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.