Archive for ‘General’ Category
Get Your Head In the (Right) Cloud
The word of the decade seems to be “cloud” and it has nothing to do with global climate change. There are numerous cloud options for storing documents and your other digital goodies. For backing up specific files, solutions range from simpler storage options (like Google Drive and Amazon’s Cloud Drive and S3), to more robust alternatives (like iCloud, Dropbox, SugarSync, SkyDrive and Box), which allow files to securely sync across devices and live simultaneously in the cloud and locally.
If you’re trying to get out of the pile of papers and get your head in the cloud, it can be hard to make sense of competing storage options. Security, ease of collaboration, user experience…these and other features and functions are all pretty hard to detect from reading the glossy marketing on a company’s web site.
Managing Editor Holly Regan and her peeps over over at Software Advice Test Labs have parted the clouds and let a little sun shine on the issue. As you’re looking to put some data points into the mix, Software Advice serves up a plethora of vivid answers that can help you figure out whether Box or Dropbox might be the better choice for your family, your project, your small business or your big, impressive operations.
Software Advice compares apples to apples with a straightforward, if occasionally cheeky, visually appealing approach. The graphics are colorful, clear and easy to understand. For a sneak peek:
Beyond the features covered in the graphic above, Software Advice also looked at:
Technology & Syncing — LAN and free syncing, application integration, API
Document Collaboration — Creating and edit documents in-program, simultaneous collaboration (which I recently, and sadly, learned that Dropbox can’t do), downloading documents created in-program, and collaborating with outside users
Security — Single sign-on (SSO), two-factor authentication, HIPAA compliance, multiple backup data centers, password-protected documents and folders…and a whole lot more
Device Authorization — Viewing, controlling, remotely disconnecting, linking accounts to specific devices and more
Mobile Support — For example, did you know Dropbox doesn’t play nicely with Blackberry Playbook, while Box isn’t so friendly with Kindle Fire? Their review tells you everything you could want to know about what you can do with Box and Dropbox on your preferred device, from storing files locally and downloading them, to viewing offline and inviting collaborators, to streaming video and beyond.
User Experience — They really went beyond expectations with in-depth reviews of the user experience, providing screen shorts for everything from the home screen, to drag-and-drop vs. one-click uploading, to navigation. They even talk about common glitches.
Photo and Video — From photo navigation to video streaming, they cover all the bases.
Versions, Archiving and Audit Trail — Want to save past versions? Need to know if extra versions will count against your storage quota? They hit that.
Support and Help — Email, phone and web self-service, because when you want help, you want it the way you can understand it, right?
The Corporate Stuff — Paper Doll doesn’t care how many total users in a customer base or the valuation of a company, but I suppose these features help determine how long a company will be around to take care of your information.
So, head over to Software Advice, and for all of these charts, just click over any given rating to get more detailed information.
Now, if only Software Advice would help out the Affordable Care Act web site and do a detailed comparison of all the health insurance plans, with and without subsidies, by state, this could be a favorite go-to tech website. As it is, this is a nifty offering for helping people figure out whether Box or Dropbox may offer a fluffy place to lay their heads.
Paper Doll Post:
Think Outside the (Storage) Box
Do you own three staplers but can never find one that works? Are you always searching for the three-hole punch? There’s a science to arranging your work tools so that you can find exactly what you seek. Start with three questions:
Why are you keeping it?
Uncertainty is often the driving force behind holding on to outdated gadgets or tools that are awkward to use. If you haven’t used it, don’t know how to use it, or could easily use a less spiffy alternative, donate or toss it. (Of course, longtime readers of Paper Doll know that uncertainty is the reason we hold on to papers, notes and formal documents, too, which is why it’s so important to have a good records retention schedule to guide the process.)
Who needs access to it?
In a home-based office, your storage system only needs to satisfy you, but in a communal office environment, territorial disputes abound. Reduce perceived inequities by selecting a neutral storage location that gives everyone equal access without cramping anyone’s workspace.
Office Space, @20th Century Fox
Also consider who should NOT have access to certain stored items. Personnel records, proprietary files, and other sensitive data should be stored in a location with controlled access, by key, combination lock, or password. For home offices, a lockable filing drawer can keep office supplies from becoming school supplies.
How often will you need it?
Frequency of access is inversely proportional to the distance between you and your storage. In other words…
Limit what you keep on your desktop to tools you access frequently throughout the day. Resources you use less often (have you really used that gigantic dispenser of Scotch® tape this month?) should be tucked away, sorted by category and separated by drawer dividers. (Rubbermaid has some nice, basic modular dividers.) Embrace creativity, but emphasize efficiency over form. An Elvis paperclip dispenser may be fun, but if it spills clips across the desk each time you use it, let it go.
Keep only a usable number of supplies at your desk to minimize clutter and maximize efficiency. You may instinctively hoard pens or Post-It® Notes out of fear being caught short, but it’s more efficient to “go shopping” at your private office supply store when you actually need something.
Create a main storage area for your business or home office, with everything from paper to toner, burnable discs to those scary looking devices for adding spiral binding to your presentations. Group related items together, so that all writing implements or inks, or all paper, copier, and printer supplies, are kept together. Keep the most-often accessed supplies at eye-level, and use shallow bins or dishpans to corral loose items. In an office without a lot of horizontal space, consider hanging clear shoe organizers or something like Christy Designs’ Simply Stashed, which works just as neatly in a workplace environment as it does at home.
Attach labels to the edges of shelves to make it easier to locate items or identify when supplies are out of place or running low.
In large offices, post a laminated master inventory supply list, including brands and vendor product codes, on the supply cabinet door. For home offices, keep a running list on your legal pad or favorite shopping app.
Finally, no matter how powerful the siren song of the office supply stores may be, don’t buy solutions for problems you don’t even have. It’s an invitation for chaos and clutter.
The above post contains material excerpted from my forthcoming book, 57 Secrets for Organizing Your Small Business, in the 57 Secrets series from Logical Expressions, Inc.
Paper Doll Post:
Organize Yourself for New Vistas
This was my view of the mountains and the labyrinth on my last day at Red Mountain Resort near St. George, Utah, where I spent my vacation last week.
“Adventure” resorts aren’t really Paper Doll‘s thing. I am not much for hiking, and “out” is not one of my favorite doors.
However, taking the better part of a week away in a completely different environment was eye-opening. I challenged myself — multiple exercise classes each day, getting up early, eating *vegetables* — and I also gave myself space — away from my computer, my client work, my committee projects, and the frustrating news stories of the day.
I’d been running on empty for a while, rushing to get things done, and get them done well and quickly. I needed to put a project away. But productivity isn’t just about getting things done quickly, just as organizing isn’t just about putting things away. The goals are to do the right things efficiently, and store only the things that are needed, and only where their accessibility is made easy. But that can take inspiration, motivation and clarity, elements we all occasionally (and sorely) lack.
I didn’t quite know it at first, but I needed a break. That might seem like a strange thing to say in my first post back after taking the summer off, but I spent the months finishing my upcoming book, 57 Secrets for Organizing Your Small Business, which the publisher informed me this morning was in the copy-editing stage and soon to be moving on to the layout stage. There were days this summer when I felt permanently welded to my desk chair. I’m not too proud to admit that there were floozies fluttering in my wake when I’d pace to try to find the right words. And poor Paper Mommy heard a lot of “I’d love to talk but I’ve got to finish this chapter…” By the time I turned in the manuscript earlier this month, my posture was wrecked and my brain was mush. (Apparently, even professional organizers fail to take their own advice sometimes.) I needed a break.
Taking a break can be scary for many of us. What if everyone realizes they’re getting along fine without you? What if you can’t get back into the work groove when you return? What if…
But no matter which mental hecklers try to boo you off the stage of your life, the truth is that just as we need sleep to recuperate from the day, we need vacations, weekends off and free time in each day to recharge our batteries. Whether it’s working out (or snuggling in), we need time to explore new vistas and get out of our own heads. In advertising page layout, it’s called white space and in organizing our schedules, we call it buffer time. We professional organizers advise our clients to fill filing cabinets and bookshelves and closets and drawers no more than 80% full; we need space to grow.
As I relearned on my vacation, sometimes, the best way to be organized and productive is to stand still and breathe deeply. Give yourself time. Grant yourself space. I did, and now I’m ready for adventure!
Paper Doll Post:
Organized Once Again: Your Paper Doll Archive Is Back!
Dear Paper Doll readers:
Thank you so much for your loyalty and patience as we’ve been striving to create this new home for the Paper Doll blog after the unexpected closure of OnlineOrganizing.com. Your support as new posts have launched is so gratifying — comments, emails, and even a few phone calls have provided a delightful re-entry after too many weeks away from blogging.
As you know, we’ve been carefully nurturing all of those gently-used classic posts, keeping them from inclement weather and nibbling creatures, safe in the vault, guarded by Paper Mommy, George Clooney and a representative selling Coffee Crisp candy bars. But now it’s time to blast the doors off this baby!
As of this week, almost the entire 5 1/2 year archive of Paper Doll posts has been resurrected — and they’re all ready for you to peruse. The search engine spiders are still in the process of indexing those posts at their new homes, so it might be a bit before you can Google something specific, but an on-site search box for finding specific tags is in the works.
A few caveats: Because all of the links referencing old OnlineOrganizing.com URLs (that is, links from one old post harkening back to an even older post) are linked to a black hole, it’s going to be necessary to manually re-do any pre-2013 internal links. That will roll out over time. (Of course, if you’re looking for something to do over the holiday weekend, you could just reread the entire archive for kicks! You’ll feel so much more organized!)
Occasionally on the really old posts, fonts may suddenly shrink or grow. If you see something completely wacky, please send me feedback. I want the blog to be quirky, but in a Zooey Deschanel manner, not in an Urkle kind of way.
Also, our IT team wasn’t able to transfer individual comments on old posts. Again, we may be able to manually enter them, but it’s not going to happen overnight. If you once made a brilliant comment about the content of a post, here’s your chance to share your genius anew! Comment! Reply! Opine!
Please feel free to share these “classic” Paper Doll posts on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and wherever else you tell people about funny cat videos and what you had for lunch…and, y’know, how to save time and money, reduce your stress and increase your productivity through organizing your paper and your life.
Love,
Paper Doll
Paper Doll Post:
NAPO 2013: Loud, Proud and Ridiculously Organized
A little over a week ago, I left Paper Doll HQ bound for New Orleans, Louisiana, land of bayous and beignets, for my annual pilgrimage to the National Association of Professional Organizers Annual Conference and Expo. It’s like a university semester crossed with a high school reunion, with a liberal dash of food tours and luggage envy. More than 630 attendees, hailing from nine nations, helped make this event a thrill yet another year. (This was my twelfth consecutive NAPO conference. I can’t wait until next year to make it a baker’s dozen!)
In coming posts, I’ll be sharing the intriguing products and services I spotted at the expo, but for now, know that your trusty reporter worked so hard (ahem) and spoke so much (no surprise!) that she completely lost her voice. By the time Saturday dawned, six full days after I arrived in NOLA, I was communicating with raised eyebrows, flapping jazz hands, and squeaks that must have confused the native Gulf Coast fauna.
To that point, a big shout-out goes to colleague Liz Jenkins, CPO® of A Fresh Space in Franklin, TN, who played virtual assistant and returned telephone calls to prospects on my behalf when I was unable to squeakingly do so.
Liz is president of the NAPO-Nashville chapter as well as chair of our 2016 conference in Los Angeles. Yes, we organizers plan far in advance. See Liz here, pictured with Help A Reporter Out founder Peter Shankman, who spoke with the Golden Circle veteran NAPO organizers early the final day of conference about How The New PR is Spelled “Customer Service.”
Peter then closed out our conference with his stirring keynote on Reinventing the Art of Networking, focusing in part on how (in my words, not his) being a mensch is good for business. Peter’s hefty new book, Nice Companies Finish First: Why Cutthroat Management Is Over — And Collaboration Is In, was likely responsible for more than a few “excess weight” luggage fees! (OK, it would have been, except professional organizers are clever and probably just wore extra layers of clothing while flying in order to make room in their suitcases.)
Of course, there were other big names in attendance at our New Orleans festival of productivity.
Our opening keynote speaker, hoarding specialist and psychologist Dr. David Tolin, presented Unmask the Potential in Your Clients: Helping Mainstream Clients Get Unstuck – Lessons Learned from Clinical Psychology. The loud (but tidy) throng of organizers settled down just enough to hear the practical essentials that dovetail with encouraging motivation, including developing a sense of client autonomy, challenging thinking errors, and problem-solving training. Later in the conference, Dr. Kelly McGonigal presented The Willpower Instinct, based on her book of the same name, with cutting-edge research and practical applications for promoting the development and nurturance of willpower.
The brilliance didn’t stop there. The always-entertaining Dr. Ari Tuckman taught two breakout sessions of incredible material for professional organizers to use with their clients and their own occasionally overwrought selves. One, Motivation to Climb the Mountains, had attendees buzzing, and I’m already putting the lessons from How To Remember to Remember into practice…even in the writing of this post!
And be assured that the multi-year love-fest between NAPO members and Maine’s own Rich Brooks of Flyte Media (seen here with your swooning reporter) continued apace:
Rich presented sessions on Mobile Marketing for Professional Organizers and Turning Likes Into Paying Clients.
Of course, fellow NAPO fellow members taught compelling pre-conference and conference sessions that had tweeters and Facebookers thumb-wrestling themselves to share the genius. To even make it to the conference, Monica Ricci‘s partner-in-crime for Speak Up!: Crafting and Delivering Killer Presentations, Lisa Montanaro, had to battle planes, pains and automobiles, showing her commitment to the subject, and to us.
Other sessions ranged from the purely practical, like Tackling an Estate Clearance and Organizing: Eyes Towards Re-Design, to the technological, like Technology Solutions for Happier Clients, Digital Filing Systems: Smart Organizing, and Google: Tools to Organize.
Yours truly even got to share the stage with the outgoing and incoming Board of Certification for Professional Organizers presidents, Audrey Lavine and Helene Segura, respectively, for our presentation on BCPO Certification: You’ve Got Questions? We’ve Got Answers!
It’s a little fuzzy, but at this juncture, we were either exploring the finer points of Continuing Education Units Arithmetic 101 or debating whether payment in chickens counts as remuneration. (We were slated at 7:45 in the morning. Can you imagine the entertainment factor if we’d been in Prime Time?)
For a complete sense of all the things that kept your favorite professional organizers busy, from Maximizing Productivity for Business Clients to Understanding a Student’s Organizing Style, just take a gander at the chock-a-block program schedule.
Yes, we were busy learning, but be assured we were playing, too. Look at the fun my NAPO-Georgia chapter had, just trying to organize a lunchtime photo shoot when the official photographer didn’t show up!
In case you want to see us looking a little classier, the official photo, and all of my other shots of conference and the expo hall can be seen here:
NAPO 2013: Pre-Conference Photos (taken during joint NAPO and Board of Certification for Professional Organizers board events)
For more perspectives on NAPO 2013, I refer you to the brilliant Deb Lee of SoHo Tech Training, who created a page for Live Virtual Coverage of the events. (Deb’s also responsible for ensuring that this post didn’t look like an addled fourth grader was set loose in WordPress Land! Thanks, Deb! It takes a village, and you’re my Mayor of Technology.) And to keep it all in the family, check out what The Clutter Princess, Janice Simon, said in her guest post on Deb’s Organize to Revitalize blog — it’s called 630 Organizers Walk Into a Hotel.
And finally, lest you think (even after looking at the above photo) that we professional organizers were dull girls (and a few boys) with all work and no play, you should know that we had plenty of fun socializing on Bourbon Street and dining (and sometimes, dancing) into the wee hours. For example, here (with my conference roomie, financial organizer Nanette Duffey, PDMM, and UK-bound, Professional Organizers of Canada immediate past-president Jackie Hollywood Brown), we prepared for a lovely dinner at Muriel’s off Jackson Square:
before attending to the reason for the whole evening:
delicious beignets at New Orleans’ famed Café du Monde. A good time was had by all.
Next time, we’ll begin exploring all the fascinating and fun organizing tools and services presented at the NAPO expo. (And yes, there were some absolutely fabulous paper-related productivity solutions that I already covet.) I can hardly wait!
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