Have you ever sat next to someone or even engaged in a conversation with someone who made you feel like you were completely and utterly alone? I had often remarked to my husband in our early years together that I felt like I was by myself so often when we were sitting in the same room. So just because he was there, didn’t mean he was present with me.

We often get wrapped up in the everyday minutiae of life that we forget to live in the present with those that are of value to us therefore devaluing the relationship.

Be what you’re being while you’re being it.

If you are a manager of 25, girl scout troop leader of 12, board member of 10,  mentor of 5, best friend of 2, parent of 3 and spouse of 1 then you may feel like Sybil at times. With the advancements in technology we are expected to do more, learn more, participate more and create more – now. The trouble is, if I’m working on a presentation for my board of directors, I can’t possibly be a good mother at that same moment. If I’m nursing my sick child, I can’t be a good troop leader at the same moment. To think that we can be multiple personalities at the same moment effectively is not a reasonable expectation.

The art of multi-tasking has been corrupted into an unachievable balance between personal and business tasks. And though it may appear that we are getting more done, in actuality, we are digressing and harming our families, our work and ourselves more than creating benefits.

So when you are at work, then be the employee/owner/manager or whatever your role is right now.

But my child is sick…

…so go home and nurse your sick child. If you are so worried sick about your child that you are on the phones all day with your day care or babysitter, you might as well pack up your stuff and get out of there. If you are so preoccupied that you are not present and working at your best, then you’re not doing your company or yourself any good. If you’re trying to ‘mother’ while you’re at work, then you’re not being fair to all parties involved, including yourself.

But I have to get this report done…

…so go into your home office with a do not disturb sign, finish your last page to your report, and come back out to join the family when you are ready to be present with them. Rather than half heartedly play with your kids and spacing because you’re so worried about your project, finish the darn thing and come back.

Are you afraid that you don’t have enough time with your kids? Then make an effort to tuck that report away until you put them to bed. While you’re hanging out with your kids, they need to know that you are with them and not preoccupied.

Whatever you do, do not try to play & interact with your family while you are finishing that report. Both will suffer as a result. Your report will take twice as long and be 1/2 as good while your kids wonder why that stupid report is more important than building Legos.

It’s An Art

One of my first jobs was managing a sports bar when I was 19 (holy cow that was a lifetime ago!) I thought I was a damn great barista, but I remember this gal I hired that kicked my ass in pulling in tips! I was floored because I’ve been known to pull in a few c-notes in my time. So what was her trick? She just knew how to be what she was while she was being it. So when she came in to bartend, she was not a diligent daughter or devoted girlfriend, she was ‘the best damn bartender.’ End of story. She would not only make you a great drink, but when she talked to you, she made you feel like there was no where else she’d rather be and no one else she’d rather talk to – even with a bar full of tipping customers.

Simply: she was present.

The Truth

My post on the magical inbox gave you a little explanation about the Scientology courses I took for a full year & the disclaimer that if I were to join a church, it wouldn’t be the Church of Scientology. But I have to give credit where credit is due. They blew me away with their business courses which I understand that 98% of their congregation never are exposed to any of it. That’s because they’re mainly there for their own self development.

This concept of be what you’re being while you’re being it, which we deployed in my brick & mortar businesses, came directly from L. Ron himself. And truthfully, it gave us all a humbling perspective on our roles in life as dynamite employees, managers, leaders, spouses, parents and friends.

Use this to have a rock solid relationship.

1. Spend time together (away from the kids – even if it’s chatting while they’re in bed)
2. Talk to each other for more than the national average of 12 minutes per day
3. When you’re talking to each other, talk about things other than finances, work and children
4. Be present. Be a loving, doting spouse. Talk to each other like you were dating. Remember that? Ask questions. Ask opinions. Challenge opinions. Relay stories.
5. And most importantly. Have ‘relations.’ Lots of it! And in case I haven’t made my point: when you’re in the bedroom, be that sex-kitten or stud. That is absolutely not the time to be a super-parent or manager…

The other stuff will fall in place.
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Here’s a great read that inspired me to give you an in-depth look Organizing Lee 101.

If you receive under a dozen emails a day, this post is probably not for you since you can easily manually organize your emails. However, what you find as you open up a business or 2 or even just accumulate a few friends in this lifetime, is that you start to get an plethora of emails and you need to organize.  Now, add the different coupon sites you sign up for, the different Mystery Shopper sites you’ve enlisted in, RSS feeds and Victoria’s Secrets sales newsletters, you are now drowning in the invisible sea of electronic mail.

So how do you organize your emails to prioritize and distinguish between friends and family whose emails you’d like to read, colleagues whose emails you must read, shopping emails you’d like to indulge in, and everything else that falls into the e-crap category?  Especially those FWD: fwd: Fwd: fwd: blah blah blah and forward to 10 people or you will have great misfortunes, not get your $1,000,000 and then burn in hell emails?

Those who know me at all understand that not only am I not a neat freak, but there are generally piles of stuff everywhere in my offices.  But I’ll be damned if I can’t find something I need within a few minutes. However, if we’re talking about electronic information, I can get it to you within seconds! And I get around 400-1,000+ emails daily.

HERE’S HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR EMAILS (in Outlook)

1. I treat my email like a filing cabinet.  Each folder can have sub-folders just like real files in a filing cabinet.  So for example, I’ll create a folder & sub-folders under the Inbox that looks like this:

• Coupons
• Family/Friends
  • Hubby
  • Sister
  • Brother
  • Mother in Law
  • Cousins
  • Best Friend
  • Son
• Marketing firm
  • Account Manager
  • Invoices
    • Invoices Paid
  • Upcoming Events
    • Events Completed
• Shopping

Please note: I actually replace with the generic ‘Sister’ or ‘Best Friend’ with actual names.  Also, if I get periodic emails from someone I don’t email often, I’ll put them under the generic category like ‘Friends’ or ‘Cousins’ to keep this from looking too ridiculously long.

2. I create the magical rules. Creating rules is easy and will save you hours in the course of your email-reading lifetime. It’s as simple as right-clicking, selecting ‘Create Rules’ and selecting at least one option from the top like, when I get an email from “Sister” then “Move the item to folder: ______” Make sure that you select the correct folder.  It’s easy to overlook.  You can get real fancy with the rules you create.  For example, if you get spammed by a certain site that you have already asked to be deleted from, you can set up a rule to permanently delete as soon as you get it. You will never have to waste another second of your life trying to determine if that same doggone email was spam, then hitting the delete button. That will add about another 2 hours to your month8-)

3. If you’ve ever missed an important email, here’s an email organization tip that will stop that: I place a few key folders in my ‘Favorite Folders’ quick view in Outlook so that I don’t miss any important emails! Not only do I have the normal Inbox (for each of my emails) up here, but also the most important folder for me is my “Unread Mail” (for each folder as well).  This makes sure that you don’t miss a collapsed folder like the “Account Manager” folder under your “marketing firm folder if you forgot to expand it. This has saved my ass a few times.

STARTING MY DAY

Now that my emails are organized, I always go down my list of expanded folders to pick which emails are most important first.  I will always ready my “Hubby’s” emails first, then my sister’s, then any of my important colleagues.  I skip certain folders that would most likely be solicitations or even just friends who usually send non-sense, and save those for later.

Then to be certain I caught every important email, I will go under my “Unread Mail” under my favorite folders quick view.

TAKING IT A STEP FURTHER

For years I didn’t have access to an exchange server. I know, I know…howwww did I survive? Well thanks to Apple’s revolutionary application for the common business people who can’t afford thousands of dollars for an exchange server, MobileMe, I am all synced up again – emails, contacts, data storage and all.  However, before all of this great Apple technology, I had to find a way to always have access to my docs.

I would create folders for these documents like:

• Documents
  • Handbook
  • Eval Forms
  • Client questionnaires
  • Policy and procedure manual

And each time I made an update to my documents or created a new document, I would email myself and then file under one of these folders. If it was a document I didn’t create, I would just scan it and then email to myself, then of course file under the right folder. Here’s another tip: to make sure you have access to the most current version, name your documents like this: “2009-02-10 Employee Handbook” without the quotes.  If you follow this file naming practice, you’ll see that your documents will be easier to sort through.

Get the idea?

You can get so creative with this. It takes a little getting used to, but I find that I work better at things that are easy and that will enhance my life.  This will save you countless hours each week.  You could almost take a vacation with the hours you saved yourself from slaving away in the e-world – almost.

This has changed my e-life.

Let me know how you’ve tweaked it to make it work better for you.

My first business was formerly known in north Texas as The Body Wrap Shop, and for reasons that are totally ridiculous, we had to change our name about 18 months into it.  I have since sold that business (again) and it operates under Wrap Me Now! But our beginnings were very precarious and though I would have gladly traded the company we had to deal with to get started for the devil himself, I’ve picked up some amazingly cool business tools along the way.

When my husband & I jumped into this business, we didn’t recognize the signs that were in front of us that said, “You’re dealing with the bottom of the Scientology cesspool.”  These people are what gives Scientologists a worse name than they’ve already made for themselves.

So I remember popping in for a surprise visit before I gave the ‘parent company’ that we were buying our license from to see how they operate.  I had pretty high expectations from someone who was asking for $35K.  I was actually in Clearwater, FL on business anyways and was dressed like someone who could play the part of a pretty good sales(wo)man.

Clean, tailored suit and all, I strode into this run down facility on Belcher Rd with a little bit of confusion.  Before I could even see the chimney stacks of cigarette smoke from an assembly of bovine-resembling women, I could taste the stale, dense fumes.  My first instinct was to protect my unsullied suit from this stench.  I grew up with a father who is a smokestack himself and the compulsion to protect my wardrobe was more instinctual than calculated at that moment.

At any rate, let’s say that my first encounters with Scientologists were very contradictory to their core beliefs.  We will definitely explore more of this later.

It turns out that my soon to be Advertising-Co-operative-Sort-of-Business-Partner, “MW” is a devout Scientologist too.  She had somehow persuaded me to go to one of her business meetings she was setting up for small business owners.  I thought she needed some support, so I volunteered to attend.

Here is the first of many tips that has changed my life and organization of my companies.

Magical Inboxes!

I know you must think this is elementary, but it goes deeper than this.  The key: inboxes, pending boxes and out boxes for every ‘hat’ you wear or subject you are in charge of.

That started to revolutionize the way my business was run. The magic of inboxes was quickly recognized in my small but growing company.  I probably had about 12 employees at the time and I was in charge of every aspect of my business.  The issue I had with the inbox system prior was that my inbox was always full and seemed so daunting that the mere thought of tackling it would just send me into a mental straight-jacket keeping me from any real progress.  My pending box was just another place to store incoming items.  My outbox was always empty because I couldn’t organize myself enough to get anything done.

The Magical Inboxes that I had set up for each hat I wore became 3 rows x 6 columns of wall pockets Big J-Oda generously screwed to one wall I had cleared off for just this new Magical Inbox system.

I then set up an inbox for all of my on going items of concern.  I had an inbox for:

1. Accounting
2. Client Issues
3. Staff communications
4. Mail
5. Advertising
6. Gift Certificates

So each column was comprised of an inbox on the top row, then a pending box, then the outbox, though after much usage, I realized that outboxes were usually empty because by the time something got processed, it seemed to poof! just magically disappear. What this also did for me was to keep an eye on each task as I was ready to tackle them and ironically enough, it helped me to organize my day to take care of issues efficiently.

The most loathsome sight was anything in my Client Issues inbox.  We prided ourselves on not having very many, maybe one every other month or so, which was no small feat with our volume of business.  So to see anything in Client Issues Inbox meant that we took corrective action promptly.

Of course, when we would see items in the Gift Certificate Inbox, that usually meant that we needed to send in our Spa Finder vouchers so we could get paid.  If that wasn’t motivating for us, nothing was.

Staff Communications in writing were pretty rare in our business since we communicated verbally and through email, so that would also get priority.

Before the Magical Inboxes came into my life, all of these crucial items would get lost in a single inbox and were neglected which cause greater havoc due to missed deadlines or irate clients when they could’ve all been avoided with the right tools in place.  It was so much easier to prioritize my agendas after this.  And after we could afford to hire managers, having the Magical Inbox system in place was easy to teach and an invaluable tool for us all. We were able to communicate the urgency of tasks without even speaking to each other, so when we had time to speak, it was even more productive.

So to you all with inbox congestion, this will change your life and increase your productivity.  Your addiction to an empty inbox and outbox will overcome any abhorrence to organization you might have…guaranteed:-)