To Doodle or Not to Doodle
Scheduling nightmares. We’ve all been through the back and forth jungle of trying to find a common time for a group of people to meet.
An email gets sent to a group of people and everyone’s email inbox gets jammed full with the Reply All responses. As the coordinator of a meeting, you spend too much time trying to find the most common meeting date & time for everyone to meet.
Here’s a solution to your scheduling nightmares.
Doodle enables you to propose several dates and times through an email to a list of participants. inside or outside your organization, across calendars, and time zones. Participants can indicate their availability online through a poll. Once you choose the most common date from the online poll, you can send an email to set a firm meeting date. Doodle is free of charge and registration is not required.
Have a look at a demo for Doodle.
Doodle Calendar Connect and MeetMe are options worth having a look at. These enhanced features enable you to connect your calendar so you can share your availability, no matter what calendaring system other participants are using and regardless of which organization they are in.
Tungle.me is a similar option to Doodle.
When trying to set up an appointment with a client, by clicking on the Tungle.me link through the downloaded program, you are able to select available time options and send these options through an email. Once a suitable time is selected, an appointment is automatically added to each participants calendar.
Have a look at Tungle.me’s video demonstration:
Instead of spending your time searching for a suitable time to meet, save your time for your meetings instead. Give Doodle or Tungle.me a try and let me know what your preference is.
Essential Skills
The Government of Canada has identified key Literacy and Essential Workplace Skills. These skills are used in nearly every job, throughout daily life and at varying levels of complexity. Having a common foundation of skills will enable people to successfully participate in the Canadian labour market, enhancing communication and workplace productivity. Essential skills give people the ability to evolve with their jobs and to adapt to workplace change.
The nine Essential Skills include:
- Reading
- Document use
- Numeracy
- Writing
- Oral communication
- Working with others
- Thinking
- Computer use
- Continuous learning
To help you kick start your continuous learning efforts, Out of Chaos will be offering the upcoming workshop basics:
Get Organized: de-clutter & focus and what matters most!
November 1, 2011 – 7:00 to 8:30pm
For the pilers, filers and stuffers who are running out of space. For those that are overburdened and stressed with too many email, voice mail, paper, and interruptions. This workshop will give you take-away tips on how to get yourself organized by addressing:
- How to begin diving into the piles when you “just don’t know where to start”
- How to prioritize and focus your time on what’s important when everything appears urgent
- Decision making using the “Decide in Five” model to help you focus on what matters most
Class held at the new Healistic Planet Wellness Studio in Kitsilano, 1860 West 1st Avenue, Vancouver, BC
604.689.8034
Magazine Collectors’ Best Friend
As a professional organizer, I often visit homes overrun with collections. Common amongst many collections are the piles of paper and subscriptions to various magazines.
What are your options? To keep or not to keep? The logical decision would be that if space is limited and you want more room, then the magazines must go.
Emotionally however, people grapple with the “what if’s“. What if I might need it again? What if I haven’t read everything? Not to mention, magazines are neatly bound with a nice cover page.
Getting a Grip on Aging
We are hearing more and more about the Sandwich Generation. Better yet, if you are living right smack in the middle of it, you know exactly what we’re talking about.
Juggling the demands of caring for your children and spouses, keeping on top of your careers, managing your personal health and financial issues and now the needs of your aging parents. Notice how your personal needs didn’t even fit into this last sentence. What about ‘me’ time? (night out with the boys, spa date with the girls, date night…).
“The number of people aged 65 and up has more than doubled since the 1920s, according to Statistics Canada, and will double again in the next three decades. By 2031, one in four Canadians — an estimated 9.8 million — will be a senior, up from roughly one in 10 today.”
I Can’t Get My Work Done!
In this electronic age, it does not come as a surprise that most work disruptions are electronic. According to a survey conducted by social email provider harmon.ie in March 2011, they commissioned a survey of 515 IT users working in US and global companies to better understand the impact that electronic distractions have on the workplace.
Survey results are worth spending some time to ponder:
The majority (57%) of work interruptions now involve either
- using collaboration and social tools like email, social networks, text messaging and IM, or
- switching windows among applications and personal online activities such as Facebook and Web searches
In fact, 45% of employees work only 15 minutes or less without getting interrupted. Constant interruptions have created problems ranging from difficultly working/producing, to missed deadlines, to poor work evaluations.
53% waste at least one hour a day due to all types of distractions. That hour per day translates into $10,375 of wasted productivity per person per year, assuming an average salary of $30/hour. That is more than the average U.S. driver will spend this year to own and maintain a car, according to the Automobile Association of America (AAA). That means that for businesses with 1,000 employees, the cost of employee interruptions exceeds $10 million per year. The actual cost of distraction is even higher in terms of negative impacts on work output, work quality, and relationships with clients and co‐workers.
Read more
Got TAX PAIN?
Some of you may have seen the commercials, alluding to the tax time filing pains in our nether regions, as we struggle with getting ourselves organized to file our taxes in time before the deadline. Even if you aren’t filing your own taxes, the trauma of finding all your source documents is enough to give you a headache or pain in the…
Gloria Munro of Munro & Company, CGA has these great tax checklists to get you prepared for your personal and business tax filings. Just filing your return on time will save you money on the late filing penalties, even if you are being charged interest on the unpaid tax amounts. According to Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), April 30 (or June 15th, if you’re self-employed) is the deadline to file your taxes. After that, if you owe the government, you will be charged a 5 percent late penalty on the total owed, and 1 percent interest per month, for a maximum of 12 months.
Your business tax receipts may already be in a disorganized pile for this year’s tax filings, but by following these tips you will be in top form for next year. You’ve got one year to rid yourself of more tax pain…
- Keep your tax documents in one location (section of file cabinet or separate file box)
- Create Company File Folders for those you use often or receive monthly statements from
- Create Category File Folders for expenses which may not have the same supplier (auto repairs & maintenance, office supplies)
- Create Dedicated File Folders for tax accounts and government issued documents (HST, WorksafeBC, etc)
- File receipts in the year transaction took place and only after they have been entered into your accounting system
Read more about good filing practices from Munro & Company, CGA
Another Workshop Announcement: Stay tuned for our workshop on how to organize your financial papers, co-hosted with financial planner Kendra Sivertson.
Getting from To-Do to To-Done
We all have that never ending list of things to do. We complete one task and 10 more tasks take its place. The key to getting from to-do to to-done is managing your
- Task List
- Creating Transitional Holding Patterns
- Plan your day by Scheduling Your Commitments
Keep in mind that your to-do list is nothing more than a list of intentions (some day, when I find the time…). Add to this the dilemma of various lists in the form of scraps of paper, post-it notes, pads of paper, note books, and flags in your email correspondence – the feeling of overwhelm is almost too much to bear.
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