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 …
It’s Time for a “Time Makeover”: 5 Tips for Mastering Your Calendar
April 13, 2015Take 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 …
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Spring Cleaning Your Office
April 28, 2014By 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 …
How To Get Paper Under Control
February 10, 2014By 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. …
How to Get Organized in 2014
January 13, 2014By 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 …
Easy Steps to Starting Your Organizing Journey
December 15, 2013By 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 …
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Set Up Email Filters or Rules to Organize Your Inbox
December 2, 2013By 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 …
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4 Tips for Eco-Friendly Organizing
November 17, 2013By 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 …
Travel Smart: 3 Tips for Organized Gadget Travel
October 26, 2013By 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 …
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Psst —What’s the Password?
October 11, 2013By 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 …
The Number One Organizing Mistake
September 27, 2013By 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. …
Digitized Files: How Much Hard Drive Do They Take?
November 9, 2012PDFs, 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 …
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Managing Your Papers: Inbox, Outbox, and Everything In Between
October 5, 2012By 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 …
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3 Easy Ways to Get Your Paper Under Control
September 7, 2012By 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 …
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Tips for Organizing Medical Files
August 10, 2012Keep 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 …
Choosing the Right Tools for Going Paperless
July 13, 2012By 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 …
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Tips for Creating a New Filing System
June 29, 2012Trust 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 …
4 Tips for Easier Emailing
June 15, 2012A 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 …
4 Ways to Spend Less Time Processing Paper
May 25, 2012Being 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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Two Strategies for Stemming the Tide of Email- Learn to master your email, instead of letting your email master you.
May 4, 2012By 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 …