Staying on Track with Planning

Since you, as your own boss, have no one looking over your shoulders making sure you are staying on task, it is imperative to create plans that will do so for you. Trying to run your business without planning is like going to the grocery store without a grocery list; you don’t even know where you should start. You can make great strides in managing your time better by following these five pieces of advice, allowing you to run your business with clarity of purpose and vision.

Daily Planning for Entrepreneurs

1. To help keep your business on track, plan out your own work schedule in a way that fits everything in and prioritizes your tasks. Once you have a visual of when you will be doing what, all that is left is to do it—the easy part.
2. In planning, start with the big picture—say the agenda for the year or the month—and then plan the details—your days and weeks. Always keep in mind when you are planning your days where you want to be at the end of the year.
3. As you flesh out your plan, prioritize your tasks. Inevitably you will find yourself stretched for time and behind on projects. If you determine beforehand which projects should take precedence over others, you won’t find yourself at a total loss, but will have an idea of what’s most important to get done and can start chipping away at that. See point 4 of a previous post where I discuss prioritization in more detail.
4. Space and time don’t only have a unique interrelationship in physics, but also in your life. By organizing your workspace according to categories of your business—keep all of your marketing materials, your financial paperwork, and your schemes and ideas in another—you will be able to divide your time according to your duties and save valuable hours in the meantime.
5. Take fifteen to thirty minutes every day to re-organize your organization. This might sound a bit silly, but experience tells us that order inevitably leads to chaos, and all of your well structured calendars and offices will start to get messy with the workday. Make sure you are keeping  things in line as you are working and  not when you are knee deep in your own disarray when untended bills are scattered across your desk and you are not sure if you had or hadn’t rescheduled that sales call.

Learn more about  SimplifyThis’s appointment scheduling software, an online tool that helps entrepreneurs, and freelancers stay on top of their billing and appointments.

Your Professional Image

Projecting a good professional image is a necessity for any business owner. At its core, your image relies on your ability to conduct your everyday business with a level of professionalism. Business that treat their customers right all the time, by being timely and cordial, develop a sense of trust. This is the ultimate secret for success. That said, appearances are important too. While they can be deceiving, appearance is the basis for most of our decisions, especially when it comes to doing business. Who has the cleaner website, better Yelp reviews, is more affordable, inspires a sense of confidence?

Especially if you are starting your business venture at the grassroots level and operating out of your home, you might find yourself struggling with a Napoleon complex, believing that there is little you can do about your “stature”—truth is, you can polish your professional image by choosing to implement several logistical services.

Five Easy Ways to Polish Your Professional Image

Maintaining a professional appearance can feel like keeping up with the Joneses, but by following several of the steps we’ve laid out for you you’ll be able to shine in no time.

Office Address

• If you are currently using your home address as your business address, you’re giving off the impression that you haven’t gotten off your own feet yet—as if you were still living with your parents after graduating from college. Even if you do run your business out of your home there are many options for sidestepping this issue. Many services exist out there that allow you to rent an address and achieve an office image, without a an office price tag. To find a virtual office in your area, check out Regus Virtual Offices, Your Office, or google “Virtual Offices” to research solutions in your area.

Separate Phone Line

• When I was in high school my father ran a computer consulting small business called Larson Computers. Unfortunately we never got a separate phone line and were trained to answer the phone with an ambiguous “Larsons” that could either have referred to the business or the family. Most of the time prospective customers were just confused when we picked up the phone. As kids, we were not trained secretaries. It’s very easy and affordable nowadays to either get a second phone line or  a business cell phone.

Email and Website

• Since a lot of industries are no longer using phones as the main form of communication, it is important to get a professional email account that preferably includes your company name. By using a free account such as gmail or hotmail, you’re sending your clients the message that you run your business somewhat inadvertently and don’t care to go the extra mile. As far as this may be from the truth, it’s what it looks like. Along with your email account, you will want to be sure to set up a clean and well designed website that is both professional and fitting to you r line of business. If you are a massage therapist for example, you will want your website to convey a sense of tranquility. Many sites such as these automatically play soothing world music when the site appears—a function that affects me contrarily since any sort of pop-up gives me a tinge of anxiety.

Literature

• If you have printed out business cards or brochures, it is important that you are using high grade paper and printers, otherwise it is a lost cause and will paint your business in a negative light. It is easy to find high end laser printers for affordable prices online and even at thrift stores if you are vigilant. I reiterate—ensure that every image attached to your business suggests a high degree of professionalism and competency.

Payment and Scheduling Options

• You can show that you are serious about your business by allowing your customers the freedom to pay in different forms. Particularly well-suited to a small business are services such as SimplifyThis’s EasyBook online invoicing software that accepts payments from both PayPal accounts and major credit cards. Also, this service integrates quite deftly with your email account. And the cost of this service starts at only $9 a month—well worth its long term benefit.

These are all steps you can take today to improve your image. In the end, these steps will only be effective if you truly do conduct yourself in a professional manner. Assuming that you do, these steps could help communicate exactly how professional and serious you are.

See how you can use SimplifyThis’s invoicing and scheduling services to inspire confidence in your clients.

Managing your Accounts Receivable

Learning how to best manage your Accounts Receivable is essential in the business world where the name of the game is often cash flow.   These simple steps will help you streamline the invoicing procedure, making the money transfer from your clients’ account to yours as simple as a couple of mouse clicks.

Better Cash Flow through Accounts Receivable Management

Here are several suggestions to get the ball rolling and to save you valuable time and resources with your invoicing duties.

1. In order to make sure you are getting paid—your main objective—send your invoices out as soon as possible, especially since payments usually aren’t due for 30 or 45 days.
2. As previously discussed in the Effective Time Management post, when you set aside a certain time of week to for specific tasks such as sending out invoices, these tasks will eventually become part of your work routine.  If you stay consistent with your invoicing practices, you will be less likely to forget to send your invoices out. Late Friday afternoons would be a great time to do so (assuming your business follows the traditional work week) since you can send out all of your invoices for the week at once, eliminating any oversights.
3. Use an invoicing application like QuickBooks, or our own online EasyBill invoicing service to get you on the fast track to managing accounts receivable. This also leaves you more time and energy to dedicate to the ins and outs of running your business. Before the days of the Personal Computer it was a very arduous full time job just to track one’s clients bills and to organize them in the books. Nowadays there are tools available that facilitate the bookkeeping in ways that make the paper chase appear practically medieval.
4. Be upfront, polite, and clear about how you will bill your clients and what terms you expect. As easy as online invoicing makes the transaction for all parties concerned, it is important to walk first time clients through the process of payment.
5. Regardless of how you bill your clients, the more professional the process, the more trust you will inspire in your business. Personalize your invoices by attaching your business logo to them and provide authenticated credit card transactions for your clients.

SimplifyThis offers an EasyBill invoicing service that’s as easy as pie and allows you to send online invoices in PDF format, receive online payments via PayPal and credit cards, integrate your invoices with your Iphone and Android, automatically send out payment reminder emails, among a host of other funcitons that will simplify your life and business. Sign up for a free-trial today!

Effective Time Management

Good time management is crucial for any citizen of the 21^st century for whom a typical day involves responding to countless emails, phone calls, and text messages, on top of all the other daily interruptions one encounters in running a business. Most of time you are being interrupted from tasks that are essential to growing your business. Poor time management can make work feel like a leaky boat. As soon as you plug one hole, you’ve got the next leak to cover until you run out of limbs. If you can start with a dedicated plan to fix your holes, you’ll be better off in the long run.

Five Tips for Better Time Management

As we all know, when it rains it pours.  How do you stay on top of all you have to do? By creating a time management game plan. Here some of our favorite strategies that help you to better manage your time.

1)      Set blocks of time aside for specific tasks.  Maybe you will spend an hour in the morning and in the late afternoon responding to email, dedicate the hours right after lunch to meetings and take care of your accounting needs before lunch. If you establish a rhythm that your mind can get used to, staying on top of your tasks will become second nature.

2)      Use the proper scheduling/planning tools. If you structure your vague sense of time and deadlines using a calendar you will have a much better idea of what needs to be done and when you need to do it. Using an online appointment scheduler offers the added benefit of cutting down on phone time.

3)      Work in a distraction free zone. When you are working are you tempted by a million other things that you could be doing instead? Try as best you can to discern what diversions take you away from your work, and eliminate them. Since I am a writer, I found that whenever I reached the end of a sentence and struggled to begin the next I would choose to forego that mental strain and open up Firefox instead, killing time by browsing. To address my lack of discipline, I bought a typewriter that  has no other intended purpose but to allow me to write. It’s just black ink on white pages.

4)      Determine and prioritize your objectives. If you can start each day by determining both your primary objectives and your secondary objectives and then prioritize your efforts accordingly, you will begin on top. Make sure to establish a time frame in which you accomplish high priority goals, and then stick to that plan. If you can plot your day out in theory, you’ll be able to do it in practice as well.

5)      Give yourself appropriate deadlines.  As Parkinson’s Law states, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” In other words, the amount of time you will allow for the completion of your work will be consumed. The more ruthless your deadline, the sooner your work gets done. When you decide to spend a week on a project that could be completed in a day, it’s going to take a week minimum to complete it.

Mastering time management techniques changes your life for the better, allowing you more time to do the things that matter most. See how our appointment scheduling software can help bring your time back under your control.

Keep your brain working

How often does this scenario reoccur: you are working toward completing a project, have motivated yourself sufficiently to get started on it and make some decent headway, and then you take a step back to evaluate all of the progress you’ve made so far, realizing you’re over halfway toward your goal you decide it would be a good opportunity to reward yourself with a little break. I am (to my own chagrin) all too familiar with this pattern, often succumbing to the allure of starting a new project (or three or four) rather than completing that which I am already knee deep in. Being a writer, I am continually engaged in mindgames with myself, trying to trick myself with various reward mechanisms and systems into getting my brain to get words on a page, a simple task fraught with the greatest hindrance to progress: the resistant will. Melville’s testament to life on earth, “Moby Dick,” Ishmael makes an appeal to God to “keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught — nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience… For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the capstone to posterity.” It is my belief that procrastination is endemic to our culture, a direct outcome of our result-oriented society where we only value in terms of completed tasks, and not in terms of process. In resistance to these simplifying mechanisms, we procrastinate; we attempt to redeem the value of the work by not bringing it to completion. We’ve grown accustomed to operating according a backward logic that on the one hand esteems the procedural aspects of the work and on the other hand frustrates and devalues it to others and oneself by not allowing it to reach its culmination (an incomplete project remains a deficient project). These two conflicting dispositions make for a perplexing complex and a lot of unncecessary anxiety.

Psychologists Minjung Koo and Ayelet Fishback (both of the University of Chicago) have investigated the attitudes with which people motivate themselves and located two primary perspectives: to-date thinking; or, what was has been done up until point x, and, to-go thinking; that which is still left to do after point x. Wereas to-date thinking fosters a sense of accomplishment and complacency in the incomplete, to-go thinking actually triggers a discrepancy in the brain between where we are currently and where it is that we still want to get to and shifts one’s attention and energies toward what is still required to get to that point. Although remedial rewards can serve their purpose in achieving one’s goals, particularly if they function more as markers of what still remains to be done, it is best to wait to party hard until you’ve completed the cathedral. We all know what happened to the hare who took a little break and got passed up by the tortoise who then received his due credit when he passed the finish line.

Work and Time

I know many of my entries have been dedicated to the workplace 3.0 and its implications for the structure of our day to day lives, but I return to writing one again because it seems one of the more pertinent issues of our day. With more and more work being managable from the ubiquitous reach of the internet, our traditional divisions of job and leisure have begun to bleed into each other. The 9-5 that is more often a Monday through Saturday in the corporate scheme is slowly being replaced for a more elastic schedule that allows workers to take into consideration their own preferred schedules.

The conditions we have gotten used to in the business world are summarized well by Nigel Marsh, a renowned speaker and best selling writer on matters relating to the structure of the modern day work life, in his Ted Talks performance: “The reality of the society that we are in is that there are thousands upon thousands of people leading lives of quiet screaming desperation, where they work long hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.” According to Marsh, the working conditions we operate within in the corporate world, regardless of whether it be one of the big bad McCorporations or a “good company,” are intended to draw as much work from its employees as is efficient. Whereas I believe the rise of the internet is allowing employers and employees to establish a more congruous working arrangement and a more organic schedule, the basic pressures do remain: work will be work as bosses will be bosses as time will be time. Regardless of whether or not you are able to determine your own work schedule and place, one is always responsible for one’s own quality of life. Even if you determine when you eat and when you sleep, when you walk your dog and when you play with the kids, no one else will be making sure that you are enjoying your life. Here Mr. Marsh advises affirms inserting simple but life-giving projects in one’s day, not by trying to balance a strenuous day in the office with a strenuous workout in the gym, but redefining success by how enjoyable one has constituted one’s life. If we begin preferring simple pleasures and leisure versus maximizing one’s time in the office, at school, at home, we will be able to slowly redefine what sucess and happiness looks like.

American Made

I still vaguely remember being a child and gathering from adult conversations the importance of a tag announcing the origins of the product: “Made in U.S.A.” On the flipside of the same coin, being that I spent a fair amount of my growing up years in Germany I also remember the pride that Germans placed in their national treasures such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Audi. When a German friend visited me in the states the father of an American friend of mine appalled him, trying to convince him that BMW was a british automobile (why else would James Bond drive a BMW?). Expressing his utter dismay at this statement which I could only follow in part, he asked me how I would feel if an Italian were trying to convince me that Nike was a spanish manufacturer. I shrugged my shoulders, feignign to understand. Only when I was a senior in high school and began noticing American Apparel proudly promoting their clothing as being made in the U.S.A, and not in sweatshops, did I reconsider the importance of what it meant to produce consumer products “in-house.” Around this time I entered a Wal-Mart for the first time, proceeded to walk around and take a look at the articles on the shelf, and realizing that they all revealed the tag line “made in China.” Gradually, the repercussions of a world in which all manufacturing duties belonged to only one country sank into my high school brain; what would happen to all of the jobs that used to crank out all of those American made products? What happens when an economy that built itself around its exports primarily imports goods and has little more to offer to the global economy except its addiction to consumer goods?

Now that some time has passed since my initial discernment of the shifting industrial project and I have entered the workforce myself and traveled throughout Europe and Africa since doing so, I’ve come to realize that the USA has little more to offer to offer in terms of sustainable markets than its cultural capital. All of our basic necessities are contingent on southeast Asia. And yet there are some grassroots initiatives such such as famer markets, as well as more established movements to return to producing American made goods for American consumers. In Elma, New York a store gaining popularity fast has committed itself to sourcing all of its products to ensure they are absolutely 100% American made, claiming (to me in a somewhat distasteful manner, by draping US flags on the wall of their stores and blasting Toby Keith from their speakers) that buying American is patriotic. If there is to be any form of patriotism I can support at this moment in time, it would be buying American.

When a hyperspecialist starts hyperventilating

Lately I’ve been taken by notions of the universe espoused
by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the writer Jorge Luis Borges, and the
cosmologist Carl Sagan, who all postulated that existence itself (the infinite
galaxies, President Obama, and the FIFA World Cup) is little more than minutiae
operating as metadata that some grand narrator has constructed an endlessly
ongoing tale with. It seems this idea coincides with the advent of cloud
computing and the hyperspecialization existing in the workforce today,  dividing and isolating tasks along the line
of Adam Smith’s foretold division of labor in order to achieve maximum productivity.
Looking back at how our job titles themselves have been broken down and
atomized to absurd degrees of meaning in the last fifty years (“receptionists”
are now often referred to as “Directors of First Impressions”), and the job descriptions
that now correspond with these titles are marked by the same opaque
nonsensicality. Kafka’s predictions of the office have proved themselves to be
truer than he even imagined when he spent his years occupying himself with the
fatuous deliberations of the insurance office he worked in, engaged in tasks
that seemed to have no greater purpose or intention apart from his personal engagement
with tedious clauses. And now the tasks that young Franz once performed—sifting
through boxes and boxes of documents on the hunt for some trivial details—are being
performed by software tools that can scan more information in less time and for
less money. Recently I came across an online transcription service that is
hiring transcriptionists with various language backgrounds to work on a project
whose main ambition is to develop an automated transcription service. In a very
real sense, a lot of the jobs currently available are intended to remove that element
of human involvement, a reality that few workers in these positions are aware of.

In some areas however, this narrowed scope of focus has its
advantages. In medicine and in engineering, by narrowing the scope of focus
(while still retaining the grand vision) workers derive a meaningful satisfaction
 from their work. What remains to be seen
is how hyperspecialization—which makes it very easy to rescind worker’s
benefits—will continue taking shape in the USA which finds itself in between
India and China, where the system is already deeply entrenched, and the European
Union still values traditional worker’s rites and benefits. In order for
hyperspecialization to take effect as the new working model, a global network
initiating a new order will have to precede it. We shall wait and see.  

IBM's big 100

When I was looking at notebooks for college, my father, who ran a small computer consulting business at the time, encourage me to buy a Lenovo Thinkpad. Six years later, I still write many of my blog entries from the Lenovo 3000 N100 that has since traveled to three continents and absorbed many scrapes and bruises. It was the legacy of IBM that led my father to encourage me to buy the computer, a legacy of computer engineering that spans one hundred years almost exactly to this very day. IBM has a particularly fascinating, and not totally conflict-free, history in which they have re-invented themselves time and time again in order to not only provide the solutions to problems arising in our global information age, but to contribute largely in the framing of those very problems themselves so as to position themselves in such a way that their solutions remain ahead of the curve.  Originally IBM, or what was then known as C-T-R, engineered tabulating machines for various information processing needs (punch cards serving as the primary mode of information storing), fostering a corporate culture and pride that largely involved their drive to create new cutting-edge technologies. Retrospectively, IBM’s groundbreaking strategies to instill corporate culture  that included singing the IBM rally song (http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/multimedia/everonward_trans.html) in the workplace and insisting on a corporate uniform, leave a somewhat unappealing taste in my mouth, if only for former IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson’s ambiguous role in making it possible for the National Socialist regime to systematically target Jews using IBM’s tabulation machines.

Regardless of how dark a chapter of IBM’s business dealings with Hitler really were, their commitment to R & D–always investing their profits back into the company–drawing on their punch card system, IBM invented calculators, electronic typewriters, and magnetic disks for data storage, all before introducing the System/360 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360) in 1964, a multifunctional computer that supported several applications at the same time. From then on IBM invented the magnetic strips featured in all credit cards, bar codes, floppy drives, and in 1981 the first personal computer. During the eighties however, IBM’s clean-cut, blue suit business ethic took a nosedive when more free-thinking Silicon Valley companies such as Apple Macintosh and Microsoft picked up steam, and they had to cut out 100,000 jobs. According to many analysts, IBM’s fall can be attributed to their spreading themselves too thin, an issue they have since addressed by dedicating themselves to developing new information architecture and infrastructure, having sold off their Thinkpad computer line to Lenovo in 2005. One of the largest investors in Open Source technology, IBM has maybe made its biggest headlines by providing two prototypes whose intelligence has outmatched its greatest human competitor: in 1997 Gary Kasparov, the reigning chess champion, was defeated by Deep Blue, an IBM chess-playing computer, and then, in 2011, Watson, a supercomputer constructed by IBM engineers, took down two previous champions in Jeopardy. All in all, IBM’s active engagement with their markets and consumers, along with the range of flexibility they have demonstrated in taking on new challenges, has brought them the one hundred years of success we now attribute to them.

Set your Smile Free

Ever since reading Machiavelli we’ve been aware that effective communication has a lot more to do with tacit suggestion and barely audible gestures than direct communication. The smile is one of the more powerful communication “devices” that has evolved as one of the most immediate and striking signifiers and at the same time underrated or underacknowledged, as behavioral science studies are demonstrating. The smile is a cross-cultural signifier, though its meaning ranges drastically from region to region (i.e., in Russia it is often impolite to smile in public whereas it is impolite not to smile in public in the US). In a Ted Talk lecture (http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_gutman_the_hidden_power_of_smiling.html) Ron Gutman shares his discoveries made while researching smiles for thirty years at UC Berkeley, it becoming apparent that those who sported big bright smiles in either  their yearbook profiles or on their baseball cards consistently had more fulfilling and long lasting marriages, scored higher on standardized tests of well-being and general happiness, were more prone to inspire others, and would live seven years older than those who preferred not exercise their facial muscles

Both Charles Darwin and William James identified more reasons to smile when they outlined what is now known as the Facial Feedback Hypothesis that more or less states that physiological changes are not mere external expressions of emotional states, but that they actually induce mental states. In other words, by deciding to smile you will feel better. Of course, in returning to Machiavelli, the persuasive capabilities of the smile should not be underestimated. A smile is evolutionarily contagious, prompting a smile from us whenever we glimpse a smile; a smile will influence any trying situation or encounter, imbuing a positivity and confidence by necessity of the neural construction of the brain. A great rule to follow: if you have nothing to say, just smile. Peter Seller’s movie “Being There,” in which he plays Chance, a “retired” gardener, who has  never stepped foot in the “real world” until his employer dies and he is forced to enter the concrete jungle that is urban Washington D.C. where he ends up winning over a whole city with his simple smile and laconic Zen phrasings.  Quoting Gutman: “Smiling also makes us look good in the eyes of others. A recent Penn State University study confirmed that when we smile we not only appear more likeable and courteous, but we’re actually perceived to be more competent.”

Another fun tidbit involving the smile: fake smiles. Differentiating between real and fake smiles is notoriously difficult for us in real life but is possible for neuroscientists to gauge. A fake smile can cause the same outward implications that a genuine smile might, so if in doubt, force a smile. For fun, try your hand at deciphering smiles here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/ .