. I can happily tell you that the state of my desk has not retuned back to disorganized mess, it used to be. I would say "you wouldn't believe it..." but I am sure you can as you knew what the result would be, but it is a JOY to sit at my desk. To know that all the files are in their right place and I have a clear cut system that allows me to work through a process, it is a delight. Wishing you and your business all the very best."
- Sacha Sank, Rapaura Water Gardens, Te Puru, Coromandel Peninsula

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