Working from home can present unique challenges. Filing systems, both digital and tactile, are things that must be conquered early on in order to maintain and keep yourself productive. I can hear your thinking now, “HOW to I go about doing THAT?”. Let’s discuss.

Having a filing system for paper is a key element in any office structure. But my suggestion to you would be to try to keep the paper flow to a minimum. Scan and digitally file documents that can be handled that way. For some of us, it is much easier to have documents accessible in digital format rather than having to search through paper files. Scanning can assist us in becoming free of the clutter of paper.

But, (there is always a “but”) if you take all your data to digital format, be prepared to back up, and back up often. There are many services online that you can use to back up your important files. The one that I have been using for the longest time is Mozy. It allows unlimited backup for only $4.95 a month and has a “Home” version as well as a “Pro” version. There is also a “free” version that allows 3GB of space. Mozy is dependable and can be configured to back up anything on your computer. You can schedule your backups to occur daily or weekly: it’s completely up to you. Mozy runs in the background and silently backs sp a the times that you have designated.

Going digital is a great way for getting out from under your clutter. In my next article, we’ll discuss what to do with those paper files that you must keep!

Related posts:

1. Essential Tools for the Home Office Warrior Who Works Online
2. The Paperless Home Office - Part 1
3. The Top 100 Ways a Home Office Warrior can Utilize a Virtual Assistant - Part Four

I decided to share my 2009 goals with the readers at HOW this year. I don’t do  resolutions: instead I do goals. Since I was offered a new home on HOW last year, I thought it appropriate to do so. Without further adieu, here they are!

*Grow my consulting business by 500%
*Start on the eBook that will blow peoples’ minds (newsletter subscribers got a sneak peek in on this)
*Mull over taking out a 10 pack of ISBN numbers so I can publish all my eBooks *Network with more people in my field and collaborate more
*Contribute as guest posters/ contributors on other blogs
*Make time to comment more often on the blogs that I read
*Create questionnaire for clientele (PDF form with checkboxes, etc)
*Create a few checklists (for publication) that I have been mulling over
*Stay focused and on track with posts on FFOP
*Finish my Swirly Q GTD Template set

I’ve got a good start on some of these, and even one is finished! I’ve completed my Swirly Q Template Set (finally). I started on this back in July and just got them finished over last weekend. These templates take quite a bit of time to create and finalize. All are done in Adobe illustrator.

The first goal is a lofty one, but I have a good head start on that one already too. Great new clients are in the works that will provide challenges as well as great learning times for all involved!

I have my Mind map created for the new book idea, but have yet to write any of it. That goal is in “Next Action” status right now.

How high have you set your goals this year? What plans have you put into place in order to achieve them? Are any of them complete yet? Do tell – I’d love to know!

Related posts:

1. Will you Survive or Thrive in 2009?
2. Marketing Productivity – Learn Social Media in a Snap!
3. Using Gmail to be more Productive — Part 1

The hardest thing to do with emotional issues is having the patience to see the logic in the situation.

There couldn’t be a more true phrase on this entire planet.

Patience is something that is learned: you’re not born with it, but you are taught it: by parents, teachers, siblings and all those that you come in contact with during your daily life. It certainly isn’t easy to learn patience, and there are some on the planet that will never master it. But in order to be productive and have your wits about you, patience is a necessity.

So what do you do to retain your head in times of great stress and pressure? I know one trick that works for me, and you might have success with it too.

WALK AWAY.

Go somewhere else, even for just a few moments. Go smoke a cigarette, grab a cup of coffee, or go outside and enjoy some fresh air. Allow your head to wrap around the situation: the key is NOT to do it while you are in the thick of the situation. Your head needs room to breathe, just as the body and soul do. Allow it that space, and you will be amazed at the results!

What do you do that allows you to have patience. Let’s chat in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Productivity Starts with Equipping Your Home Office with Reliable Technology
2. Personal Productivity: Achieving Balance in Your Daily Life

Mac OS X

Things (Free Until January 6th)

I myself have used Things quite a bit.  Things is the perfect blend between features and simplicity.  Things will also support “teams” and you will be able to share tasks with other people.  That feature hasn’t been ironed out yet, but Cultured Code has promised it will happen.  And if you’re an iPhone user, they have an iPhone version that syncs flawlessly with its desktop counter-part.

Things is currently free, but will cost $49 when it it released on January 6, 2009.  But if you subscribe to their newsletter, it will be $39.

[Cultured Code: Things]

Anxiety

If you’re looking for a simple and beautiful to-do list, Anxiety is a great contender.  Anxiety integrates with your “calendars” in iCal and sits in your menu bar.

[Anxiety]

CheckOff

Another worthy contender for simply managing your to-do’s is CheckOff.  CheckOff is an independent application unlike Anxiety, which is simply a separate interface for the iCal to-do’s.  CheckOff does run in your menu bar though.

[CheckOff]

Backboard

Backboard is a simple Mac application that merges Backpack (a simple web-based to-do application) with your desktop.

[Backpack]

[Backboard]

Windows

FruitfulTime TaskManager Free Edition

FruitfulTime’s website says the following about FruitFulTime TaskManager.

Basic todo list management tool for Windows available to download for free. Limited features, no support, for private and non-commercial use only.

[FruitfulTime TaskManager Free Edition]

Cross-Platform

Task Coach

Task Coach’s website says the following.

Task Coach is a simple open source to-do manager to manage personal tasks and to-do lists. It grew out of Frank’s frustration that well-known task managers, such as those provided with Outlook or Lotus Notes, do not provide facilities for composite tasks. Often, tasks and other things todo consist of several activities. Task Coach is designed to deal with composite tasks.

Task Coach is for both Windows and Mac OS X.

[Task Coach]

Slife

Slife’s website says the following.

Slife is a time and activity analytics application for both Mac and Windows that automatically keeps track of where you spend your time on your computer.

How Does Slife Work?
Slife observes as you interact with applications, documents, email and web sites and then displays detailed statistics of your computer usage in a set of intuitive and easy to use visualizations.

Why Do I Need Slife?

With Slife, you can finally understand where you are spending your time and energy, and focus on what really matters.  Thousands of designers, architects, consultants, developers, and many others use Slife to keep track of time and manage their productivity.

[Slife]

JDarkRoom

For many of us, our attention spans usually can last about 3 minutes at a time until we see a Growl notification telling us we have new articles in our feedreader or MailPlane telling us that we have a new e-mail.  This is where JDarkRoom is great.  It is simply a full screen text editor to block out all distractions.

[JDarkRoom]

Related posts:

1. Top iPhone Applications for the Home Office Warrior
2. Business Applications for the Mac
3. Must Have Applications for the Home Office Warrior

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are proving to be important places to market your business and make valuable connections with clients, referral partners, the media, and more. This past year millions of business owners jumped into social networking for the first time… but many are now finding themselves knee-deep in overwhelm and alienating future clients along the way. In order to stay productive and on top of our games, we need to utilize these services, but learn how to do so in the quickest and most productive way possible.

Nancy Marmolejo, social Media expert, has a solution for entrepreneurs who are eager to reap the benefits of Facebook and Twitter quickly and productively. On December 16 and 17, Nancy will host a virtual class "Quick and Easy Social Networking Tips For Entrepreneurs:A Proven 3 Part System to Boost Your Visibility, Expand Your Network AND Save You Hours of Time On Facebook and Twitter".

If you don’t yet know Nancy, she’s an experienced social networking user who teaches highly effective, time saving tips to entrepreneurs. Her 2 part class will reveal a proven system that she personally uses to stay highly visible on Facebook, Twitter, and beyond.

Along with the course, Nancy will be giving out five additional bonuses for all those that sign up:

• Bonus #1: Official Quick Start Guide with easy to follow steps so you can start implementing TODAY ($49 value)
• Bonus #2: Video tutorial literally walking you through the quick and easy steps to huge visibility. ($97 value)
• Bonus #3: Complete mp3 audio recordings of both class sessions ($59 value)
• Bonus #4: Word-for-Word transcripts taken directly from my video tutorial so you can read the information and have it handy no matter where you are ($49 value)
• Bonus #5: “Facebook Finesse” mp3 audio interview by me and my good friend, Facebook guru Mari Smith. We outline the Do’s and Don’ts of Facebook and how to maximize relationship building on this incredible site. ($49 value)

Space is limited, so do sign up today. Even if you can’t make the live class, Nancy will make sure you get her customized video tutorials, complete Quick Start Guide, transcripts, bonuses and more. I can vouch for the fact that Social Media is a GREAT way to market your business and services, but it does indeed take finesse to do so. Coming from someone that is learning herself, I recommend that you do get some training. It is so easy to alienate people, and once you lose them, they are usually gone for good.

Take a look at what Nancy has to say, and then sign up for her course. It’s not extravagantly priced at $97, and I know that the advertising techniques that you learn will more then make your money back on the effort put forth. Heck, the five bonus items are worth triple the enrollment cost!

Related posts:

1. Social Media, What’s in it for You?
2. Social Networking and the Home Office Warrior
3. Where to Connect with Grant - Home Office Warrior

Balance is key to maintaining a strong mind, soul, and spirit.

If you are not balancing your workload, play time, and time with self, you will end up crashing and burning. While it may be something small, like catching a cold or getting a headache, it could be a major crash and burn such as a breakdown or an illness that puts you in the hospital for a undetermined period of time.

As we all feel, we cannot afford to take time off. We feel that we are the back bone (and we most likely are) of our business and that no one can do things as well as we can. While that may be true, the fact still remains that you have to balance your workload in order to achieve personal productivity. Taking a day off here and there (make it a weekly habit to take at least one day completely off) will allow you to rejuvenate yourself and keep you functioning at the top of your game. The consequences of crashing and burning are far greater than the consequences of taking one day off a week.

The body demands balance, and you, as its caretaker, must listen to what your body tells you! You know the signs in your own body that tell you when you need to rest or take a break. But I know that you sometimes turn a deaf ear to it. I realize how we feel that we must push on and through in order to Get Things Done. But when you have balance in your life, you are able to work at the top of your game, and you will be able to put forth a much better quantity and quality of work than if you are unbalanced.

Some things that I do for balance are:

• Play with the Wii
• Play with my dogs
• Take walks
• Meditate
• Escape for a day out of the office

Tell me, what do you do to retain the balance within your life? What are the little escapes that you take? Let’s chat in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Work Life Balance — Outsourcing and the Home Office Warrior
2. 10 Ways to Achieve Work-Life Balance
3. A Must-Have for Productivity & Organization - Patience

I’m very happy to be a part of the HOW contributors group. I love meeting new people and hope to share with you (and have you share with me), lots of great ideas on how to be productive and organized in this world of chaos that surrounds us.

Today, I’m just throwing myself out on the table in order to greet you and get to know all of you. You can take a trip over to my spot on the contributors’ page to see who I am and from where I come.

I’m very pleased to meet all of you and wish you a great day, today and every day! My first content post will be on balance. Tell me though, how do you acheive YOUR balance? Let me know in the comments. Looking forward to interacting with you!

Related posts:

1. Personal Productivity: Achieving Balance in Your Daily Life

In my journey towards GTD nirvana, I looked high and low for some nice, attractive, inexpensive GTD templates. But I couldnít find any! While I found inexpensive ones, I did not find attractive ones. I donít know about anyone else, but I am more apt to use something if it is aesthetically pleasing to me. A nice leather Circa with attractive GTD pages was what I was going for: but I couldnít find anything that fit the bill.

So I thought to myself, ìSelf, you can make GTD Templates that will knock peoples socks off! So I did! I looked through my gigabytes of graphic files that I have on my computer until something spurred my interest. And my first template was born.

While I looked at many templates to get a feel of the style and flow of the layouts, I wanted my templates to be unique. The first image I found that caught my interest was the steaming coffee cup. So the Java series was born.

All of my templates series consist of the following templates:

Most of these are self-explanatory, but let me do a quick run through of how I use them. With the Notes template, I tend to use that to keep track of random thoughts that pop into my head: because I know that if I donít write them down, they will disappear forever. Graph paper is for quick sketches, but is also a great tool for MindMaps. Agendas work for both conference calls, meetings, or anything else that you would need to chronicle things to discuss. Expense reports keep track of all your expenses, whether youíre traveling or just running errands around town.

The Project Planner is is for bigger projects. I tend to use one page per idea/ project and fill it up til it canít take any more! I narrow down my focus and get fairly detailed in my project planning, so itís a great tool. The Phone Log is something that I cannot do without. Whenever I call anyone, whether it be a company or friend, I keep a log of what was discussed, so that I can refer to it later. Sometimes when I discuss things with people, it will spark other ideas that I have to write down. Personal Profile keeps your name, address, and any other pertinent information at your fingertips.

Items from my Project Planner get moved to the To Do List. This is where the bit-sized chunks of the Project Planner ideas start to come to fruition. I check things off as I go, and move onto the next one. Weekly and Monthly templates help me to plan the items from my Project Planner and To Do lists so I can schedule my time accordingly, stay ahead of the game, and have time for important meetings.

The next series I started is the SwirlyQ series. With delicate brushes and the colors of springtime, this series is sure to get you motivated! It is currently in development, so six templates of the total twelve are complete. I plan on getting the rest completed shortly.

My templates are inexpensive, with the complete twelve page series going for a mere $21.99. I can guarantee you that you have never seen templates like this and they are definitely one of a kind. They can be used with three hole punches as well as Circa punches. They are in PDF format, so they scale well to any size. I am very anxious to do custom templates, and know that I could make you just what you need! Custom work is priced on a per project basis, as well as exclusivity or public release.

Grant, thanks for allowing me to take the time to share my love for GTD and these templates with your Home Office Warrior readers. Whether you are in a Home Office setting, or public one, these templates are sure to assist you in being the most productive individual you can be!

Related posts:

1. 12 Ways to Make Your Virtual Assistant Love You
2. TIme Management E-Book from Fresh Focus
3. Being Productive – Setting my Goals HIGH!

I also briefly mentioned Gcal, Jott, Remember the Milk (RTM) and sync’ing all of the data with each other. Because each of these and others are such an important part of my every day functioning and being productive, I have decided to break them out into a series of post. And the first one we will discuss is Gmail.

First of all, some of what I am going to discuss and the ideas I use are not original to me. There are some huge gurus of Gmail out there. And Steve Rubel is one of them. Some of what I am going to discuss are some of the ideas Steve has posted about.

Gmail to organize your emails:

I get a ton of emails on a daily basis to multiple email addresses. There is no way I could manage this without Gmail and the built in tools it contains. One of the built in features I use the most with Gmail are labels and filters. First, I set up labels for the different type of emails I get. Labels are actually like folders in other email programs or services. For example, I have labels for staff emails, client emails, listserv emails and even one for social media emails. And those are not even all of the ones I use.

To get my emails directed to these labels (folders) I have set filters inside Gmail. Another very important built feature of Gmail. Setting up filters is easy to accomplish with Gmail. You first need to choose a search criteria. You start the process by deciding what email addresses you want to be sent to a label (folder). Than you decide on the action you want it to take. I usually have mine skip the inbox and send it right to the label (folder).

The only emails which go to my inbox are those who don’t get filtered to a label. One key to this is to make sure you keep the emails filtered “marked as unread” so you know how many unread emails are in each label. I also use the process to manage the number of comments I get from my blogs and any “quick contact forms” I get from my blogs. In other words, I have one label marked as “blog management”. And another marked as “contact us form”. You should get the point by now. You can make any label and filter you want which will help you to be more productive and keep track of the emails you get. Oh, and lets not forget about the label I have called “listserv”. All of the listserv emails I get go there so they don’t plug up my main inbox.

Have I mentioned lately that I love Gmail? However, I don’t use Gmail in my browser window. I use a great third party program called Mailplane. Mailplane is for Mac OSX and it is wonderful. You get all of the features and benefits of Gmail in a desktop application. It does cost $24.95 and in my opinion is worth every single penny.

Gmail to organize your data:

Besides using Gmail to organize your emails, you can use it to organize the amount of data and information you deal with on a daily basis. One of the tips I use almost on an hourly basis is “turn Gmail into your personal nerve center from Steve Rubel. Steve provided such a great idea when he suggested you can use Gmail as a massive database. And he is right. If you use Firefox and the Google Toolbar, you can use the send to Gmail function to send items right to Gmail. To do this, you should first set up a secret email address. What I mean by this for example may look like this: grant.griffiths+[secretword]@gmail.com. Keep in mind [secretword] can be anything you want. For example you can call it notebook, data, archive, or whatever you want. The main thing to remember is the +[secretword] acts like a filter. You than set up a label (folder) in Gmail and set up a filter to send all the emails you get with the +[secretword] to that label. I also set the filter to mark these as read since I know what I just sent myself and will view them later.

Because Gmail has the same great search abilities as Google itself, you can search and find anything you have stored in these labels you have set up as database storage.

I also have one of these special +[secretword] Gmail addresses to be a location where I send blog post ideas too. If I am reading items in my browser, I can send a link and an idea to myself as a blog idea for later use. How many times have you been looking for something to blog about. If you use this system, you can search the blog idea database in Gmail and come up with ideas.

Just remember to change the subject line in these emails so they aid in your searching of these labels (folders).

iPhone and Gmail:

What I love about this system is that I can use it with my iPhone too. Gmail works great with the iPhone’s built in mail application. And lets not forget that Google has optimized Gmail for the iPhone with its own iPhone interface Gmail web based service.

Tomorrow, I will discuss how I use Gcal and a couple other select web based applications to manage my events and to-do’s. In the meantime, leave your comments on how you use Gmail to organize your own daily life.

Related posts:

1. Do you have an out of control email inbox?
2. Making Sure Your Data is Safe
3. My Work Anywhere Office

However, we have to keep on task and we have to “get things done.” I use multiple tools to keep track of my calendar and those things that need to be done. First and foremost is my computer based calendar, iCal. Next, I sync my iCal calendar with Google Calendar. I do that for two main reasons. First, as a backup to my computer based calendar. And, second to give my virtual assistant access to my calendar.

My next calendar tool is my iPhone and its built in calendar feature. I am able to keep the two calendars sync’d with each other too.

The problem is, not one of these tools will work or help if you don’t use them effectively. To that end, I was pleased to see a post on one of my favorite blogs, life Sutra titled, 6 Tips For Using Your Calendar Effectively. Brick provides 6 great tips for using your calendar effectively and best of all, it appears he is a Mac and iPhone user too.

Here they are:

You can go to the actually POST to see a great explanation of each of the above tips. What I was pleased to see was I am actually using the tips and they do work great. The one I do need to try, which I have not done and can see the benefit of using is the “block your golden time.” This might help me control my weakness of letting myself get distracted.

Related posts:

1. Essential Tools for the Home Office Warrior Who Works Online
2. Top iPhone Applications for the Home Office Warrior
3. My Work Anywhere Office

Sandy claims that she’ll remember the details so you can focus on what’s important.

• Kick off your morning knowing what’s on for the day.
• Keep your day moving forward with reminders right when you need them.
• Books to read, people to call, your cousin’s birthday — I’ll remember it all.
• Stay organized with everyone in your life — effortlessly.

“All without leaving your email inbox.”

Related posts:

1. Do you have an out of control email inbox?
2. Using Gmail to be more Productive — Part 1
3. Greetings and Salutations!