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Breaking Through Administrative Bottlenecks: Part 1 - Work Spaces

Guest post by: Barbara Garro

Article Overview: Organized business people get more done well than disorganized ones. Organization systems need to be dynamic instead of static. What worked ten, five or even last year may not work in our ever more time-consuming Internet Age. Marketing, advertising, public relations have become beasts with a thousand heads, so many ways, so little time to investigate them against your needs and your budgets. More people contacting you and more ways for them to do it. Add to all that, we have, according to my Character Architectural Technology System, nine very different personalities. See my book Grow Yourself a Life You'll Love to learn the CAT.

Breaking Through Administrative Bottlenecks: Part 1 - Work Spaces

Bottlenecks bring busy people to their knees. Everybody gets stuck in them. The solution is to find the causes of yours and design a variety of organizational hammers to break through them and get efficient and effective work flowing again.

Why is organization the solution? Because bottlenecks aren't going to go away. Organizational solutions anticipate and act as preventative maintenance. And, give you something solid to actually maintain.

Why does it seem like there are more bottlenecks now than ever before in your career? There are more reasons than I have time to discuss here and there are reasons that I have no way of knowing. So, let's look at two global reasons. The first, as you can guess, is sophisticated technology. More gadgets mean more can go wrong. Ever drop your Blackberry in liquid? I found somebody's Blackberry in the street in Saratoga Springs, New York. As I was walking home with it, it rang. I answered it. The owner asked me who I was and where I was and how he could get his Blackberry back. I told him my name was Barbara and that he could pick up his Blackberry on my porch in about five minutes. He wanted more information. He got none. Later in the day, the Blackberry was gone and in its place was a really good bottle of white wine with a label on it that said Barbara's Wine. Does that give you any idea how important his Blackberry was to him? No, I never found out who he was.

The second is working more hours. Consider that the average workweek in the 1970s was 41 hours, in the 1990s 50.2 hours, and in 2011, 60 hours isn't unusual.

If you have been looking for realistic systems that make you feel efficient, effective and productive every day during work, take advantage of the actions steps in this Three-Step Organization Process--

Step One - Make your work spaces work for you. First things first. Organize every place you do your work. For those of you who work out of your car a good deal of the time, you have the hardest challenge, not the least of which is break-ins. While organization means different things to different people and there are, as I mentioned above, nine personality types, some basics apply.

• Know Everything You Have in Each Work Space - that means go through every bit of each space and look at everything you have in there.
• Throw out Everything You Don't Need - be amazingly efficient here.
• Organize the Space so that Everything You Work with is in Easy Reach - when you do this right, you can just work until you decide to stop without going anywhere to get anything.
• Keep Everything That Way From Now On - of course, this is a most important ongoing organization efficacy.

Step Two - Make your administrative management systems work for you. Where do you keep your files? Do you have hard copy as well as computer files? Do you have solid virus protection on your computer systems? Do you have a My computer crashed; I need to boot up the backup computer; be with you in fifteen minutes system? You should be able to get your eyes on each project you are working on as soon as the phone rings or you get an email, so you can efficiently discuss whatever needs to be discussed. You should be able to find files for each of your important contacts with notes as to where you are, so you always sound on top of your game. You noticed there are no bullets here. That's because the nine personality types all do this differently. Okay, I promise you will get some suggestions to get you started in Part 2.

Step Three - Make your working style one that works for you, your bosses and your clients, whatever you need to do to accomplish that. Yes, I am talking about organizing yourself so that you get finished what you need to finish when you need to finish it and you get it to who you need to get it to when it needs to get there. Another part of this is that you know how long it takes you to do all the parts of what you do or you become a really good estimator of new tasks. Why? Because part of self-organization is avoid taking on more than you can do and causing your own bottlenecks. What if the boss dumps more work on you? Since you know how long it will take or you can estimate what a new task will take, you tell your boss, I am happy to take on this new task, and I hope you understand that the report on Client A will have to be pushed back and the project for Client B will not be able to start on time. Can I promise you your boss will never say, Sounds like a problem you are going to have to work out? No, still I can promise you your boss will respect how organized you are and how well of a handle you have on what you are doing in your job.

In Part 2, you will hear from author Kerry Gleeson who wrote The Personal Efficiency Program: How to Get Organized to Do More in Less Time.

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Article Tags: Internet Organization, Organization Systems, Space Management, Time Management, Work Bottlenecks, Work Spaces



Related Forum Posts
Learning from other people's mistakes (Books) - Most business books are written by people who tell of success stories, and how they were achieved. I'm wondering if people learn more by reading about the stories of failure? Or about how people achieved success...and then frittered it away through bad business practice. I checked two books out of the library yesterday. Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders, by Jim Carlton (started as a startup in 1976, sales peaked in 1995, and even then they were a "troubled" company, and now they've only got a 3% market share. (And I must admit I used to love Macs, but don't anymore...) and Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft, by David Bank. "Breaking Windows" tells the story of the battle for the soul of Microsoft that raged inside the company from 1997 to 2000 and continues to reverbrate today." The book "breaks new ground in its analysis of Microsoft's past and future business strategies. As Microsoft faces the waning importance of Windows, rallies behind XML, and confronts the open-source insurgency, the past Bank reveals is vital to understanding the future of this company and the still unfinished digital revolution it helped unleash.
Patent information - I'm also interested in Part 2. Thanks.
Patent Process - Interesting to hear your experiences with the patent process - what's Part 2?
Re: What's your top tip for balancing your business and taking t - Proper Work management meeting your all deadlines....
Re: What to avoid when cold calling? - While cold calling one must be be clear with what he/she is saying and must be ready with as much possible reasons as he/she could about the product or the services he is talking about. 1. Breaking while talking in between which mostly takes place because of lack of knowledge of the product and confidence 2. One must never think negative and keep trying along with professional tone 3. It has been reported many times that because of not getting sales even after trying many times frustration occurs which also should be avoided 4. One must not talk to make sale but to create a relationship, this must be in mind in order to the sales to follow


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