Your Life. Organized.

Quote: Setbacks

"Setbacks and stressors are bridges to be crossed to our goals... not barricades to keep us from them."

 

Stephen Pierce
Speaker and Author

 

 

 

 

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Giving Thanks For You

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving -- my favorite holiday! I love it so much because it's all about my two favorite things... being with people you love and delicious food! I'll be making my famous baked corn pudding, as I always do and because my husband and I have a policy of not traveling at the holidays, we spend Thanksgiving with our dear friends, who we feel are our chosen family.

Here is a short list of the things I'm thankful for...

A loving and merciful God
My health
My handsome, kind, loving husband
My family
Running (hot!) water, heat, and electricity at my fingertips
Access to clean, safe food and water
My amazing circle of friends and colleagues
My thriving business
Our homes and those we share them with
Our sweet kitty
My car that's paid off
Music, sunlight, flowers, birds, trees, animals, and the beauty of nature
Technology that helps make my work possible

And finally, to the people who graciously make my life so much better, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your professionalism, your enthusiasm, your care and skill. You are truly a blessing.

Dr. Mike Tumminello, chiropractic champion (for 12 years)
Dr. Jonathon Dubin, dental hero (14 years)
Whitney Johnson, hair magician (11 years)
Lori Roth, Quickbooks guru (5 years)
Peter Tarantino, awesome CPA  (4 years) 
Robert Lester, pest control expert (11 years)
Matt Poston, auto mechanic wizard (7 years)
Karen Welch, housecleaning extraordinaire! (1 year)    

And finally to you, my wonderful readers! THANK YOU for your kind enthusiasm and your support. Without you, your comments, questions and support, there would be no blog. Have a wonderful, gratitude-filled, joyful Thanksgiving!

Much love to you,

 

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Quote: Thankful

"Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough."

 

Oprah Winfrey
Television Host, Actress, Producer and Philanthropist

 

 

 

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The Big O: Be A Smart Shopper!

Listen to the newest episode of The Big O with me, and your hosts Vicky and Jen as we discuss all things SHOPPING! Learn about buyer's remorse, how to avoid impulse buying, what questions to ask yourself to help distinguish a need from a want, and much more. Save money by shopping wisely!

 

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Quote: What Choice Do You Have?

"We have no choice of what color we're born or who our parents are or whether we're rich or poor. What we do have is some choice over what we make of our lives once we're here."

 

 

Mildred Taylor
Author

 

 

 

 

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7 Good Reasons To Go Paperless

The paperless office is becoming more and more a reality as technology catches up to the real world needs of today’s mobile workforce. If you’ve been considering going partially or fully paperless at home or at work, here are seven reasons to motivate you to pick up a rapid feed scanner with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capability.

1. Free Up Floor Space: When you implement a digital document management system, information that used to take up drawer after drawer of filing space is stored electronically, taking only drive space. The conversion from hard copy to digital means you can find a new home for that big ol’ filing cabinet and use your floor space for something else a lot nicer looking.
   
   
2. Time Savings: Misfiled paper documents cause more than aggravation. They also waste time and can cause information to become permanently lost. In fact, companies typically misfile 2 - 20 % of their records. (Source: ARMA International) When you scan and store documents digitally, you and your employees no longer risk misfiling and having to recreate paper files, which costs the average company $250 each. (source: Coopers & Lybrand study in Inc Magazine)
   
   
3. Simplify Retrieval: Filing is more about FINDING information than storing it and today’s OCR technology turns every piece of paper, receipt or business card into a searchable document. All the words on the paper become searchable text, as well as any keywords you add to the file when saving it. So even if you or a colleague do happen to misfile something in your electronic filing system, it’s still easy to locate within seconds using text search.
   
   
4. Collaborate: Don’t you just love emailing multiple versions of a document back and forth as an attachment when you’re working on something with another person? Ugh. So unwieldy! Digital document management lets you collaborate on a single version via the cloud, so multiple users can view the same document and everyone is on the same page.
   
   
5. Security: A filing cabinet is only as secure as the lock and the person who holds the key. Paper is vulnerable to theft, fire and water damage and is cumbersome to transport in an emergency. Digital documents are not only easy to recreate when you do need a hard copy, they are easy to back up electronically via the cloud or an external hard drive, making them more secure than paper.
   
   
6. Cost Reduction: Storing paper costs more than you think. There’s the cost of square footage of your office space, filing cabinets, the paper itself, as well as ink and wear and tear on your printers and copiers. Not to mention the labor cost to file and retrieve it. The average office spends $20 on labor to file each document & $120 searching for every misfiled document. (source: Coopers & Lybrand study in Inc Magazine)
   
   
7. Mobile Access: Scanning and storing information digitally makes it accessible to anyone who has access to the server, the hard drive or the cloud. With so many in today’s workforce being mobile, accessibility is important. You don’t want to be tied to your office just so you can access your paper files and creating hard copies of paper to travel with is cumbersome.

Going paperless doesn’t happen overnight, so I recommend starting from with today's paper and scan going forward rather than beginning with the past. There may be a reason to scan some historic paper, but consider it carefully before investing time and money going back more than a year.

Also, going paperless requires creating a standard process for scanning (and possibly shredding) various types of incoming paper so before you get scan-happy, sit down and figure out your digital protocol. Soon you’ll be on your way to super-fast, secure, digital storage and retrieval of all your important home and workplace information.

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Quote: Who Matters Most?

"People who matter are most aware that everyone else does, too."

 

Malcolm Forbes
1919-1990, Publisher of Forbes Magazine

 

 

 

 

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Why Lazy Gets A Bad Rap

Come on, admit it… isn’t it fun to be lazy? Maybe you think of being lazy as spending a whole day doing nothing more than kicking back with Criminal Minds reruns and a nice cup of coffee. Or hanging by the pool relaxing in the sun with a People Magazine and a glass of white wine. Maybe lazy for you means ignoring the dishes in the sink all weekend, opting to play X-Box instead.

As someone who makes her living teaching people how to be productive, I have to admit we’re ALL lazy to some degree. And if I’m being honest, I think being lazy is an essential part of being happy. Yeah I said it. Poor sweet lazy gets a bad rap. There are times when being lazy is important.

Everyday Lazy
During a recent conversation about getting her house organized, my friend Stephanie remarked “It’s a good thing I don’t own a lot of stuff because I’m essentially lazy .”  That’s one instance where lazy works just fine. If you only own the bare minimum of life’s necessities, you can afford to be lazy because you have less to maintain than other people do. Your life is by definition, “lower maintenance” – the less you have, the less you have to keep up with. So if you like being lazy, de-clutter to the extreme!

Area Lazy
We’re all “area lazy” somewhere in our lives because we just don’t care enough not to be. For example, my husband and I have been together fifteen years and our bedroom looks like a cross between a used furniture store and a college dormitory. Our bed is up on cinder blocks (stacked two high!) to create redneck-style extra storage underneath.  We have no headboard or footboard and our dressers and night tables are mismatched family hand-me-downs.

Suffice it to say our master bedroom is NOT a sexy, fabulous, luxurious sanctuary! Our closet is wonderfully organized, but we’re area lazy about how our bedroom looks and we just don’t care. It works fine for us and that’s what matters. Your life doesn’t have to be perfect -- if you’re area lazy and if it works for you and your family, drop the guilt and embrace it!

Scheduled Lazy
Weekends are great for scheduling lazy time, but they’re so often filled with work and other activities and obligations that you never really get to be lazy. Recharging is an essential part of productivity, so make time for it regularly, whether it’s the weekend or not. If you’re not taking time to chill out, relax and turn your mind loose of work and responsibility, you’re cheating yourself and your family out of the best of you. Deliberately schedule time for nothing one of these weekends to rest and recharge.

If you’re so busy that you just can’t fathom how to schedule a little bit of lazy into your life, remember this: You don’t need a whole day to rejuvenate. Lazy is a powerful potion – it's like good Tahitian vanilla extract... little goes a long way!

Send the kids on a play date or to Grandma’s for a couple hours and read, watch TV, lie in the sun on the deck, work on a scrapbook or just nap. Whatever you like to do to relax qualifies as being lazy because you’re taking your mind off being a grown-up for a while and recharging YOU. What are your favorite ways to add a little lazy to your life?

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