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QuickTip: Three Uber-Effective Tips for Home Offices

Thursday, March 3, 2011

We just moved into our next “forever” home.  Seems like the only “forever” is the moving part.  But that’s not the point of this missive. The point here is to describe THE three characteristics every home office should possess to be highly effective.

The background on this is that I work from home when I’m not on the road.  In the last seven years of working from home, my “office” address has changed five times.  Thus, I’ve become quite an expert at setting up home offices.  Here are the three characteristics I found to be crucial to creating and working effectively in a home office. 

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Three Small Steps to Greater Control of Your Day

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Change is easy; deciding to is hard.  That’s because we all know that we need to make changes to improve our lives.  However, the inertia of the status quo is a very powerful force to overcome when the moment to effect those changes arrives.  My personal and professional experience is that small change is, indeed, the most effective strategy for accomplishing all types of goals.

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No Snow Day For Me! The Benefits of Being Virtual

Thursday, January 27, 2011

This is a guest post authored by Jessica Levin, professional speaker and principal in Seven Degrees Communication.

It snowed today. Again. Schools are closed. Offices are closed. Many, many people are losing productivity and many businesses are losing money. I, however, am toasty warm working from my office. Sure, I had a meeting canceled today, but I am still am able to get all of my other work done. Why? Because I work 100% virtually.

I didn’t set out to be virtual. It started when I worked in NYC and would occasionally work from home. It then turned into Fridays. When our office was closing and we needed to move buildings, it didn’t make sense for me to get another office. When I think back to that commute and how unproductive it was, working virtually was one of the best decisions I could have made.

A lot of companies don’t want employees working from home for various reasons. I think trust has a lot to do with it. I also understand that this structure doesn’t work for all job types and not everyone has the discipline to “go to work” while they are in their home.

Here is a little glimpse of how I operate. I hope it helps you to understand how easy it can be.

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Three Reasons Why Executive Time Management is Like Losing Weight

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Instead of doing the normal “set your goals” first-of-the-year post that you’d expect from a productivity guy, I wanted to do something different. The purpose of New Year’s resolutions is to take stock of our lives and, hopefully, find things we can improve. However, making a list of resolutions that invariably fail is not only pointless and unproductive, it’s failure – plain and simple. Why do we want to start the year off with a failure?

And then it hit me! The rate of failure of New Year’s resolutions is so high that their failure must have a pattern, a discernible weakness. That got me to thinking. Why do these resolutions (and similar commitments) fail so often? More importantly, how could that dynamic be changed to make keeping resolutions a successful experience?

Much thought and many discussions ensued to uncover the dynamics of resolution failure. The theory proposed below was developed based on these informal research sessions and the actual experiences of success I encountered. I’m sure there are thousands (millions?) of PhDs who could give us all a lesson on the hows and whys we have difficulty maintaining commitments. But, candidly, if they were so smart, they’d be able to do more than explain why we can’t fulfill certain types of commitments, they’d offer us an answer that can be translated into action resulting in success.

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