6. Getting Organized

Being an Out of Office worker requires as much if not more organization than the in-office counterpart. The in-office worker benefits from having support networks within the larger organization. In many larger organizations, administrative tasks are carried out by specialized staff. Even in mid-sized organizations, it is not uncommon to have someone whose designation is usually something akin to Office Manager. Their role is to ensure that the items necessary for the operation of the office environment are provided. From paperclips to plumbing and beyond, the Office Manager and their team (if they have one) are the people to which other employees turn when they need items to support their role.

When you work from home, that immediate support network is missing. When you run out of staples, there is no stationery cupboard to turn to. If the A/C breaks down in the middle of summer, there isn’t a maintenance crew on hand to be called out to fix it. Even the trash can in your office doesn’t magically empty itself over night for you.

All of these things and many more that the average in-office worker takes for granted are suddenly your responsibility. When a friend left a large consultancy to start working for themselves from home, their first comment on the first day they started the business was, “Where is the intern to get my coffee? Oh that’s right, I’m that intern and everybody else now!”

Although there is a lot to be said for working from home, as I have already outlined in previous chapters, the key, at least in my opinion, to making it a successful situation is to be organized—extremely organized. That isn’t something that comes naturally to some people, myself included, and it should certainly be a consideration when contemplating making the move to Out of Office working. That is not to say that the level of organization has to be at the obsessive level, but knowing where everything is, where it needs to be, and how to find it just makes life a whole lot easier than the alternative.

If you haven’t transitioned to Out of Office working yet and you work for an organization, take a look around your office the next time you are there. Think about all the things that are in your office or cube. I don’t mean just the desk and chair; think about the other elements that make up your office environment. Lighting, heating, carpeting, office supplies, janitorial supplies, printers, fax machines (some people still use them!), photocopiers, security services, on-site gym, on-site nurse, cafeteria, and, yes, the desk and chair you use.

All of those things are going to be supplied by you when you start Out of Office working. Whether from home, on the road, or a combination of both, you are going to have to manage all of those elements that are simply a given in the office.

Now you might say, “Well, I already have an office at home or a space that can become one and it already has heat and light and flooring. I have an all-in-one printer that can be a fax and copier. My kitchen is just down the hall so I don’t need a cafeteria, and the cabinet under the kitchen sink always has cleaning supplies if I need to use them.”

Okay, sounds like you have all your bases covered—or do you? When making the transition to Out of Office working, are you going to include a “maintenance fee” per month that will be paid to cover the extras? Can you expense them or do you just have to accept those costs as part of the advantage of working Out of Office?

Are these expenses really that high? Paperclips don’t cost much, nor does printer ink and printer paper. Screen wipes are pretty cheap, too. Very true, but now start to add them up. Over the total of a year, those items and many more can actually come to a decent amount. If you don’t have an agreement in advance of making the transition, you could well end up having to just absorb the costs.

Of course, you might be able to write them off as an unreimbursed business expense (talk to an accountant about that), but I recommend thinking it through before you make the transition. Oh, and those cleaning supplies that live under the sink in the kitchen, those belong to the house not your office, so depending on how often you think you are going to clean your office, you might want to find a drawer in your desk to keep your own supplies.

Now, of course, at first reading this seems all very petty. You are going to be doing serious business working Out of Office. You don’t need to concern yourself with paperclips and screen cleaners. After all, if your company trusts you to work unsupervised, surely you are mature enough to look after an office space. Therein lies the downfall of many an Out of Office worker. Taking for granted the little things that actually make the cogs of industry turn. If an army marches on its stomach, then business moves on stationery. Sound like an outrageous claim? Just think of the number of times that you have opened a desk drawer and not found at least a few items of stationery. Even though many people will talk about being fully digital, using only email, efax, video conferencing, and social media, the rest of the world is not yet paperless.

I’m sure we have all experienced the frustration of finding the only stapler that is near at hand empty of staples and having to track down the one person who keeps a supply of them in their desk. That frustration, when it happens alone can be something that contributes to the stress felt when working Out of Office. Having gone through that type of stress, along with other work-related stress, I’ve found that actually having a place for everything and everything in its place makes my life a lot easier and more enjoyable. As they say, it’s the little things.

Working alone from home doesn’t exempt you from this type of stress. All those additional items can be written off as a business expense, especially if you can show you are buying them solely for use in your home office (again, check with your accountant for exactly how much you can write off). Part of this organizational challenge is separating home from office, even though they occupy the same physical space.

There is much more to being organized than just staples, of course. However, according to organizational specialists, starting with the small things leads to a greater sense of organization. Along with basic organization, the experts also recommend regular cleaning of your office space, something that sounds obvious and, of course, happens for you when you work in-office. Now, I am far from a clean freak—as my girlfriend will testify—but even I see the benefit of a clean and orderly workspace.

I clean my office on a regular basis (or at least what I consider a regular basis) of all the accumulated detritus. This means taking all the piles of paper, assorted conference badges, sticky notes, notebook pages, notebooks, electronic devices, and other things off of the desk and putting them in piles on the floor of my office.

Having separated these items into their appropriate piles, it is time to make the hard decision—what stays and what goes? Now, it may be true that I am a bit of a hoarder. I have a tendency to hold on to things “just in case.” At the age of 30, I pulled out an old favorite jacket from a storage box from when I was a teenager. In the pocket was a shopping list that my mother had given me when I was 12. I’d kept it “just in case.” Of course I threw it away, but now regret doing so, since my mother is no longer with us.

Of course, attaching sentimental images to office supplies is a bit of a stretch and more likely to indicate a propensity to hoarding than a true emotional attachment to that sticky note. Still, setting a shelf-life on the items on your desk (or in your closet) makes the decision a lot easier. If you haven’t used, read, or referred to an item in a given period of time (a week, month, year, or decade, depending on how big your desk is), then it is time that item was retired. Now that might not mean actually trashing it, but rather filing it. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, “The Benefits,” I have a desk previously used by a lawyer. It has large drawers on both sides that are perfect for filing, and I also use a separate two-drawer file cabinet to keep things ordered.

It can be surprising how often I have to refer back to past contracts, invoices, or proposals. Although all these things are also filed electronically, having a paper trail (literally) has proven more than once to be a useful practice.

One item that can become a clutter point is business cards. I used to collect them as though the greater number of them I had, the more successful I would be. So over the space of a few years, I ended up with hundreds of them. They were in drawers, file boxes, bags, suit pockets, special folders designed just to hold them—they were pervasive. After a few years of this, I suddenly realized that if I hadn’t contacted the person, done business with them, or referred someone to them in the past 12 months, I probably never would. It was time to thin the collection.

Being a public speaker, it is not uncommon for people to come up to me at the end of a presentation and give me a business card. I’m not really sure the point of this: I mean, I understand that the person would like for a speaker to remember them, but given that I probably get handed 30 or so cards at any one event, it becomes impossible to remember everyone who simply hands me a card and runs away. I am a proponent of only exchanging business cards with people I know or at least have a strong suspicion I am going to want to follow up with in some manner—whether that is to do business with, to refer someone to them, or to have them refer me to someone.

If you truly don’t see that type of connection, why trade cards? I usually carry very few business cards with me to events; that way, I am already restricting myself to only trading cards with people who meet my criteria. I’m sure some people will find this almost anti-social—after all, how much do business cards really cost? Isn’t it just polite to trade cards with people at an event? Although I can see the basis of this argument, my thoughts are more along the lines of, is it really polite to just clutter their desk with one more business card they are never going to use?

I used to scan the business cards I received religiously: I thought that would make things more ordered and, of course, I would keep the actual card as a paper backup in case I lost my data somehow. As I mentioned earlier, I back up data to at least two different places, so, excluding the fall of mankind, it is extremely unlikely I will lose my data—I was already building redundancy into a system that had a surfeit of redundancy. I, of course, found ways to rationalize this, mostly with the “you never know” justification—which really just meant that I couldn’t come up with a good reason for keeping them but wasn’t sure I could just throw them away.

In the end, I came up with the same rule for business cards as I did for everything else: If I hadn’t had contact with the person in the 12 months since I received their card, it was time to discard it, both physically and electronically. Let’s face it: Our electronic devices can be just as cluttered as our physical spaces (more on that later in this chapter).

For those of you who want to store business cards, I highly recommend doing it electronically; there are so many devices and smartphone apps that make this easy, I find it hard to understand why anyone would not store them this way.

One such app I have used for quite some time is CamCard (see Figure 6.1). It utilizes the camera and optical character recognition (OCR) software to extract the information from the card and store it in your phone’s contact database. It also supports you adding pictures and notes to the card so that you can store information about the person who gave you the card.

Figure 6.1 CamCard

Having scanned a card, it will transfer the data to your contact database. I find this extremely useful as I sync my contacts with my computer; that way, I have the same data in at least two places and therefore I can email a contact from my phone or computer without having to actually look their email address up each time. I have to admit, I have never added a photo of someone who handed me a business card. That seems a little bit too invasive to me, but I am sure for some people it is a useful feature.

Having scanned the card and then added your notes and perhaps even a picture, you can throw the card away! Or better yet, give it back to the original owner. That’s one less card that they have to replace. Eventually, they will be able to stop ordering new cards.

Having captured contact information from business cards and stored it, how do you now manage it and all the other contact information that you have on your device. Stop and think about that for a moment, you have contact information from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any number of other networks, you have information that you have entered manually, from your email and a variety of other sources. Do you know where it is? Do you know how to quickly call up that information? Can you only do it by looking up someone’s name? If you are like me, just when you really need someone’s email address is the moment that you will completely blank on their name, or at least part of it, either first name or last name. This kind of thing happens all the time to me. I can remember exactly what someone looks like, I can remember the last conversation we had but I cannot for the life of me remember their name.

This is where contact management software or apps come to the rescue. Standard Contact address books on most phones are organized by name, either by first name or last name, and that is about it. On some devices you can search on fields such as company but on many you are stuck with just name. For people like me who think of their contacts in different ways, apps like Brewster (iPhone only) are a great addition to keeping you organized (see Figure 6.2).

Figure 6.2 Brewster

Brewster organizes your contacts by name but also allows you to search in many different ways: visually—it produces pictures of your contacts taken from their social network profiles, by interest (for example if you have a contact from a kickball league that you are in then you can search by “kickball”), or by location—know where your contact lives, search for them that way. It also organizes your contacts based on the relationship you have with them—something I find very useful. For example, if I want to email my girlfriend, I don’t want to have to search for her through my contact book. I want my device to know that she and I have a close relationship—Brewster handles that, managing your contacts based on the frequency you communicate with them, including via social networks (if you connect them to the app).

One more benefit from Brewster—it will send you reminders if you have been neglecting a previously much contacted connection, so it even helps you manage your social life.

As good as card scanners and OCR readers have become, there are always those “artsy” business cards that just can’t be read, or are read incorrectly. On more than one occasion, I have used one of these apps only to find someone’s name replaced by their company name, their phone number replaced with a fax number, and only a partial email address.

Still, for all their faults, applications and software that allow you to store your information electronically are definitely going to help cut down on the physical clutter in your office. However, much clutter you rid yourself of in the physical world I can guarantee you have replaced most (if not all of) it electronically.

I was reading an article recently on camera apps. The person who wrote the article claimed to have over 800 camera apps on their phone! Now that might have been an exaggeration to make a point, but even if it was a gross overestimate, that is an awful lot of data to have collected on one device. How many apps do you have on your phone? How many software programs do you have on your computer? How many of them do you use regularly? Just as with the physical items on your desk, this electronic clutter makes you less efficient. Those apps and programs slow your device down, which in turn slows you down. Having a contact database with thousands of names, telephone numbers, and email addresses might be impressive, but is it necessary? Think about how much faster your devices would operate if you cleaned out the clutter on the same basis as you cleaned out your physical workspace.

If you really feel you absolutely must retain every last piece of electronic data that you have acquired, then why not simply archive it to a cloud service. My preference is Dropbox, but there many to choose from. These services can be used simply as an additional hard drive, or you can schedule things to be moved to them (think of it as a maid service cleaning your physical space!). However you choose to use a remote storage service, it does provide a great way to clear clutter from your devices and free up both space and distractions while you are working.

Having done this once, I guarantee you will be surprised at how little you miss those items you have moved off your device. Then you will want to take a second look and see what else you haven’t used in a while and clear even more from your devices. It can be quite a liberating experience, and unlike items in the physical world, unless you delete them, they are always somewhere that they can be restored to your device should you need the data.

Having the items you use most nearest to the point of work and the items you use least furthest away makes for a much more organized and efficient space than some of the more, what might generously be referred to as “eclectic” workspaces. Part of that workflow is the layout of the room itself. In most corporate settings, this is actually undertaken by professional planners. This is either contracted in or in larger corporate organizations done through a department whose function is to maximize the effective use of the owned or leased space.

Of course if you are planning a home office, you will have a lot of preexisting restrictions, some of which we discussed in Chapter 2. Although the simple option is to move the furniture and other items into the room and let the space “evolve,” using a room planner makes this process a lot easier and less hard work, especially on the lower back (nothing like moving a heavy desk for the fifth time to make you realize that moving things on paper is a lot less work!).

Several software packages are available that can be used for this, but why buy something you can use for free? Free is just about my favorite price point when I am buying anything (although not so much a favorite when I am selling, but that is a story for a different book).

The retailer Pottery Barn offers an online tool that provides most of the features of the software that you would buy, and unless you are planning some serious reconstruction to build out a space, it is more than adequate for planning out a space effectively (see Figure 6.3). You can find the tool at http://www.potterybarn.com/design-studio/tool/home_offices_room_planner.html.

Figure 6.3 Pottery Barn room planner

What I like about this particular tool is that you can start from a basic predesigned plan, or if you are feeling more adventurous, you can start from scratch and enter you own room dimensions, selecting a room shape that roughly matches the one you are planning. Admittedly this is a tool that is designed to sell you Pottery Barn products; therefore, the items that you can place in a room are only those sold by Pottery Barn. However, you can make some very respectable plans by swapping their items for your own as long as you are working with tolerances of several inches rather than exact measurements. Figure 6.4 shows a basic plan of my home office using this tool. As you can see, I was able to place the doors and closet sliding doors accurately, and the major furniture components, even though none of mine were actually bought at Pottery Barn.

Figure 6.4 My home office plan

Quick disclaimer: This is not an endorsement for Pottery Barn; I simply like their free online tool. I am sure you can find others online or software that you can download or purchase that will fit your own needs. The point here is that planning out a room and the flow of that room is much easier using a tool or even a page of graphing paper than simply moving the furniture around until it fits and hoping that you don’t have to move it again!

Having reached the point where you are comfortable with your furniture layout and have it all in a place that makes the most sense to you and how you are planning to work, it is time to move on to the less permanent or at least easier-to-move items.

One of the most common items for all Out of Office workers is a computer. Of course, the brand, size, and type vary from person to person, and I am most definitely not getting into a discussion of the merits of one brand over another. Some people buy for the task at hand or for the brand; many, I would assume, buy what they can afford.

Where there is a difference is whether or not people use a portable device. Personally, I prefer a desktop computer for my office. I have several reasons for this, but primarily the amount of storage space it offers and the performance. This second factor is diminishing as the performance offered by laptops rapidly catches up and in some cases exceeds that offered by desktops machines. Even with the advances that laptops make, I will probably always use a desktop for my primary machine, and the reason for this is two-fold: the size of screens I can attach to a desktop and the number of screens I can attach. I currently have two screens on my desk: one is 19" the other 26". That makes for a lot of screen space I can utilize. When I do work from a laptop, I struggle with only having a 15" screen on which to view things. Of course, a desktop is totally impractical for traveling with—can you imagine loading one into those little grey trays at the airport? So a laptop has been the only realistic option for many years and for many remains so. However, with the increase in the capabilities offered by tablet devices, this is changing. On shorter trips (anything less than three days), I rarely carry a laptop. I can achieve most of what I need to do on a tablet in that timeframe. On a longer trip, where I will be editing a lot of documents or images, I have to revert to the laptop, but I am confident that in a few years that will no longer be the case and that laptops will become a thing of the past for all but a few power users.

The other thing that takes up a lot of space on my desk is storage. I have a small wooden three-drawer storage box, which one of my monitors sits on, that I picked up in a vintage store. It holds various office supplies, batteries, and other sundries. It’s probably not particular practical but it does hold the items I use most regularly, which enables me to be more effective. So, even though there are storage solutions with a smaller footprint, this time form beat out function. After all, if you are going to work in your own space, shouldn’t it reflect who you are?

If you take a look at Figure 6.4, my office plan, you can see I have another desk to the right of my main desk. This is actually a small media table that I use to house my printer, paper, and labels. As I mentioned before, having a paper trail that is physical has helped me out on more than one occasion, and so having a printer near at hand makes it much easier to keep that maintained. One feature that I absolutely love about the printer is that it is wireless, which means that I can print from any device that is connected to the wireless network in our home—computer, laptop, iPad, or phone.

That level of convenience actually makes a lot of difference to those working Out of Office from their home. I really find being able to print things directly from my phone an advantage, rather than having to go and look them up on a computer when I remember. Of course, many digital natives will groan at that statement, asking me why I don’t use some form of bookmarking system—after all, they are numerous. I’m just that weird mix of digital and analog that likes to read some things on paper whereas other information is just fine being confined to the screen.

So the requirement of being able to take the level of organization that we have achieved in our permanent space with us on the road is something that cannot be ignored. When I travel, for either business or pleasure, for a trip that is longer than one night, I want to be able to set up an office space in my hotel room that at least mimics the basics of my home office. Although I won’t be carrying a printer or other major device with me, I do want the ability to remain organized, even in a strange space.

I am amazed at the people I meet on the road who I know to be extremely well organized in their office space yet seem to have no idea where things are when they are on the road. With so much to think of when traveling, having one less thing to think about just makes sense to me. I have spent years trying different bags—in fact, I’m a bit of a collector.

I’m not going to recommend a bag to you. What? Isn’t that the point of a book like this, to solve your issues? There is a very good reason why I won’t recommend a bag for you; I don’t know what you carry. I’ve had lots of bags recommended to me over the years, and never has one met my needs. Bags are a very personal item in my experience: What works well for one person doesn’t necessarily work well for another.

Some people prefer a simple handle; others a cross-body strap and still others (myself included) backpack-style bags. There is no right answer—only the answer that fits your needs most closely. So all that said, I will tell you the solution I have settled on that seems to work best for me.

I carry two bags with me when I am traveling for business: a backpack and a carryon with wheels. The backpack holds my electronics and camera, along with a change of clothes. The latter is a spill-over from the days of checking bags and something I have never felt the need to do away with. The carryon I use has a suit compartment in the lid, which allows me to pack a sport coat or a suit for business. The rest of the bag is taken up with clothes for the trip. Having traveled a lot, I consider myself a fairly light packer and usually can make these two bags stretch for up to eight days. Over that, unless I have access to laundry facilities then I have to resort to a checked bag.

If you want to do away with bags completely, there are several clothing manufacturers who have created clothing items such as sports jackets, overcoats, and so on, that have dozens of pockets that will hold everything from your phone to a tablet device and pretty much everything in between. Although I haven’t tested these out personally, I have seen many reports from friends who have and find them to be extremely useful for short trips—although I confess to having my doubts about the durability of these garments and their ability to not end up making you look as though you are wearing a sack with pockets in it. Although style isn’t everything, I try not to appear like I just got out of bed when I am traveling.

There are a few items that I have found that make packing and sorting items in my bag easier. One that I highly recommend is the Grid-It by Cocoon. Again this is not a product endorsement; I have simply found this product to be extremely useful. It can be purchased from most online retailers and a few brick-and-mortar ones as well.

The Grid-It is a pad with numerous elastic straps running both horizontally and vertically, forming a grid across it. You can store pretty much any small item in this web. I use it for all the smaller items that go into my bag. I usually have a notebook in it, a pen, an extra memory card for my camera, in fact just about anything that might get lost at the bottom of my bag goes into the Grid-It so that I know exactly where to find it when I am on the road. It is particular useful, if like me, you prefer bags that are basically big open sacks.

Other travelers prefer that their bag be divided into sections that can be organized, and I can completely understand the appeal of that arrangement—I have just never found a bag that was constructed that way that I particularly liked or that was organized in a way that made sense to me.

Whatever you choose, ensuring that you have all the items with you that you are going to need when on the road makes life an awful lot easier. Depending on the length of the trip, the destination (foreign or domestic), and the purpose of the trip, the items you need will vary.

Power chargers are a must, as well as a phone, laptop, and any other device. I also pack a small power strip—a great way to make friends at an airport. Smartphones are replacing many of the smaller devices that someone would have carried only a few years ago. For example, I use the voice recorder on my phone to record some client meetings to ensure that I have captured all the requirements from that meeting; my smartphone has also replaced my compact digital camera, GPS system, and several other small devices that were always with me on a trip. Of course, some things have been added to the things I carry, such as an external battery pack for my phone so that I don’t run the risk of depleting the battery while traveling.

Having a small collection of office supplies with you, including smaller versions of the things you use the most in your main office, is also a way I find of reducing travel stress. Staplers, sticky notes, paperclips, in fact all those office supplies come in travel sizes.

If you are traveling on business, you are going to be collecting receipts. Whether you work for a larger organization or yourself, travel expenses have to be recorded. Now, I will be the first to admit I am not the most organized of people when it comes to paperwork, so I won’t be claiming to have some amazing system in place for recording business expenses while on the road. Although I am sure there is software or a smartphone app out there for doing just this, I resort to an analog method—an envelope and a paperclip. I simply collect my receipts and clip them together in order, first to last, as the purchases occur. Then they are entered into the accounting software when I get home. Not the most elegant of solutions, but again, I’m more interested in things that work and suit my work style than necessarily selling you on the latest piece of technology. There are plenty of technology evangelists who will happily do that for you.

As with data, I also find redundancy with certain items a must. Also, remembering to rely on the simplest solution is usually the best backup you can find. I am reminded of an old joke about the space program, about how NASA spent a million dollars inventing a pen that would write in space, and the Russian space program simply issued their astronauts with pencils. Just because it is the latest and greatest gadget, app, software, or travel item, don’t overlook the obvious and most simple solution. Sure, it might not win you prizes for innovation, but getting the job done will definitely look better than not because you were relying on something that broke down, ran out of power, or simply needed to be upgraded at a critical moment. Those reasons might just be the digital-age version of “the dog ate my homework” excuse from when I was in primary school. What it really says is that you weren’t as organized as you needed to be.

For that very reason, as I’ve mentioned in previous chapters, I still carry a notebook and pencil with me at all times. Yes, I have a smartphone that has apps that can easily replace these two items, and that in turn would make my bag fractionally lighter—which, as anyone who has walked around a massive conference center for eight or more hours will tell you, is definitely a bonus. But I have never had to recharge my notebook or plug in my pencil (yes, I carry a sharpener too).

Whether you started this chapter as a neat-a-holic or as someone a little less organized, I hope having reached the conclusion of the chapter that you have some new ideas about how to improve the efficiency of your workspace and how to carry that efficiency through to your time on the road.

My final piece of advice: Find what works for you. If that is a piece of software, great. If it is an envelope and a pencil, then use that. The point is, be organized anywhere and everywhere, and you will not only reduce your stress levels but you will be much more efficient, and at the end of the day that means you will spend less time working and more time on other things. That, however, is the topic of my next chapter.