Making It From Black Friday to NYE Successfully & Happily

Thanksgiving is over and Black Friday arrives. I always get the feeling I should be amongst those shoppers on that dreadful day, fighting my way through the crowds in order to get the best price on the latest iPod. Except the thought of being the mix of a frenzied crowd brings terrifies me…and irritates me. I know my limits and avoiding Black Friday like the plague is amongst them.

That being said, I always get stressed about the holidays. Am I buying gifts that people will like? Am I keeping to my budget (rarely)? Should this person get a holiday card even though I never hear from them? Will I get everything done on time and how can I avoid turning what should be a warm, fun holiday spent gathered with people I love into one of dread and stress?

Well, first off, I try to remember that I should be enjoying this time and then I make a plan. Knowing in advance what I will need helps me to plan out when I need to purchase the items, bake the cookies, send out the cards and it keeps me in line with my budget. It also helps me to avoid the stress of poor planning so now I rarely forget people and I find my stress levels are lower. The plan doesn’t have to be over-the-top, just a simple list of what I need for who and when is helpful to keep myself organized.

Holiday cards; most men don’t have to deal with this. I’m not sure why, but men are forgiven and rarely expected to send out cards. They are lucky. Then again, they probably don’t receive many cards themselves and I really like getting cards in the mail and hearing what others are up to or just reading the simple note. Which brings me to my next point: if you send out cards – keep the list shorter than the dictionary. Send out e-cards if you are so popular you have that many friends. If not, weed those people off the list you never speak to, don’t particularly care for, or who are too lazy to send you a card with anything other than their name on it. They’re not making an effort, why should you?

The art of gift giving. Some people are lucky, they have everything they possibly could want or need. Those who must buy those people gifts are not as lucky. So this year, I realized that after surviving through part of this recession that I am really lucky. I have everything I need and so do those people I intend to buy gifts for. So instead of racking my brain for a gift they’ll like and instead of going with the token bottle of wine or scented candle, I turned to Heifer International , Ocean.org, the Cancer Society, and the local animal shelter where my dad adopted his cat as a way to give gifts that can’t end up dusty in the back of a closet. I purchased honey bees, chicks, a hammerhead shark, and a baby seal on behalf of the people I love so we could give back to the planet in some small way. I have to say, I feel fabulous about these gifts which is a nice change from carting around heavy items and wondering if I picked out the right item. I couldn’t go wrong this year and I waited in no lines. Just pick a charity you think that person would also support. My aunt had cancer and is now healthy so I’m contributing to the American Cancer Society.

I’ve also been pacing myself. I do a little bit at a time instead of waiting for a Saturday in which to kill myself in a race to get everything done. It is satisfying and I feel a lot less stressed. I practice doing a little at a time for most things and I find I always get everything done on time. Not forcing myself to do it all at once helps me do better work, stay interested, stay on task and not feel like I need to tear my hair out. Whether it’s housecleaning, purging old files or clothing, or even shopping for gifts or groceries, it doesn’t need to be done all at once at the same time. Remembering I can do it all, but not all at the same time helps me keep what’s important in perspective.

My mother actually used to do a little at once over the holidays and managed to make a game out of it for us kids. Every day we’d come home from school to find she’d put up a few new decorations. This way she wasn’t doing it all at once and we got to figure out what was new and where she had placed it. It was very fun. Again, doing a little at a time makes the process easier, more enjoyable and it still gets done on time.

Speaking of mom’s they seem to be the one’s who do nearly everything in preparing for the holidays. Just remember that they need and deserve to be helped. Husbands can do their part and even small children can learn how to help as well. Offering to help someone during the holidays may be the greatest gift you can ever give them.

May you all have a happy and healthy holiday season.

Organizing your Inbox for Time Management

Let me guess, your e-mails have gotten out of control. You get distracted quickly because an e-mail comes in and as a result, your work is taking longer than you had originally thought. You have begun to have a love/hate relationship with e-mail.

It’s completely understandable these days we get so many e-mail messages during the day that it becomes overwhelming. More e-mails pour in every day and you never want to miss an important e-mail, but are starting to feel overwhelmed by the amount and want to make sure you’re also staying on task while devoting enough time to responding to important e-mails.

First, unless you have or work in a business where your only part in being there is to respond to e-mails, most e-mails do not need to be read as soon as they come in. In fact, studies show that every time you get distracted, whether from a phone call, someone stopping by your desk or an e-mail comes in, the average person gets off task for anywhere from 10-20 minutes. How often are your e-mails so important that stopping your work for that long is actually beneficial to your time? It’s probably not as often as you think. To help prevent such losses in time, schedule specific periods during your day to look at and respond to your e-mails. How often you do this depends upon how much e-mail you get and how much you need to respond to them.

If you fear that not responding immediately will cause problems, start to let people you work with know that you will be looking at your e-mails during specific points of the day. Let your clients know as well. Then invite them to call you if there is an emergency, but otherwise, you’ll get back to them at the allotted time in the day. Always train people to know what to expect from you and it prevents unnecessary problems and/or breakdowns in communications. Most people can wait a few hours for a response.

When you do reach those points of the day where you are responding to e-mail, first go through the e-mails quickly one by one. Do not respond immediately to any of them. Create file folders for your incoming e-mails such as: research, respond to within 1 week, respond to within 1 day, keep, etc. These different file folders can be set out to work for the types of typical e-mails you receive daily. Once you have put your e-mails into their respective folders, go through those e-mails you perceived to need an immediate response and get them out of the way. Also, set up and utilize your junk folder to filter out unwanted e-mails.

Again, any time you are in the middle of a task and you take a moment to look at an e-mail, it will take you 10-20 minutes to get your brain back on task. If you receive many e-mails during the day, this habit will create problems with getting your work done on time, keeping you working later hours than are needed, leads to exhaustion, stress and less time to concentrate on other things. By setting specific points during the day, such as at 9:30 am, 12:30 pm and 4:30 pm to look over, sort and respond to e-mail then you have made a date with yourself to handle e-mail, but are not a slave to handling everything that comes in when it comes in.

Sorting quickly through your e-mails helps you to quickly assess what needs to be looked at immediately and what can wait. By assigning certain items to be worked on later when you have more time and those that aren’t pressing matters, it allows you to have the time to devote yourself to work that is imperative. Sorting your e-mails into categories allows you to prioritize your work and makes it simpler and less overwhelming to deal with. The file folders also make it much easier to find e-mails in the future.

Always make sure you delete items you no longer need on a daily basis. If you aren’t sure, create another file folder to hold on to items you may need to find later on. However, your inbox should only carry items that need to be addressed immediately or those items you have not yet sorted through.

I hope this helps to begin the process of learning how to live without instant e-mail gratification. If you have a ton of e-mails to sort through, do a little at a time or you’ll never get it done. Ask your assistant to help filter e-mails for you as well. Lastly, if you feel you need additional help of a professional organizer or time management coach, contact Alison Kero at: 646-831-9625 or on her e-mail at: info@gothamconcierge.com. Consultations can be done in person in the NYC metro area or phone consultations are available nationwide. Lastly, if you trust and know of another professional organizer, contact them and make an appointment to get your time, space and life organized today. You’ll see and live the difference every day! Good luck!

Linking Similar Tasks Together to Save Time

Do you remember the Sesame Street song that went, “one of these things is not like the other, one of these things doesn’t belong. Can you tell which thing is not like other by the time I finish this song”? This is a great song to remember when your goal is saving time and being organized.

What I mean is that you’re more likely to remember where things are and where you keep them if you put similar things together. Put all your pots and pans together. Put all paper goods together. Schedule similar tasks at the same time so if you have tasks on your list that are similar in nature, do them together. Say you have 3 projects you’re working on and each project requires you to do some writing, some research and some number crunching. Schedule your time working on these projects not separately, but together. Schedule the writing for each project together, schedule the research for all 3 together and the same with the number crunching. Although they are separate projects, writing is writing and when the creative juices are flowing, it’s far easier to keep up momentum if you’re staying within the same task.

If you schedule one project at a time you’re instead jumping around far more than you would by scheduling these like tasks together. The best part for those of you who thrive on variety, you still get variety by scheduling your tasks this way because the nature of these projects will probably be different, but again, allowing yourself to work on virtually one task will help you to be far more productive.

Continuing to lump like things together, whether you’re organizing items in your home, projects you need to finish or tasks you need to accomplish will allow you to save time. You will know where your items are because you can relate the box of extra pens to the supply of paper and envelopes you placed with them. You have then saved yourself the time it would have taken to remember where you put them and the search it would have taken to locate the pens. You know where they are from now on because you placed them near similar items.

You can save time by lumping errands together that are near one another. If I have to schedule an appointment, go to the bank, pick up food and stop by the pharmacy, I know I can do these in one trip because I know that all of the places I need to go to finish these errands are nearby one other. I then plan to do them in practical order. I would first stop off at the pharmacy to drop off my prescription because I know it usually takes 30 minutes to fill. I then would stop by the bank to deposit a check because it’s the next location on my way to grab food. I then schedule my eye appointment because it’s next to the food shop, then grab my hot food and stop by the pharmacy, which was my first stop and closest to home on my way back.

Again, planning and scheduling a little ahead and lumping like things together will go a long way toward creating a more simple life, which will enable you to be more productive and use less time to accomplish your goals, tasks, errands and projects.

If you need help creating a process for your hectic schedule, creating an organizational scheme for your home or office, or how to get more time out of your life, contact me, Alison Kero at: 646-831-9625 or e-mail me at: info@gothamconcierge.com to schedule an in-person visit or phone consultation today. Best of luck organizing your time, space and life!