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Have you ever experienced losing the receipts you got during a business trip that you had to account for, that the notes you took during the conference just disappeared, or perhaps the business cards you received at the mingle party apparently were nowhere to be found?

They have probably disappeared because ...

Next Monday, February 22nd, the one hundredth edition of the Swedish version of the weekly newsletter “Done! - Tips on structure from Stiernholm Consulting” is published.

When I started writing these structure tips for almost three years ago, I did not think I would keep up for so long. However,

Most of us spend much of our days in meetings. At the risk of generalizing, I dare say that we all have experienced meetings that we wish we had not attended and that turned out not quite what we had expected. There may be meetings where do not come to any decision, meetings that get prolonged, meetings that start late, meetings that are completely chaotic, etc.

When you want to refine the way you do something, it is a good idea to ask the pros, those that apparently manage to develop their businesses from success to success, mostly by having meetings. A while ago, BusinessWeek published an interview with Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of search products, where she ...

Choose a word, any word, and say it out loud to yourself over and over again. After a while it becomes more like a sound than a word and it looses its meaning.

I’ve experienced a similar effect at a few management team meetings. It may have been the tenth management team meeting for the year and just after lunch when we’ve come to the chart concerning how the eighth key figure is evolving, ...

In early January, Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet published a feature about the Malmö based company TAT - The Astonishing Tribe.

Among the pictures ...

In a normal week at work, I have got a lot of different meetings with different people. It can be project-meetings, sales-meetings, lunch meetings or other kinds of meetings.

It is important for me that all of my meetings result in some form of progression, that they are tangible, and that all parties know the purpose of the meeting. It is not necessary that we make decisions in every meeting for things to progress; some meetings’ primary purpose is to get to know each other and our respective businesses, but ...

One of the most valuable components of a structured, effective, personal way of working is the weekly update.

If you in your everyday life complete and add tasks to your to-do-list, creating a continuous in and out flow of tasks, it is in itself a good thing. But it often tends to result in a situation where only the tasks of immediate importance are completed, for example the most recently added tasks or those someone recently reminded you to do.

There may be tasks here and there in the to-do-list that you added a couple of months ago, which are of vital importance for your business, but which you couldn’t do anything about at the time. Now might be the right time to complete such a task and if you do not at regular intervals go through your to-do-list, it can easily get lost in the crowd.

This is where the…

To keep and store reference material such as meeting notes, project documents, sketches, correspondence, printouts and other things so that they are easy to find when you need them, is a key factor in a good structure at work.

If we furthermore want the storage method to be aesthetically pleasing even as the material is readily available, it is a real challenge (but an enjoyable such).

A man that ...

An effective way to easily get the right thing done at the right time is to use a to-do-list where you write down everything you have to do and check them off the list once you have completed them.
As I see it, the greatest benefit with this is that you no longer have to keep everything in your head and instead you can relax, knowing that everything awaiting completion is on the list.

But, aren’t we quite a few who have decided to start making to-do-lists, got it going and after a while noticed that all the things we don’t have time to do are what’s on the list since we are only doing the things we are trying to remember? Where and in what format you choose to keep your list is crucial as to how well it will help you.

Here are ten, no, eleven tips to how to be successful with a to-do-list that works in the long run.

I have got an idea and I need your help.

In one of my current assignments, we need to…

If we, like Georges Perec in the fascinating novel “Life – a User’s Manual”, could freeze time just for a moment on an ordinary day at work, how much of your business would be visible to the naked eye?

Are the things you do visible only when you are doing them, or are your routines and flows visualized in any way, so it would be possible for an outsider to study them, even if everything was standing still?

To describe your business in terms of work-flows is valuable, both making the actual real-time description and the complete documentation afterwards. This is particularly important in service-businesses since the service isn’t visible unless someone is performing it.

Do you find pleasure, in the same way as I do, in mapping out processes? Do you enjoy drawing boxes and arrows in a schematic way? Is your working-day complete when you have captured an ongoing activity as series of flows?

Perhaps not, but the actual visualization of the work doesn’t need to be as formal as the flowcharts that first come to mind. A checklist, an animation, a map of symbols or maybe even a comic-strip may be the perfect way to illustrate it, as long as it is appropriate for the target-group and the purpose.

But what is the actual point of describing your business?

Here are seven reasons why visualizing your company through flowcharts is useful.

I have a penchant for always having something with me to write or record in. It can be a notebook or a stack of index cards.

At least for me, ideas are volatile. As I mull something over ...

A couple of weeks ago, I visited Fläkt Woods in Växjö, Sweden, in order to hold a course in personal productivity for their staff. Fläkt Woods is a global business in ventilation solutions and they are the market leader in their field.

Meeting them was impressive in many ways. One thing was ...

Thank you for a wonderful 2009!

It has been the best year so far for Stiernholm Consulting, in many respects. At this very moment, it ...

What do you do with all that good-to-have-material, your reference material, the things you need from time to time that are so simple to put in piles so it won’t get lost, and which you then never find when you need them the most, just because they are somewhere at the bottom of the piles?

The whole idea with this type of material is for it to be out of your way when you don’t need it, it should be easy to put away and easy to find whenever you need it.
My personal favourite solution to this problem is…

Now, there are just a few days left of this fantastic 2009, and although I enjoy the time off between Christmas and New Year, my thoughts are already far into 2010.

Navid Modiri asked me the other day what my keywords for 2010 are. I love such food for thought.

After a few seconds of afterthought, ...

Do you ever experience from time to time that you are just completing task after task, doing one detailed thing after another, and everything is spinning so fast that you can’t grasp what’s going on, and that you don’t even have the time to reflect on what week it is and what’s coming up next month? Join the club.

It’s one thing to be in a flow, to feel that everything is clicking and falling into place, that you move from clarity to clarity and are getting things done, but that is not the situation I am talking about.

The condition I have in mind can be recognized by that you feel a week has just begun when it suddenly is Friday, you are astonished to realize that a certain meeting was “this week already?!” or that you are always running out of time when you are close to a deadline. To use a worn, but none the less illuminating expression: “You can’t see the woods for all the trees”.

My solution to this situation is ...

This autumn I have again had the opportunity to work with a group of entrepreneurs within a project called “Spira” (in English “spire”) here in Gothenburg. In this project, ten fresh entrepreneurs get help building their business during six intense months.

My assignment was to give a talk and to hold a workshop on how to formulate a long term vision and how to break it down into short term, detailed goals and milestones to guide you on an average workday. A month later, I met with every individual entrepreneur to work on their particular questions and challenges, regarding how to reach your long term goal as easily as possible.

When I sat down with ...

We are many who receive quite a lot of e-mails, perhaps even more than we can handle and are comfortable with. It is easy to feel that you are the victim of dire circumstances when it comes to the constant flow of mail into your inbox, but it is possible to be more efficient by working structured even with this.

Here are five concrete ways in which you can work more efficiently with your incoming mail.

Have you also from time to time experienced that the things just waiting to be done are in a real mess and you need to get a good overview to sort out what needs to be prioritized and what are the next steps?

It might be needed in some area for you individually or for your entire business.

Here is a quick and efficient method used successfully by both myself and several of my clients.