By Joshua Zerkel – Productivity Consultant As the end of the year rapidly approaches, you’re probably preoccupied with finishing up the details that come with closing out the year – final quarter reports, wrapping up projects, holiday parties, and more! It’s an odd time in that for many of us, it can be both busy …
Take control of your busy schedule with a few easy ideas! By Joshua Zerkel Time flies when you’re having fun, but what if you’re not having fun and your time still seems to fly away? Do you ever feel like your schedule runs you, rather than the other way around? Maybe you’re feeling like you can’t get …
Continue reading “It’s Time for a “Time Makeover”: 5 Tips for Mastering Your Calendar”
By Joshua Zerkel Clutter, both physical and digital, is not only annoying – it can get in the way of you being productive and getting your important work done. With the change of season, now’s a great time to take stock of what you have, jettison what you don’t, and make a plan for keeping …
By Joshua Zerkel Dealing with paper is nobody’s idea of fun (well, unless you’re a professional organizer, perhaps!). Seeing stacks and piles of paper sitting around can be incredibly frustrating for many of us, and you may waste time rifling through your piles trying to find the one piece of paper you actually DO need. …
By Joshua Zerkel If one of your goals for 2014 is to get more organized, you’re in good company. Most polls show that getting organized is a perennial favorite among folks who set resolutions for the new year. Of course, the challenge isn’t in setting the resolution – it’s in keeping it. Here are a …
By Joshua Zerkel As a business owner, you’ve probably already been faced with one of the biggest challenges – staying organized and productive. Realizing that you need to make time to get yourself organized is one of the biggest steps to getting organized. It isn’t enough to simply say, “I’ll file that stuff later.” Later …
Continue reading “Easy Steps to Starting Your Organizing Journey”
By Joshua Zerkel Boost your productivity by letting your email program sort your messages. Not every email you receive requires the same kinds of actions—or any action at all. If you’ve got an avalanche of messages in your inbox, the first step to making sense of it all is to create subfolders for each of …
Continue reading “Set Up Email Filters or Rules to Organize Your Inbox”
By Joshua Zerkel Simplify your life while being environmentally responsible! Getting organized can be a fantastic way to simplify and streamline your busy life. The process of getting organized can involve weeding through (and discarding) some of the belongings that have been keeping you from living how you want to live, and finding other products …
By Joshua Zerkel I travel quite a bit for both business and for fun, and I can’t think of the last time I went somewhere without some tech in tow, whether a digital camera, my mobile phone, iPad, laptop or netbook, or some other gizmo. These devices are so much a part of our lives …
Continue reading “Travel Smart: 3 Tips for Organized Gadget Travel”
By Joshua Zerkel Follow these tips for managing your many logins and passwords. In the age of living your life online—banking, bills, video rentals, social media, work, email, and so on—keeping track of all your passwords is essential. Many people simply put their passwords on a sticky note stuck right on their monitors—something I definitely …
By Joshua Zerkel “I am an office supply junkie! I love to go to the office supply stores and get all the matching organizers like pencil cups, paper trays, folders, covered memo boards…you get the picture. It all looks so nice and neat in the store, and I can just imagine my stuff in them. …
PDFs, Docs, and image files all take space, but how much? By Joshua Zerkel So you’ve gone paperless and are now storing all your documents on your hard drive. Great! By doing so, you’ve likely freed up tons of space in your office by eliminating the need for paper storage. Just because the papers don’t take …
Continue reading “Digitized Files: How Much Hard Drive Do They Take?”
By Joshua Zerkel Set up a system that syncs with the lifecycle of paper. No matter how organized the rest of your office may be, it’s easy to feel like things are out of control when your desk is covered with papers. Although you may have heard rumors that the so-called “paperless world” has arrived, you …
Continue reading “Managing Your Papers: Inbox, Outbox, and Everything In Between”
By Joshua Zerkel Virtually every client I have – and every person I talk to – is fed up with dealing with paper. And it’s no surprise, since, like email, we have a constant influx of it that we’re simply forced to deal with. The worst part is that even though we all have paper in …
Continue reading “3 Easy Ways to Get Your Paper Under Control”
Keep critical paperwork together and easily searchable. By Joshua Zerkel Files related to you and your family’s health are important documents and should be effectively organized. The first thing to do in organizing the paperwork you receive from your doctors or insurance company is to separate it into categories. One category would be actual diagnoses or …
By Joshua Zerkel Paper takes a lot of space to store, and especially if you’re used to searching for documents on your computer, rifling through paper piles and digging into file cabinets can seem practically archaic! Many people have been asking me lately to help them go paperless – that is, reduce the amount of paper …
Continue reading “Choosing the Right Tools for Going Paperless”
Trust your intuition when organizing your papers. By Joshua Zerkel One of the most frequent questions I get from clients who are organizing their offices is what to call their new filing categories. The truth is, there is no one right way to create a category structure for a filing system. Filing, whether on the computer …
A few simple strategies will make processing your email a snap! By Joshua Zerkel Do you feel like email has taken over your life? Well, you’re not alone. In a study by Information Week, over 75% of the people surveyed said that email is essential to their lives—and an additional 15% say they’d rather lose their …
Being a Certified Professional Organizer, I actually enjoy working with paper – I know, I’m strange! Even so, I don’t want to spend too much time on it; like you, I have many other tasks on my to-do list. One of my big goals for 2012 is to reduce the amount of paper that I have …
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By Joshua Zerkel Are you feeling overwhelmed by your email inbox? You are not alone. Email is complicated because it is an interruptive medium. If you leave the door open for email all day long—i.e., if you have email programs open in front of you, or your phone alerts you every time a new message comes …
