When your entire team feels overwhelmed by the flood of emails each day and their to-do lists that just keep growing and growing, it may not be a coincidence. Many offices leave it to each individual to decide on their own email plans, but if your team comes together and decides on a company-wide plan, then team members can be freed up to spend less time on emails and more time on their job responsibilities.  Refocusing attention and priorities in the workday as a team effort also provides a good boost to those that aren’t naturally as organized as others.  Here are 3 reasons why an email management plan could work for your team:

1. Improves Efficient Communication - If you compose each email properly with a specific subject and include your email signature, hopefully you won’t receive as many emails looking for your contact information.  Recipients will also be more inclined to call you instead of type out another email to you if your phone number is right in front of them.
2. Reduces Digital Clutter - When you create a system that works for how to handle your incoming emails, you’ll be able to eliminate the clutter in your inbox quicker.
3. Saves Time for Your Team - If you can manage email effectively, especially as a team, you can reduce the amount of time you spend in meetings. Instead of making all the decisions face-to-face, your team can make those decisions through email.

Want additional tips on how to manage your email effectively? Follow The Productivity School’s blog for daily tips on email management and other productivity topics!

For those of you following our blog to improve your productivity and time management—either personally or professionally—you might wonder occasionally about some of the “productivity jargon” that we use. So we’re here to settle any confusion you might have about common terms we use:

Action Item: Tasks that come in which require a specific action from you. For instance, a task assigned to you during a meeting is considered an action item because it requires you to take a specific action in order to complete the task.

Digital Clutter: Similar to physical clutter, but the files, documents, photos, or apps are stored on your electronic devices. Sometimes it’s difficult to notice digital clutter since it isn’t as tangible as physical clutter. It is, however, just as important to keep your computers, laptops, phones, tablets, etc. organized.

Eat That Frog: The term originated from Brian Tracy’s book, Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. The phrase is meant to motivate people against procrastination—encouraging them to just “eat that frog” (that item on their to-do list that they are avoiding or anxious about) right away so it’s done.

Efficient: The goal of productivity is, of course, to become efficient. More specifically, being efficient means removing bottlenecks, simplifying processes, removing redundancies, and getting more done with your time.

EOM: This acronym stands for “End of Message.” Professionals place it at the end of email subject lines to indicate the entire communication is in the subject line (e.g. “I finished processing the expense report EOM”). This helps the email recipient avoid wasting time looking at content in the empty body of an email.

GTD: “Getting Things Done” is a time management methodology created by David Allen in his book, Getting Things Done. Allen’s philosophy is based on the importance of writing down everything that’s floating around in one’s mind, capturing tasks in a central location, creating action items, and then completing them. This allows more focus to be placed on tasks, rather than trying to remember everything you have to get done.

Productivity Consultant: Though productivity is an innate ability to some, for others it can be learned. Productivity consultants, like our team at Innovatively Organized, work with teams and individuals to educate, teach, and improve their systems and structures, implementing better skills for time management, email management, file management, etc.

Streamline: To streamline something is to make it simplified and organized, such as the “path of least resistance.” Too often, team members ‘reinvent the wheel’ when it comes to projects and processes. Streamlining allows professionals to work more efficiently by removing bottlenecks and defining procedures that eliminate redundant or unnecessary steps and tasks.

Virtual Notebooks: Unlike paper-based notebooks, virtual notebooks make it possible to go paperless and keep notes in digital form while staying organized. Similar to physical notebooks, virtual notebooks such as the popular tools Evernote and Microsoft OneNote allow users to organize their notes, meeting agendas, projects, and tasks within one digital place. The advantage of virtual notebooks over paper notebooks is not only their accessibility from a variety of devices, but also the ease in which you can collaborate, search and sort information within them. To learn more about the benefits of virtual notebooks and how to use them, you can download our “Virtual Notebooks 101: Maximize Your Productivity without Paper”.

Workflow: A sequence of tasks, processes, or steps required for certain operations. A workflow might depict or refer to a repeated type of project or procedures, for example your intake process with a prospect or client.

4-Hour Workweek: This term refers to Timothy Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. The self-help book encourages people to identify what they really want, get over their fears and society’s expectations, and figure out how to achieve their goals.
Want to learn more about any of these terms or processes? Contact us for a free 15-minute phone consultation.

While you may be sitting in a very organized office with a clean desk surface and perfect file cabinets (or maybe not…), there are still piles of clutter right in front of your nose! However, this culprit is hard to see or even conceptualize - it’s digital clutter. But what is digital clutter?

How do you know if you have digital clutter? Here a few signs…

• Your computer desktop is barely visible due to numerous shortcuts, documents, and file folders
• You spend more than 30 seconds trying to find electronic files
• You only use a handful of the 40+ apps currently on your phone

To get an idea of how much digital clutter you are hoarding on your computer or laptop, let’s imagine those electronic files were “physical files.”  Follow the steps below to calculate how tall your pile of digital clutter would be if 1 sheet of paper represented each individual file on your computer.

Step #1: Determine how many files are currently stored on your computer.

If you have a Mac:

• Open Finder
• On the left-hand side, click on Applications
• Open the Utilities folder
• Click on the Disk Utility icon
• On the left-hand side, click on Macintosh HD
• On the top header, click the blue Info icon
• A new window will pop up. Locate “Number of files” to find your grand total (see screenshot below)

If you have a PC:

• Click Start
• Under search, type “cmd”
• Open up CMD to run a command prompt
• Type “cd/” then enter and type “dir/s”
• Click enter and let the system count for 5-10 minutes
• Once it has finished, scroll to the bottom and find “Total Files Listed” for your grand total (see screenshot below)

Step #2: Calculate the height (in feet) of your digital clutter

Now that you know exactly how many electronic files you have, it’s time to imagine them as physical files.  Let’s say each of your electronic files represents just one single piece of paper.  When stacked in a pile, it takes 3,000 sheets of paper to reach a foot tall.  Take your total number of files and divide that number by 3,000 to yield how many feet tall your files would stack to.

Now look around your office.  Do you have enough room for all those piles and feet of paper?  Do you need to keep all of those files? Do you have duplicate files? Can you find the electronic files you’re looking for quickly and easily? Just because you don’t need to physically store these files, your electronic files are still piling up into digital clutter…lots of digital clutter.

To learn how to clear out, reduce, and manage your digital clutter, sign up for our “Reduce Digital Clutter: Keep Your Electronic Files Organized” webinar on June 19^th.

How many feet tall would your digital clutter stack be?  Let us know in the comments (scroll to the very bottom of this page) to see how you “stack up.”

How many pages of apps do you you currently have on your phone? What percentage of those apps do you actually use? If you have more than 3 pages, chances are that you have more apps than you use on a regular basis.

Many of us our guilty of a cluttered phone.  We hear about a trendy new app, decide to test it, but we eventually stop using it.  To help reduce some of the digital clutter on your phone, we suggest deleting five apps that you don’t need.  Not only will it help clear space on your device, it will save you time in the long run because you won’t have to scroll through unused apps that are cluttering your screen.

Got five minutes to spare? Move the apps you use most frequently to your home screen for easy access.

For more tips to organize your phone, try our 8 Tips to Declutter Your Phone and especially this one time management tip you can implement today.

Now that the air is getting fresher and our days longer, it’s time for (you guessed it) Spring Cleaning!  When most people think of spring cleaning, they think of organizing garages and cleaning out the kitchen pantry, but we want to challenge you to clean areas you don’t immediately think of that may be hurting your productivity.

For the first phase of our three-part Spring Cleaning series, we want to address a program that many of us use throughout the day - Microsoft Outlook. Even though Outlook is a fantastic productivity tool, the reality is that it often gets neglected.  Here are a few tips to get your started cleaning your Outlook:

Mail

• Take a look at the number of rules you have in place.  Too many can slow Outlook down, so ensure you need all of them.
• Check your Drafts folder for any drafts that are no longer needed and can be cleared.
• If you haven’t done so in a while, empty your Deleted Items folder.

Calendar

• Are the appointments, meetings, and tasks on your calendar current?  Are there any recurring appointments that are no longer applicable?  Take a few moments to clean these items up.

Contacts

• Review your contacts: is your information current?  Delete or merge duplicate contacts.
• Add any new contact information you have been meaning to include (from business cards, scraps of paper, emails, etc.).

Tasks

• There is great satisfaction in crossing tasks off our to-do list, but after a while, these old tasks become clutter.  Delete tasks that you have already completed.
• Are you flag happy? Remove flags that are outdated or no longer require a follow-up task.

Notes

• Go through your notes section to delete those that are no longer relevant.
• If your notes could use some better organization, go through and categorize them or create folders to sort them into.

Clearing out your Outlook should take no more than 30 minutes, but if it requires more time, set aside 15-30 minutes each day until you feel refreshed.  Stay tuned next week for the next two parts in our Spring Cleaning series!

Are you a piler or a filer (and we’re not just talking about paper files)? Do you see piles of paper around your desk or rows of organized folders in your file cabinet?  Are there dozens of inconsistently-named documents on your computer or organized, easy to navigate folders and sub-folders?

To help you identify where you lie on the spectrum, here are common “symptoms” of both pilers and filers:

You might be a piler if…

• You are surrounded by piles of paper that you don’t want to make a decision about
• You have a year’s worth of filing that has piled up because it hasn’t been assigned to anyone (or it’s been assigned to the wrong person)
• Your computer desktop is cluttered because your electronic files don’t have a “home”
• You rely on search to locate your electronic files
• Keep in mind: Though relying on search may work for you, it is not an efficient practice when sharing and collaborating with team members.  They have to be able to retrieve files as quickly as you.

You might be a filer if…

• You consistently file paper documents and electronic files as they come to you
• Every paper and electronic file has a “home”
• Keep in mind: Just because you’re a filer, does not mean you’re necessarily an efficient filer.  You can waste time if you have too many folders, which ultimately slows you down.

Which are you—a piler or a filer?  Are you the same for both your paper files and your electronic documents?

Happy National Clean Off Your Desk Day! It doesn’t matter if you have five-minutes to clean your desk or five-hours, our team at Innovatively Organized has compiled five ways you can celebrate this productive holiday.

1. Clean & dust your desk - When you take a moment to think about everything that comes in contact with your desk, it’s surprising we don’t disinfect & dust it more often. Here is a quick how-to for cleaning your desk.
2. Control the cord chaos - We live in a world where cords seem to be coming out of our ears. Take a few minutes to purge cords you no longer use and tidy the cords that are permanently plugged in around your workspace. Read more tips on organizing your cords and cables here.
3. Place items you use most within easy reach - Create a semi-circle around you when seated at your desk to use optimal space. Take into account whether you are left or right handed and be sure to make use of vertical space by installing shelves and bulletin boards on the walls around your desk.
4. Think paperless & organize your digital clutter too - Set-up a desktop scanner (our favorite is ScanSnap S1300) and start using virtual notebooks to reduce the paper clutter. To cut down on digital clutter, download the Monthly Computer De-Clutter Checklist.
5. Nominate yourself for the Messiest Desk Contest - If your desk (or your coworker’s desk) needs a complete organizational overhaul and you live in the Puget Sound Region, nominate yourself for our Messiest Desk Contest here. Nominations accepted until January 19, 2013.

For monthly tips on productivity and organization in the workplace, sign up here.