Time Management Tips - Developing Good Email Habits

Time is your most precious resource when you work from home on
the Internet. If your Internet connection goes down or your
computer blows up, the situation can be remedied but if you
waste time, it is gone forever. If you fail to develop effective
time management techniques you will all too often find that the
hours you had intended to use productively have evaporated
without trace. Time, although free, is valuable and it is
irreplaceable: every second is unique and should be treated as
an important asset. You will only manage to save time if you
plan and employ your own personal time management strategy. We
all have different demands being made upon our time, so managing
to save time will be achieved in different ways by each of us.
There is, however, one sure way anyone working at home online
can manage to save time and that is by modifying the way we
treat our email.

The trouble with working online is that your email is always
just a click or two away at any time during your working day. If
you were running an offline business from home, your day would
be centered away from your computer and you would have to make a
conscious decision about when and how often to check your email.
When you are already sitting at your pc and connected to the
Internet, it is just too easy to forget all about time
management techniques and develop bad email habits. If you use
the following time management strategy, you will maintain
control of your working hours and find that you can easily get
more done in less time.

1. Set an email schedule for yourself. Make it a rule only to
check your inbox two or three times a day and set a strict time
limit (ten or fifteen minutes per session is about right) on how
long you spend dealing with email.

2. Don't check your email as soon as you power up your computer
at the start of any work session. You will be at your most alert
and creative during the first hour of work. Use this time to
complete more complicated or difficult tasks.

3. Don't have your email alert permanently on to notify you as
soon as an email hits your mailbox. This will serve to distract
you while you are working and tempt you to abandon the schedule
you have planned.

4. Deal with each email as soon as you read it. Flagging an
email and going back to it to send your reply makes double the
work. The only time you should permit yourself to do this is if
you need to do some research before you reply.

5. Use your bookmark function. You are bound to get emails that
contain a link to a website. Maybe you have subscribed to
interesting online news letters or they could be offers of
useful ebooks or tools. The time you have allocated to your
email session should be used solely for reading and replying to
emails. Bookmark any of the sites that appear worthy of further
investigation and schedule time for a visit. This is the most
dangerous part of dealing with emails: all commercial emails
will have a "hook" with which to catch you, drag you into a
black hole and make your time disappear. You must be alert to
this so that you can unhook yourself and visit these websites at
a time you decide is best for your schedule.

Developing good time management techniques is not difficult.
You do, however, need to be constantly on your guard against
temptations which might make you forget your time management
strategy. Developing good habits and curing bad ones is the
foundation of effective time management techniques.


About The Author: For time management tips and the best work at
home ideas visit Elaine Currie's Free Work At Home Directory
http://www.huntingvenus.com/

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Creating Breakthroughs

If all organizations were producing breakthroughs, we would be enjoying exponential increases in results. Did you know that creating such breakthroughs often requires a different focus than when making modest improvements?

How can we replace our normal improvement projects with breakthrough progress?

Breakthroughs usually take the combined sweat and tears of many people. But those efforts won’t bear fruit unless the right mix of skills and experience is involved, properly directed by exceptional leaders and by the right thought process.

Let me put this advice in context: It’s an important lesson for those who want to make lots of 2,000 percent solutions (ways of accomplishing 20 times more with the same time, effort, and resources).

The steps for creating a 2,000 percent solution are listed here:

1. Understand the importance of performance measurement.

2. Decide what to measure.

3. Identify the future best practice and measure it.

4. Implement beyond the future best practice.

5. Identify the ideal best practice.

6. Pursue the ideal best practice.

7. Select the right people and provide the right motivation.

8. Repeat the first seven steps.

This article looks at practicing to become more effective in accomplishing step seven, select the right people and provide the right motivation.

Recruit and Coach a Winning Team

People are the critical resource for any organization. Without the right people, it’s difficult to exceed the future best practice and approach the ideal best practice. Keep in mind that few people, no matter how talented, function well in a changing environment. Still fewer can work well on a team instituting changes. One unreasonable doubter can discourage a whole team. Someone who uses too much influence can stifle others. You’re looking to create a rare and delicate balance in your dream team of change makers.

Change? Over My Dead Body!

It might seem that the best way to implement any change is to work with those who know the job best — those who work with the process every day. But if big changes are needed, this approach isn’t always a good idea. Use only the old crew and you will probably run into a very serious foot-dragging stall. Even the most open minded workers lose their perspective over time. Experimental evidence shows that people new to a job have a much easier time with understanding the need for and enjoying the pursuit of changes. They can be taught whatever background they need to know without being stalled by it. The current crew can play devil’s advocate — to keep the new team honest, as it were. But don’t hold their experience against the current crew. Provide them with a new challenge in another part of the organization where they are unfamiliar with the operations.

You need very capable relative strangers to take on a change project, but they don’t have to be people from outside the organization. Look for as wide a range of perspective, skills, and knowledge as you can.

Build a Dream Team

You must find people who are energized or excited by a change. Your ideal team members must see change as a challenge that will help them grow personally. Select team members who will feel that being chosen to work on approaching the ideal best practice is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to them.

Beyond enthusiasm, what do you need? Open-mindedness. Take a cue from Abraham Maslow and his concept of self-actualization: what a person can be, she or he must be (See Motivation and Personality [Harper, 1954]). Maslow characterized the self-actualized, among other characteristics, as displaying higher levels of:

• Efficient perceptions of reality

• Comfort with reality

• Accepting oneself, others, and nature

• Spontaneity

• Simplicity

• Naturalness

• Focus on problems outside themselves

• Detachment

• Preference for privacy

• Autonomy and independence from culture and environment

• Freshness of appreciation and richness of feeling

• Transcendent experience

• Identification with mankind

• Deep interpersonal relations

• Preference for democratic processes

• Ability to differentiate between means and ends

• Nonhostile humor

• Creativity, originality, or inventiveness.

Maslow also spotted significant drawbacks among some of the self-actualized who could be vain, annoying, cold, uncritical, and overgenerous. Obviously, you should seek team members who present the fewest of these drawbacks … even at the risk of losing some creativity.

Don’t be restricted to Maslow’s concept. People who can adapt rapidly to unexpected problems are even more valuable because they point the group in a new direction when everyone else is stuck. You can spot these people by asking them how they solved seemingly impossible problems in the past.

Is There a Leader in the House?

Naturally, choosing the right team leader makes a big difference in your results. Look for a leader who shares the enthusiasm of each team member and knows how to harness that enthusiasm. In addition, you want someone who places the interests of the team and the organization ahead of any desire to exercise power as top dog.

Avoid borrowing a leader from another organization (whether they be consultants or outsourced service providers). Such outsiders will have a harder time reflecting the values of those they lead. If you cannot find an appropriate leader in your organization, be sure to hire someone who will help create the excitement necessary to bring off major changes and who matches your company’s values as closely as possible.

Four leadership qualities are essential to success:

1. Shared values with the organization

2. Understanding the problems thoroughly before beginning the mission

3. Ability to persuade others that the project will succeed

4. Skills relevant to the task.

If your top candidate is in good shape except for skills, consider how you could use some training to fill in those gaps. It’s easier to fill in for ignorance than for a lack of values.

Copyright 2007 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved

Donald Mitchell is chairman of Mitchell and Company, a strategy and financial consulting firm in Weston, MA. He is coauthor of six books including The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. You can find free tips for accomplishing 20 times more by registering at: ====> http://www.2000percentsolution.com .

Article republished from Copy & Paste Articles

Large organisations have full time professional accounting staff to prepare the payroll or the payroll function may be outsourced to a payroll bureau. The payroll task in a small business falls to the proprietor demanding time and effort to become familia with payroll legislation and a not insignificant amount of administration time that could be better spent making profits than number crunching. Small business organisations with up to ten employees producing the weekly payroll can easily take an hour or more each week to calculate the income tax and national insurance contributions .

An hour better spent earning profits or at the very least having an extra hour of free time each week. Free time that small business owner's value at a premium with small business owners often working and thinking about work from dawn to dusk 7 days a week. A payroll software package to satisfy the PAYE requirements can be just one part of making that small business more efficient.Small businesses that fail to operate a sound payroll system can produce a negative effect on the employees. Employees expect to be paid and provided the amount is a competitive rate would only rarely have an effect on staff relations.

However operating a payroll system that does not provide each employee with a payslip is like telling your employee he has received a personal letter that was opened for him and discarded as not important. To the employee a payslip is very important. And so important in that every employer has a legal responsibility to provide each employee with a payslip and at the end of each year a P60 End of Year Employees Certificate. A payroll software solution satisfies employee's essential needs and fulfills the legal requirements. Failure to provide employees with payslips can only reduce the respect hat employee has for his employer.

Every employee must receive a payslip that shows the amount of income tax and national insurance deducted from the gross pay. Employers must also calculate the employer's national insurance contribution. Employers not using a payroll software package such as available from DIY Accounting Payroll Software must design their own payslip to give to employees to satisfy legal requirements.Running a PAYE system and operating a payroll in the UK can be a burdensome task to comply with all the relevant legislation. HMCE provide much expertise advice in this area both via their website and each year through the distribution of the Employers CD-Rom. To fully appreciate all the technicalities and complete all the correct documents such as the P11 Deductions Working sheet is time consuming.

It doesn't have to be a problem. Payroll Software can automate this knowledge and functions and is available at insignificant cost. DIY Accounting Payroll Software package is available for up to 20 employees at a cost of £15 to £25. That is a payroll software package that could save a small business over an hour a week, for twenty employees more like two hours, for less than 50p per week. All small business owners should at least consider suitable efficient payroll software.Many payroll software packages are written using databases and can put many small business owners off using them due to both the cost and the fear of the unknown complexity of using such a payroll package. Many payroll software packages written on a database provide an excellent solution but have a tendency to be extremely politically correct and cover all potential rules and regulations and consequently become more complex to operate as they can demand at least a minimum knowledge of the payroll system.

There are other PAYE solutions. Written on excel sheets the DIY Accounting Payroll Software irequires no payroll software experience with minimum of entries to produce all the essential PAYE calculations of income tax and national insurance. In addition excel copies of the time consuming P11 Deductions working sheet, P60 Employees Certificate and the P35 Annual Employers Return are all automated to save the small business valuable administration time. A payroll software solution written on excel can also be used with an open office spreadsheet package but not least all the entries are visible and therefore transparent. Errors and mistakes can be easily corrected simply by changing the numbers on the payroll ensuring the payroll is produced both quickly and accurately.

Payroll Software is an effective tool that should receive serious consideration by all small business proprietors.Payroll Software also has the advantage because it can be simple and fast to use of avoiding late payments to the revenue and the consequent unwanted letters and potential fines this can invoke. By having all the information required for the monthly or quarterly revenue payments late penalties can be avoided and by producing the Annual Employers return on time small business owners can submit their returns online and receive a tax free online filing bonus. The current online foiling bonus being £150 and substantially more than the payroll software might have cost. And it's Tax Free. As they say in Yorkshire. "If thar you ever gets owt for nowt, Tec it"

Article Source: http://www.myarticlemall.com

Terry Cartwright is a qualified accountant in the UK designing accounting and payroll software packages for small to medium sized business through his website DIY Accounting, Payroll specifically produced for up to 20 employees providing simple Payroll Software written on excel spreadsheets.
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