After a relaxing and carefree vacation, it’s stressful returning to the office and finding an exploding email inbox and a massive list of tasks that have piled up while you’ve been out of the office. So much for that vacation! Here are three things you can do to prevent the stress from building up while you’re gone:

1. Set your out of office message before leaving

Having an out of office message sets the expectation for those who are trying to reach you that you won’t be responding to emails. This will also help to slow the amount of emails that come into your inbox the rest of the week. To really spruce up your out of office message, take some advice from Matt Heinz, of Heinz Marketing, and include a couple of interesting articles related to your business that people can read in the meantime.

2. Provide clients with an alternate contact

Ask a coworker if they can serve as the main point of contact for your clients and prospects while you’re on vacation. Add their contact information to your out of office message and spend 15 minutes bringing them up to speed on questions they may have to answer in your absence. You’ll feel peace of mind knowing your clients are being taken care of.

3. Have a coworker sort your email

Ask a coworker to sort your email into urgent and non urgent folders while you’re away so that when you come back you can respond to what is most important first. If you aren’t comfortable with someone else checking your email, spend 20 minutes when you get back quickly sorting all of your emails. Then you can start responding to the emails based on their importance and urgency.

How do you prepare for a vacation?  Let us know your tips in the comments below!

Many of us have a long list of websites that we visit on a daily basis. Repeatedly typing in all of those URLs takes up time and energy! A number of people have set up bookmarks in their web browsers to save time, but when is the last time you updated them?

This may sound simple, but it’s something we often forget to update. Spend 5 minutes doing the following:

• Add bookmarks for websites you visit frequently
• Delete bookmarks you no longer use

Don’t know how to bookmark websites in your web browser? Here are instructions for bookmarking in Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari.

We’ve had a great time celebrating Small Business Week in Seattle, learning new tools and techniques to improve business, networking with local leaders, and recognizing some of the best small businesses around.  We’ve compiled a handful of articles we found interesting this week, in case you missed them!

Small Businesses: Then & Now [INFOGRAPHIC]

This infographic highlights the results of a Constant Contact survey where small business owners were asked to compare running their small business now versus five years ago.

Lessons Learned From A Year of Working From Home

This post, by Stephen Searer, first appeared on the Turnstone Blog and gives a good first-person account of how to stay productive while working from home.

Productivity’s Worst Enemy And How To Conquer It

Jason Womack writes about how to reduce the anxiety associated with your busy schedule and your daily productivity.

Happy Small Business Week

This short video from Google Business celebrates the “dream-chasers” and “do-it-yourselfers” that make up the small business community!

10 Eye-Opening Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read

Geoffrey James reflects on books that “reveal the truth of how organizations really work.” Have you read any of these books?

Have you come across any interesting articles this week about small businesses? We’d love to hear about them!

To continue celebrating Small Business Week, we have compiled a checklist of productivity apps that we often recommend to clients.  For all of you fellow small business owners and entrepreneurs, these apps can help keep your to-do list in sync, your calendar at hand, and your projects organized.  Download our FREE copy of your Essential Productivity Apps Checklist and start using them now!

Happy Small Business Week!  This week we are recognizing all of the entrepreneurs and small business owners that keep our economy thriving.  You work hard around the clock to fill multiple roles and wear various hats, and to you, we tip our own hat.  In honor of this week’s celebrations, here are 6 ways for small business owners to boost productivity:

1.  Delegate Tasks When You Can

Delegating tasks to an assistant, especially administrative tasks, helps you focus your time on more important matters.  If you don’t have an administrative assistant, try using a virtual assistant for certain tasks.

2.  Follow the 2 Minute Rule

The 2 Minute Rule is especially valuable when tackling incoming emails: if it takes less than two minutes to complete, do it now.  You can get it off your to-do list before it’s even written down on your list.

3.  Create an End of Day Folder

Creating an End of Day (EOD) folder in your email helps you prioritize what must get done before you leave for the day.  As emails come in, you can drag the most important and time sensitive messages to your EOD folder, then take care of them at a designated time before you leave the office for the day.

4.  Stay in Sync

If you’re like many of the small business owners that we know, you’re always on-the-go, moving from client to meeting to project.  Make sure all of your devices are in sync so you can still be productive in between meetings.

5.  Add Time Estimates

When writing your to-do list, include realistic time estimates for each task.  Adding time estimates will help you prioritize and delegate when you have too much on your plate.

6.  Batch Tasks Whenever Possible

A lot of time is wasted transitioning from one project to another.  By batching similar tasks together, you will cut down on that wasted time.

Contact us for a free 15-minute phone consultation if you’re a small business owner looking for process improvement consulting or file management help.

We understand that you are constantly on-the-go.  Whether you are catching your bus for your morning commute, heading to another meeting, visiting a client, or en route to a conference, you are always moving but you’re still expected to get things done.  Our goal at Innovatively Organized is to help you stay productive on-the-go, utilizing your time efficiently.

One way you can use pockets of time throughout your day is by editing documents or reviewing files.  While you are waiting to meet with a new client, for instance, is a great time to pull out your tablet or laptop and continue working.  There are two main components to efficiently editing documents on-the-go:

Sync your devices

Make sure you have access to the documents you need when you are not in the office.  A service like Dropbox allows you to store all of your files in the cloud, which can then be synced across all of your devices, allowing you to access them from almost anywhere.

Have the right tools

You will also need a tool that allows you to edit your documents.  We recommend the Docs2Go app because it allows you view, edit, create, and format Microsoft Word and Excel documents, as well as view PDFs and Powerpoints.  Docs2Go can sync with your Dropbox account, so once you have finished editing a document, you can save the updated version to Dropbox and access it at a later time. Below are a few screenshots of how to connect Docs2Go with your Dropbox account.

Next time you find yourself with at least ten minutes, pull out your pending contracts, proposals, projects, or letters that need attention.  You’ll make the best use of your time while on-the-go, while also keeping your documents synced and ready to be picked up again later.

At Innovatively Organized, we are big proponents of using two monitors to help increase productivity at work.  We have two monitors set up in our office so we can view and work on multiple documents at once.  If you are wondering whether you could benefit from using multiple monitors, check out our previous blog post, “Do Multiple Computer Monitors Make You More Productive?”

But if you already have multiple monitors, we’re excited to share a few more ways you can customize your monitor set-up!  Here are two ways you can use your double computer monitors to boost your efficiency while working:

Switch the screen orientation

As pictured above, you can change one of your monitors into a vertical position.  This technique is most frequently used by accounting and legal firms because it helps to view spreadsheets in the portrait view.  If you usually work with long spreadsheets or legal documents, you might consider changing the orientation of one of your screens to help you view more at once.

Duplicate your screens

This option is great for meetings with a client or team member—you can face one of your screens towards your audience while the other one remains facing you.  This way, you can display the same exact screen without everyone huddling over one monitor to view it.

How do you use your multiple monitors?  Share with us in the comments below!

While you may be sitting in a very organized office with a clean desk surface and perfect file cabinets (or maybe not…), there are still piles of clutter right in front of your nose! However, this culprit is hard to see or even conceptualize - it’s digital clutter. But what is digital clutter?

How do you know if you have digital clutter? Here a few signs…

• Your computer desktop is barely visible due to numerous shortcuts, documents, and file folders
• You spend more than 30 seconds trying to find electronic files
• You only use a handful of the 40+ apps currently on your phone

To get an idea of how much digital clutter you are hoarding on your computer or laptop, let’s imagine those electronic files were “physical files.”  Follow the steps below to calculate how tall your pile of digital clutter would be if 1 sheet of paper represented each individual file on your computer.

Step #1: Determine how many files are currently stored on your computer.

If you have a Mac:

• Open Finder
• On the left-hand side, click on Applications
• Open the Utilities folder
• Click on the Disk Utility icon
• On the left-hand side, click on Macintosh HD
• On the top header, click the blue Info icon
• A new window will pop up. Locate “Number of files” to find your grand total (see screenshot below)

If you have a PC:

• Click Start
• Under search, type “cmd”
• Open up CMD to run a command prompt
• Type “cd/” then enter and type “dir/s”
• Click enter and let the system count for 5-10 minutes
• Once it has finished, scroll to the bottom and find “Total Files Listed” for your grand total (see screenshot below)

Step #2: Calculate the height (in feet) of your digital clutter

Now that you know exactly how many electronic files you have, it’s time to imagine them as physical files.  Let’s say each of your electronic files represents just one single piece of paper.  When stacked in a pile, it takes 3,000 sheets of paper to reach a foot tall.  Take your total number of files and divide that number by 3,000 to yield how many feet tall your files would stack to.

Now look around your office.  Do you have enough room for all those piles and feet of paper?  Do you need to keep all of those files? Do you have duplicate files? Can you find the electronic files you’re looking for quickly and easily? Just because you don’t need to physically store these files, your electronic files are still piling up into digital clutter…lots of digital clutter.

To learn how to clear out, reduce, and manage your digital clutter, sign up for our “Reduce Digital Clutter: Keep Your Electronic Files Organized” webinar on June 19^th.

How many feet tall would your digital clutter stack be?  Let us know in the comments (scroll to the very bottom of this page) to see how you “stack up.”

As a Productivity Consultant with Innovatively Organized, I am constantly on-the-go. Each week I meet with my clients at their various locations throughout the greater Seattle area, which is one of the aspects I enjoy about my job – the variety. However, as a mobile professional I’ve come up with ‘my way’ to be productive on-the-go. I may work from my home office one day, then be on the road and in between appointments the next.  A typical day in my life usually involves…..

Mobile Devices

I often find myself switching between my devices depending on my location and what I need to do. I have a 15” laptop, which is great to work on from the office or when I’m sitting in a coffee shop, but there are times when I’m preparing for an appointment and I’m in my car, so I call in the iPad (see screenshot at left)! I can review client session notes on Dropbox, update documents with Docs To Go, or read and respond to emails (I use a Bluetooth keyboard when I am sending longer emails; for me it’s much quicker than typing on the iPad itself.) My Android phone completes the productivity trifecta. In addition to being able to read and reply to emails from my Droid, I often touch base with the Innovatively Organized team between appointments to check in or debrief about a project. We set up a conference call and get a lot accomplished from the road!

Microsoft Exchange Server

Our company email is on a Microsoft Exchange Server, which allows me to read my email on my phone, iPad, laptop, or via the web and keep it synced. I never have to worry about emails incorrectly showing up as read or unread (and therefore I avoid the time wasted trying to figure out if I’ve read or responded to a message). I’m also confident that when I move an email to a folder, it syncs across devices. Knowing my email is synced no matter where I view it from makes my work life MUCH easier!

Traffic App

I use my WSDOT Traffic App a lot since I travel to meet with clients all around the city.  It saves me a lot of valuable time and helps me avoid traffic by finding alternate routes when needed. There are similar apps available in other cities. If you’re on the road a lot, it’s worth finding a good traffic app. Your time is valuable – if you can find a way to save it, you should!

Want to learn more about Jackie Chapman? Read her bio here or connect with her on LinkedIn.