• Clean Up Your Workspace
• Clean Up Your Tech
• Reconfigure Your Schedule

The last three days have been pretty active. Today, let’s sit and dream a while.

Imagine your perfect business year. What happens? What are you doing? What is your company like? What does your company feel like?

Let’s wallow in that for a bit, shall we?

From that vision, can you draw three big-picture goals? A goal has three requirements that makes it different from a mere wish.

1. A goal is measurable. You know if you have completed it or not.
2. A goal is time specific. There are deadlines.
3. A goal is achievable through incremental steps.

Stating good goals is harder than it seems but once you get there, you will have a prioritization plan for the year. Those goals can drive your decision-making. You’ll just keep asking, “Does this take me one step closer or one step farther away from my reaching my goal?” If the work is put in ahead of time, it’s amazing how easily the day-to-day, nitpicky details tend to fall into place.

Now picture yourself at the end of 2012 and feel the glow of your accomplishments. It can definitely be.

Happy year’s end, everyone! And all the best for the next one!

• Clean Up Your Workspace
• Clean Up Your Tech

I bet you are not ending 2011 the same way you began it. We live in a world of quick changes, and that is affecting both our business lives and our personal lives. We update our budgets. We update our goals. But our daily and weekly schedules are often overlooked.

As Julie Morgenstern says, time is like your closet. Thinking of time in a physical sense makes it easier to handle. When you add a garment to your closet, a certain amount of space is taken up. Nothing else can go there. And once the closet is filled up, everything else is overflow and creates a mess.

True, right? So start looking at your days, weeks, and year as a series of time blocks. What are you going to fit in those? Do you want to devote more energies into improving customer response times? Adding additional services? Getting a new logo? Or perhaps you want to simplify your processes. Maybe even take more time off.

All of that can be visualized with a working schedule. It does not have to be your hard-and-fast rule, but it can certainly keep you on track and avoid wasted hours.

When do you wake up? By what time are you at work? On what day do you send out invoices? Report sales tax? The act of plotting it all out really helps decision making and the process of realizing what is possible and what is not.

Give it a try and plot out a single day in your life. Then you’ll see what a difference a schedule can make in your productivity and sense of purpose.

Tomorrow, brainstorm and prioritize.

How does your computer’s desktop look? You’ll feel just as wonderful looking at an uncluttered screen as you do sitting at an uncluttered desk.

• Go through your contacts in your phone(s), email(s), and database(s). Update and delete.
• Create subfolders named 2011 and drag all your completed projects into them. Now that blank space is ready to receive your 2012 work.
• Tackle that email! Delete, file, archive, and back up.

Tomorrow, reconfigure your schedule.

Quite often, business owners do not find it hard to describe where they want to be. The bigger question marks have to do with all those little steps needed to get there.

When this vision puzzle becomes too challenging, try to think of the journey another way.

Ask yourself: Where will my business be in [time frame] if things continue as they are now.

The truthful answer to that question allows the gap between what will be and what you wish for to become sharply defined. The puzzle can now be approached from a different direction, using a different perspective.

Sometimes it helps to take a 360 walk around a problem because looking at it straight on does not always work.

Use to Small Businesses: Limited

In all fairness, I did not completely finish this book. I became frustrated that this is mostly about hype marketing rather than buzz marketing, in the organic word-of-mouth way.

Now there are general principles in hype that will apply to the creation of genuinely valuable word-of-mouth buzz, but the big difference is in the bottom line. Hype does not directly lead to sales and income.

Mark Hughes used to be the VP of marketing for Half.com. They did make a big splash once upon a time when a town in Oregon agreed to change its name officially to “Half.com, Oregon.” Undeniably, this brought a lot of publicity to this start-up website. Mark gives some numbers in terms of registered users as an example of what a big splash can do.

“Ah, yes,” a small business owner would say. “But what about their bottom line?”

This book came out in 2005. Do you know what ClearPlay is? This company is the example at the center of Chapter 9. Hmm. People are still talking about that Pepsi Challenge campaign but Pepsi just dropped behind Coke and Diet Coke in popularity. And do you really want to know how smart Britney Spears was with her buzz generation back in 2005?

I supposed it is fitting that this book is as dated as hype usually is. Hype flashes in the pan. Without purpose, it just comes and goes with nothing gained.

Small businesses that are watching every dollar and every hour in the day simply shouldn’t pursue hype as the main thrust in its marketing efforts.

For us small business runners, it’s time to hold sales, count inventory, reflect, and plan ahead. One of the things that always gets me excited about the impending new year is my ritual of Clean Out.

I find that the fewer things I have, the more I know I can thrive with an even lighter load.

So I go through my personal possessions and see what I no longer need. I go through my business materials and retire, file, and donate the unnecessary extras. The picture on the right shows the first four bags that went to the donation drop site.

As the space around me increases, I find that my spirit and enthusiasm expand to fill it. I make room for the next year.

I hope you are facing 2010 with a similar optimism.

I hear it all the time:

• We should have a blog.
• We should be on Twitter.

In reality, these avenues of communication are time consuming pursuits and shouldn’t be started without a certain amount of thought.

Some of the things to consider are:

• Who will be the primary contributor(s)?
• Do(es) he/she/they have the skills necessary to be a good written communicator?
• What should be the tone, message, and goal of the blog or Twitter stream?

And of course—Do we actually have anything to say?

This is not to mean that plans should not be modified because all plans, business or otherwise, change. But all too often, I see the most enthusiastic of beginnings die out due to lack of will and direction.

If you ask any responsible corporate blogger, he will probably tell you that the blog is always in his mind. She is constantly on the lookout for the next topic and composing passages in her head (if not on the pad of paper that’s always by her side).

As tools, blogging and Tweeting have so many benefits to offer a company that needs to be smart with its resources.

The time and effort, however, that need to go into making them work are usually a lot more than decision-makers may expect.

Time provides the containers and compartments into which your actions and events must go. For example, you only have so much space on your desk. If you want to put another lamp on it, you’ll have to take something away to make room. The same principle applies to your time. We only have so many hours in our day, and we have to organize accordingly.

Being organized means more than knowing where your possessions are. It also means that you are not late, you are not double-booked, and you are not behind on your responsibilities.

Could you use some help with developing a simplified and and workable system for your life? Why not give Detour Services a call?

Are you ready to face the next twelve months? Detour Services is ready to help. Just let us know if you need to get your finances in order. Or perhaps you want a filing system that actually works. Are you tired of losing your items?

Drop me a note today!

You may be surprised that I, as someone who helps organize others, would admit something like this. But to me, organization is not about things or spaces; it’s about procedures.

If my glasses are not on my face, I know they are in one of three places. When I come home, my bags and keys get dropped at the same location each time. My filings tend to sit in one “to file” pile until it gets bothersome enough for me to do it all at once.

I know how my brain categorizes and processes information so I figured out the best ways to store my stuff—which may mean in temporary piles.

My closet used to be subdivided by color. My CDs used to be in alphabetical order. These systems did not work for me. It turns out that I don’t choose clothes by color, and I don’t figure out music via the alphabet.

Trying to work someone else’s system—one that feels foreign to you—will seldom succeed in the long run. As an organizing professional, I try to figure out my clients’ routines and how they process information. Then I can suggest improvements and modifications that feel natural and easy.

If you have trouble staying efficiently organized, please give Detour Services a call. We offer free telephone consultations and a money back guarantee on our services. Try us out and we’ll figure out a system that will work for you.