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You can easily be led to believe that the piles on the desk primarily are an aesthetic problem; that it gives a negative impression to someone who comes to pay a visit.

Or, that it’s only a problem with order; that the piles make it difficult to find the documents you are looking for when you need them.

But, unfortunately the problem is more serious than ...

This whole business of good structure – isn’t it sometimes the case that we really feel that we would need to work more effectively in our everyday life, but we just don’t know where to start? It’s just too much right now and we can barely keep our heads above the water.

We’ve got so little time that we don’t have the time to change the way we work, even if it’s in order to get more time to work with. It’ll have to be some other time, when we’ve got time.

But, if we continue like this, will the day when we have enough time to start working more
efficiently ever come? Do we really have to wait?

Not the way I see it. Right now is the second best time to start. The best time was yesterday.

So, let us now take only one simple step in the right direction. What would that be?

This week, US website “Small Business Trends Radio” listed the 100 best small business podcasts of 2010.

In the category “Business news and the big picture”, they picked my ...

To be a ”struktör” is very much about visualizing; to clarify what at first sight might be experienced as messy. By structuring and visualizing you make it all apprehensible and tangible. Then it will be easy to see what is big and what is small (it can be problems, opportunities or something else), what’s important and what is not so important, what the next natural step will be et c.

This type of work is a lot easier if you have well adapted tools, tools which you are comfortable with and enjoy working with. The struktör’s eight tools are:

Do you find it hard to compile tasks that were completed in a project or an assignment with the purpose of writing a report or create an invoice from the hours you spend on the project?

Is the result of this that you work until late at night trying to finish the report in time or that you send the invoice much later than you would like to?

Could these difficulties be due to that it’s hard to remember what you did and for how long when trying to remember it long after it was completed?

Here are five simple tips on how to make this process easy as pie.

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 ...

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 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…

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.

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.

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…

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 ...

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.

We can’t do everything we need to do everywhere or anywhere. For some things we need a computer, for others access to a phone and some things can only be done in the office.

We gain concentration if we at each point in time only need to care about the tasks that are available to work on where we are at the moment.

So, how do you determine what can actually be done here and now, from all the things you need to do?

The answer is ...

Imagine that a business, any kind of business, consists of a bunch of processes involving and performed by different participants (which could be employees, machinery, software, etc).

So, a process is then a routine, a series of activities that have a certain starting point and finishing line. One, a few or many participants may be involved in completing the activities in the process.

The purpose of looking at the business as a bunch of processes is that ...

In an earlier post we discussed how valuable it is to have a captivating and engaging vision.

As I see it, the vision describes the envisioned, future situation we want to achieve in the company. The vision should truly involve me as a leader and co-worker; it should make me want to spend at least 40 hours per week for x number of years to arrive at the envisioned situation.

So, the vision should evoke some degree of rapture, an excitement, eagerness, a good gut-feeling. The more senses the vision appeals to, the more efficiently it can inspire us.

So, what form should the vision have then? Here are six ideas on how to formulate and communicate the vision.

When you are experiencing more chaos in your workday than you are comfortable with and you wish to improve the structure of your day, it is fully understandable if you tremble at the mere thought of the extent of the changes needed.

Perhaps you are hesitant and are even doubtful as to whether it is even possible to change, and you might even fear that your particular situation is a hopeless case.

I am convinced that no circumstances are hopeless and I am equally convinced that you can make significant changes with small means.
Do not try to make all improvements at once, but choose to work on one aspect at a time and you will experience greater success. When the first change is done, move on to the next, etc.

Nice and easy, you will end up more structured and with more time on your hands by taking it one step at a time.

Here are three ideas on different steps to begin with.

When you are arranging your system for documents, to-do-lists, referencematerial and other materials, it is normal to ask yourself how it should be done, for instance, how should I store the documents I might need some day?

Should I put the articles, brochures or whatever it might be in binders or should I use a filing system? Should I do my to-do-lists in Outlook, in my smartphone or on loose pieces of paper?

Have you ever delegated a task to someone or have someone promise that they would get back to you with some sort of information you need, forgot that you did, and then, at the very last minute or when it is already too late, discover that you never received the material you desperately need right now?

Here’s a hint to how to never repeat that unpleasant experience ever again.