thetimebutler

Top Time Wasters: Meetings

If you’re like most people, you’ve spent time in at least one meeting that went on and on with no apparent purpose, without an agenda, with minimal or no follow through, and without resolution. You might even have wondered why you were there at all. Certainly, there were far better uses of your time.

Meetings can be a huge time waster if not done correctly. Good meeting preparation is essential for productive meetings.

Effective meetings consist of the following:

A Tight Agenda: Ensure you have an agenda, with time limits attached to each agenda item.

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Top Time Wasters: Looking for Lost Items

Searching for lost items is one of the easiest time wasters to address. Not being able to locate what you need when you need it can result in purchasing duplicate items, having multiples of the same type of item in different locations, and spending time and resources locating your items. It can also result in purchasing things that you already have, but cannot find.

In order to ensure that you can find what you need, when you need it, consider these tips.

Organize like with like.

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Time Management

Top Time Wasters: Saying Yes When You Should Say No

Recently, we wrote a series of posts covering file management, including paper reduction, file organization, e-file setup and maintenance. The goal in having a finely tuned file system is to be able to easily find what you need, when you need it. That is efficiency.

Our next series of posts will discuss some of the most common time-wasting habits.

Wasting time means “to allow time to elapse in an unproductive manner.” But how do we tell whether something will be a waste of time?

I ask 3 questions when determining how to spend my time:

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Business Organizing

How High Hourly Rates Can Lead to Low Project Costs: A True Story

Potential clients sometimes ask me about my rates. With hundreds of class hours and thousands of client hours, I am more experienced than 80% of professional organizers. Most clients are willing to pay more for organizers who are educated, experienced and trained. I charge a bit more per hour but have saved my clients thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of time. Read on to discover how.

A new client calls needing a file system for her small business. She wants an experienced organizer who is familiar with file management and confidentiality. After we speak, she is ready to move forward and books an appointment.

A few days before the appointment, client calls to tell me that she’s found someone ‘exactly like’ me, but at a quarter the cost. If I can meet that rate, client will hire me. I decline the job.

Several years pass. In that time, I have attained my CPO and my rates have nearly doubled.

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Business Organizing

Maintaining Your E-Files

Last month, we discussed organizing your e-files, including creating a system for easy information retrieval.

To help simplify retrieval and minimize time waste, invest the time to set up systems and protocol for file maintenance and back-up. Creating a standard system for all members of your team will save time in the long run. In order to maintain your e-files, you will need a few tools.

Search Tools: A search tool is software which is used to locate a specific parameter: a word, phrase or filename. Search tools are generally included in the operating system.

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Business Organizing

Organizing Your E-Files

In many ways, organizing e-files will be similar to organizing paper files. There are also some very important differences in organizing your e-files that don’t apply to paper files.

As with paper, first establish broad categories, and then determine specific details.

To facilitate retrieval of information in the future, create a consistent naming scheme.

Start by taking a good look at your current file system. Determine if there exists a consistent method to store information. Are things easy to find, are there unnecessary duplicates, or are items stored in more than one place? How much time is spent searching for things? If more than a couple of minutes it’s time to re-organize.

Below is a sample system to get started. Businesses may need more or fewer than what is provided here. A well-functioning file system needs to be customized to individual business needs.

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Business Organizing

Locating Files Stored Off-Site

In a recent blog post, we discussed where to store your paper files, including archive files. In some industries, records retention requirements – and the resulting high paper volume – necessitate off-site storage. When storing files offsite, it’s critical to know which files are where so they can be located as needed with a minimum of fuss. This blog post discusses how to determine what to store offsite as well as how to retrieve easily.

1. Decide how you want to group your files. This could be alphabetically, numerically by client number, or chronologically by service date. Your choice will be informed by industry guidelines, your onsite record-keeping system, and how frequently you purge the archives.

2. To make location of archived files easier, create file indices for your archives. Include the following on the file indices:

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Business Organizing

Interview with Lisa Mark, C.P.O., Time Management Expert

Policygenius.com is an insurance website. Each week, they feature a business expert to share tips in their area of expertise. On February 28, 2020, Policy Genius featured Lisa Mark, C.P.O., The Time Butler to discuss time management and how it affects our bottom line.

Here is a sneak-peek:

How does a time management expert manage her own time? What does your day look like?

My days, weeks, months, and years are (mostly) planned. I use a calendar to track meetings with clients, colleagues, and my volunteer work, but I also schedule my deep-dive, brain-intensive project time.

A typical week looks like this: About 40% to 50% is client work, 20% is a deep-dive brain-intensive project work, 10% to 15% ‘running the business’ work, and 20% is downtime.

Business Organizing

Where to Store Paper Files

The final step in our Paper File Management series is how to decide where to store your files. Storage depends on a number of considerations: frequency of access, compliance requirements, the size of the files, available storage, and the number of people who must access the files.

Action: Items that require an action, such as bills to pay, phone call notes, research paperwork, or information on making a purchase need to go in your Active Files. Active Files are also known as Tickler Files, because they ‘tickle’ your brain to remember that there is an action associated with them. Choose your most convenient location for your Active Files since you will be accessing them on a regular basis.

Location Options: Action Files can be stored in a number of places: a rolling cart next to your desk, in nearby cubbies or on your desktop. Make sure all labels are visible as these files will be the backbone of your daily tasks.

Reference files are files that might need to be accessed regularly. Frequency of access is determined by type of industry and whether or not paper files are still the accepted standard. When deciding where to store Reference Files, ask yourself:

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Business Organizing

How to Create a File Index

Now that you have set up your Action File and designed your Reference File systems, it is time to create a File Index to provide a reference so that any file can be located quickly. When updating is needed, new files can be added within the structure of the existing file index to maintain consistency.

Designing Your File Index:

Choose a color for each file based on what the file contains. I recommend a tri-colored file system using red for critical, financial, and medical files, blue for personal and family items, and green for work and volunteer files.
Input all file names into a spreadsheet.
Sort alphabetically.
In your spreadsheet, use the ‘highlight’ feature to highlight each file in the appropriate color. To be more productive, highlight all files of a certain color, say, green, at the same time. Then move on to the next color set.

The attached template of a sample file index uses an alphabetical file system with subcategories as needed within the main categories.

How to Use the Index:

Once you’ve set up the index, it can serve as a reference point for which files you have and where they are located. In our sample template, the red and blue files are combined into one set of alphabetic files. The color coding provides visual separation between specific types of files to make filing easier.

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