How much time do you spend during your working day handling email?

This single task has become one of the biggest time wasters as emails flood in all day long demanding our attention, yet often being trivial.

For too many people, and I’ve been one, it becomes a constant interruption tool, preventing us from working effectively.

Your time is precious and too many people reach the end of the day exhausted and dismayed that they didn’t achieve everything on their to-do list after all.

The first rule is to turn off email notification, or if you can’t, keep your email program shut. Most people can’t resist stopping their thought train to look at that new email, but in a busy day this is the worst thing you can do. Sure your customer might appreciate a fast reply, but actually you are training them to interrupt you more often!

The second rule is never to check your email first thing of a morning. This is probably one of the hardest rules, but you should aim to complete your highest priority tasks by 11am every day and if you start by checking emails you are likely to miss this deadline. Can you imagine having a major task completed before lunch every working day? How would this impact on how you feel about your job or business?

Set aside a maximum of half an hour to check your emails in the middle of the day and if you must, check them again in your last half hour of the working day.

You can even set an automated reply letting people know you won’t deal with your email until the end of the day. This sounds harsh at first, but it stops them phoning you to ask why you haven’t responded as fast as you used to and interrupting you anyway.

People  tend to handle and forgive anything if you explain it to them.

Do you have a good business practice agenda in your business?

How do you decide what is good business practice for your own business and how are others doing it?

There is a new online tool that has been created for Australian Small Business providing a platform that will enable small to medium businesses to establish their own responsible and sustainable business practice agenda. St. James Ethics Centre and the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia in collaboration with Australian Businesses, has developed the Good Business Register.

The site is secured by log in and will allow you to build and publish your Responsible Business Practice Profile as a marketing tool that showcases your company’s image and reputation building trust and understanding.

You can print your profile, save it allowing you to use it within any other marketing strategy documents or send or publish the link to stakeholders, customers, suppliers and staff.

Currently this is a free online tool and can be completed incrementally to your time constraints and as your business grows or changes.

The site is based around 5 principles of responsible business practice – Financial sustainability, Inclusive workplace environment, Promoting responsible business through the supply chain, Active engagement with stakeholders and the community, and Minimising the impact of business activities on the environment.

We are all subject to a range of responsibilities and obligations that govern our day-to-day business operations. These obligations define minimum requirements we must meet within our business and information on them is provided within the register. However the register is about encouraging business to go beyond compliance – to be more aspirational than merely complying, and provide you with the platform to showcase this important competitive edge, improving your image and reputation.

Click here to register and use the Good Business Register

What does this mean for your business? How do you manage information and knowledge? There is an overload of knowledge out there, but without context effective management it can become a liability instead of an asset.

There are four dimensions to consider: people, subjects, software and time. No matter what technology we are using, people are still one of the most important reservoirs of company knowledge and all too often when they walk out the door, the company knowledge they take with them may never return. The first step to developing a knowledge management strategy is to identify the key people in your business that provide knowledge and develop a system to retain and share that knowledge.

There are many technology solutions available to implement your knowledge management strategy. The best system is comprises a range of tools. Blogs, wikis and even social networking online enables you to capture knowledge in real time in a way that is tactical rather than academic, whilst developing networks that can last beyond individual people who may come and go.

Social bookmarking such as delicious provide a way of tagging information on the net and sharing it with others. No longer will you lose all those bookmarks and favourites when a computer crashes, and by sharing these bookmarks within a structure, your entire staff can access and add to the information they need from anywhere. I personally often go straight to the delicious bookmarks that belong to a leader in my field and reap the benefits of her research.

Still none of these things are likely to work well without developing a strategy, so locate someone in your business with a high level of company knowledge and work with them to begin to capture and manage this to your best advantage.

We all want to make our working life easier, well at least I know I do!

Every business has office work that has to be done and for many of us it means spending a lot of time in that office. Yet we often pay less attention to our office environment than our homes, even though some of us spend more time in the office than at home.

Too often I notice in workplaces that thought is not being put into the simple ergonomic details like a decent chair, good lighting without glare, sufficient desk space and plenty of storage space. Now be honest with yourself, no one can see what you are thinking as you read this, but look about your office and see if you can honestly tell yourself that those basic factors are all fantastic in your environment.

The little things that can be done to make a comfortable and safe environment don’t always have to cost a huge amount, though it can’t be stated more truly that whatever you pay for the right office chair is money well spent.

There is an interesting and simple feng shui principle behind having plants in the office space. Some types are better than others for clearing the air, providing a break to the harsh lines of office equipment and encouraging creative energy.

These small principles have been shown to improve working conditions and increase energy flow for staff, which leads to a more positive office atmosphere. It is a fact that we work best when we are feeling good.

We can have all the latest technology and software we like in our office to assist in making our work productive, but if we ignore the environment we are working in we won’t ever get the most out of that technology.

What value does your site offer that is distinctive from any other site? Now this is not a very different question from one you should be asking yourself about your business in general – what makes your business different from every other similar business in your area, why will someone choose you?

Is your site well branded? Your branding should dovetail harmoniously into all your business branding – when someone comes to your site they need to ‘know’ that they are with you, and feel good whenever they see your branding.

Is your site optimised for search engines? It is critical to remember that if you want your site to attract new customers, they have to find you, and that happens through a search engine. If your site does not come up in the first 10 results the chances of someone finding you diminishes greatly.

Do you offer your visitors a site that is easy to find information on, easy to contact you for more information and the ability to get exactly what they want on the spot?

This is a harder one as some business lend themselves perfectly to shopping cart services, but maybe it’s information they need from your site to bring them to making contact. Whatever it is you need to identify this clearly and ensure your site provides it.

If you have a web site it must be included in your business plan and treated as a high priority – keep it relevant, informative and updated regularly!

How are you going to do this?

Social networking has become the buzz word for everyone including business.

Like it or not, it is becoming a part of the workplace, but should sites like Facebook be used and how?

Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites at the moment and it seems that ‘anyone who is anyone’ can be found there.

Is it ethical to use Facebook to check up on existing or potential staff?

Are you losing productivity to staff being logged into a site like this?

Are they just chatting inanely about their private life or is information about your business at risk?

Facebook is often used as a gossip avenue, and work gossip is nothing new, but it used to be restricted to hallways, staff rooms and telephones.

It can be surprising what people will write on these sites, especially in the heat of the moment.

There have even been many cases of employees losing their jobs through Facebook. There is no accounting for stupidity really – imagine calling in to work sick, then writing on Facebook that you are hung over or have a hot date and have chucked a sickie! Well it happens around the globe and is likely to continue to happen.

What about putting your business on Facebook?

This is becoming increasingly popular and could be a very innovative idea.

However I would strongly recommend that before you do this you analyse – why would I do it, who will look after the profile, what would I want broadcast about the business, how does it fit my business plan, who will become our friends and how much paid time will be needed to keep the page updated? No point in having a Facebook page that is not updated often, people expect regular updates there!

There are a host of brilliant web tools out there for business, but don’t just use them all simply because you can.

Business owners and high-level managers suffer burn out all too commonly, because they simply work too hard too long.
For many it becomes a case of feeling that taking any time off would be a luxury, and there is simply too much work on the desk to afford such luxuries.
Studies show that taking time off is not a luxury, but a necessity to prevent health issues and burnout and actually increase productivity.

One effective way of reducing working stress and increasing productivity
is to take a ‘working sabbatical’.

Consider taking even just a single week ‘off work’ and going to a retreat holiday location.

This could be local, but is even better if you totally remove yourself geographically. During this sabbatical you can relax in a holiday environment, and yet spend time each day working on the creative and innovative sides of your business.

This concept allows you to put yourself in a different head space, which allows you to begin to think outside of the square and consider concepts you may never even be able to imagine whilst in your work environment.

Imagine sitting on a beach, or in a rainforest reworking your business plan, cash flow projections, new innovation concepts or company structure.

OK maybe you would rather be at this location and not be working at all, but how difficult are you finding working on your business whilst in the office, and are you even taking holidays? How many distractions of the day-to-day workings of your business just keep piling up in front of you causing stress preventing you from being creative and innovative?
Google give their staff 20% of their working time to creative development, whilst 3M give 15%. During this creative time out of the working day the Post-it Note and Scotch tape were invented – now how much business and profit did this generate?

Remember being told computers would create a paperless office?

I hear complaints that more paper is generated than ever before and the paperless office is a myth.

How did we get into this situation and what can we do about it?

The obvious place to start is at the printer.

Recycling paper whenever possible does assist reducing waste. Train yourself and your staff to stop before printing and ask ‘why am I printing this?’

If you have no valid reason - don’t!

$4.2 billion is spent annually on Australian business postage. Add the cost of paper, ink or toner and much of your profit is being wasted, apart from environmental considerations.

Most large companies have introduced electronic billing, but many small businesses have not yet followed this practice. I’ve seen small business offices printing a copy for the client and a copy for the office. This stems from the old practice of having a carbon copy invoice book, but the analogy is incorrect. If you created the invoice electronically, your carbon copy is on the computer. The problem is that often that they don’t trust the computer and want their own hard copy. Still the expense piles up and affects your bottom line every day.

Information has become a huge business commodity and staff are constantly downloading large documents from the internet. Best practice is to store that document on a network and share it electronically with all staff, rather than end up with many printed copies of the document, especially if it is going to be outdated in a short period of time.

I was stunned yesterday when I attended an online conference and all attendees were instructed to print a 58 page reference document!

There is a terrific widget, free for small business, that tracks paper usage on a network allowing managers to identify where the heaviest printer usage is coming from and begin to combat the issue.

Technology does not guarantee you will become organised!

You need to USE the technology in order to achieve this.

For example, one thing I used to find with a paper diary was that some days I got so busy that I forgot to even look in the diary once I left home in the morning - the day seemed to take on a life of it’s own and run away with me.  I was often heard to mutter “it’s not good enough for me to write things in my diary - I have to look in it too…”

This brings me to one the my favourite features of electronic diaries and lists - the ability to set an alert on them.  I can even set multiple alerts on a single entry!

So firstly I had to get into the habit of putting every little thing into my iphone calendar and putting the appropriate alerts onto them.  Secondly I need to carry it with me at all times (an alert can only get my attention if I have the phone with me doh!)

Seems simple, but once I got into the habit of really putting everything in there I have found the tool to be absolutely incredible - if an alert goes off but my schedule has changed, I am reminded and then I can simply change the time on the item, say put it to an hour later or whatever and automatically it alerts me again at the right time.  That used to be a huge issue for me - my schedule changing during the day could cause me to totally forget things to do that I was carrying in my head.

Another fantastic feature is recurring events.

It used to be a ritual that at the end of the year I would have to go back through my old diary and begin transposing certain events into my new one - birthdays to remember, monthly meetings etc.

Now I can set an ‘all day event’ for someone’s birthday and tell the calendar to make it recur every year - I don’t have to do anything else!  I can have it alert me a week before the date even to remind me to organise a card or to meet up for coffee or whatever.

I attend a few monthly meetings and the calendar allows me to set for example the ’second Tuesday of the month’ as the meeting date and set it up for every month.  I love that then there is no chance of getting the date wrong for any month.

I use a setup for all of this too that backs all these things up onto a web site automatically (so as long as I am in range of an internet connection I get everything backed up including my contacts list), and it all synchronises with my computer as well.  One fear I had when I went to the electronic diary was a failure causing me to lose everything and my diary is critical for my business.  Now I have not 2 but 3 copies of everything electronically, so the chances of my iphone, computer and web storage all failing is very remote - less remote than the chance that I could have lost my paper diary!

Still the true key to success has not been so much the technology itself, but USING the technology - every person reading this entry probably has all the electronic management tools they need, but ARE YOU USING THEM?

Small business owners often find that their time revolves around a stream of little things that are necessary to keep a business running, but don’t seem to have anything to do with what they wanted to be in business for.

If you allow them to queue up, it can seem daunting to imagine how you are ever going to get through them all.

One of the most important aspects to keeping this under your control, rather than letting a million things seem to take control of you is finding a way to organise yourself that suits you.

There are many ways to do this, but the principal is preventing all these tasks from clogging up your own brains temporary storage, and into some kind of a system. This system needs to be able to track these small tasks so that you can’t forget them, whilst allowing you to concentrate and focus on the tasks you went into business to perform.

The usual suspects are typically diaries, lists, whiteboards and sticky notes, but maybe you can use technological equivalents?

There are many brands of software that accomplish these tasks for windows, Mac and Linux systems.

I would be very surprised if you don’t already have the tools you need on your computer now, even if you’ve never used them.

Maybe you can add better or more sophisticated products, but some of the very simple tools could turn chaos into manageable.

One of the things I personally love most about using an electronic diary is the reminder alarm feature. You wouldn’t believe how many tiny tasks I put into my diary - everything from making a critical phone call to getting milk on the way home, allowing me to work through my day without so much clutter in my head.