Hanging out with man’s best friend is a huge part of our daily routine, and for many families a dog or cat is like another child. But as much as we pamper our furry friends, we can’t take them everywhere with us. And when it comes to those 8 hours (or more) we spend…

Have you ever noticed that some people have piles of paper all over their office?  If you do not organize by piling, you might be viewing those piles with curiosity, disgust or amazement.  Why would anyone want to be surrounded by piles, especially “dysfunctional” piles of paper that take up whole sections of their…

What you do at the end of the year sets the tone and direction of the new year. This year set your intention to take the 12 Months of Clearing Challenge. Commit to clearing your entire home of those things you no longer love or use. Sound like a tall order? It is! But, it can…

Since I’ve been thinking about the spaces we work in a lot lately, I thought I’d talk a bit about the new approach to work that’s taking hold among many self-employed and telecommuting workers these days: coworking. There are several different approaches to coworking, but the basic idea is simple: create a space where…

When lay-offs and redundancies are on the rise, it generally follows that people trying to make a living from home, working for themselves, or over the Internet are on the increase as well. So it stands to reason that as we speak, thousands of people are sitting in their new home office (quite possibly the…

The idea of making a comfortable living without leaving your home or putting pants on in the morning is an idea that makes many people drool all over their office clothes. No more commutes, no more company politics. There are negative aspects to freelancing—clients can be slow to pay or demand millions of revisions that decrease…

One of the greatest sources of clutter in just about any office environment is unfiled paperwork. I think everyone suffers at least a little from Keep-It Syndrome, that horrendous affliction that causes us to imbue every scrap of paper that crosses our desks with a mysterious power that makes it nearly impossible to throw anything…

It’s tempting to go looking for a bargain when it comes time to stock your home office with equipment. And there’s nothing wrong with looking for a bargain in itself; if you find a high quality item on sale, by all means, get it now – don’t wait until it goes back up! But buying certain…

A long-time standby in the productivity realm, a tickler file is a reminder system intended to act as an adjunct to your regular calendaring and scheduling system. Although there are several different kinds of tickler file, the most well-known (thanks largely to David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Merlin Mann’s…

I’ve just had an opportunity to declutter my workspace, having spent half of the day swapping my home office and my son’s room around. The swap wasn’t an excuse to declutter (rather, to make better use of the utter lack of telephone outlets in our house) but I take every chance I get; we all…

Last week we talked about setting up your flash drive so that you had a “portable office” of sorts wherever you go. This week we’ll take it a step further and look at the web apps you can use: all you’ll need to ensure is that the computer you’re “borrowing” has a good browser…

Your printer is probably a utilitarian workhorse that you don’t think about until it’s broken. Why not spend a moment to consider the use of your printer so you can save some time and some paper too? Here are seven practical, easy-to-implement tips: 1. Keep supplies at the point of use. You can use…

If you work from home, the central part of your work life is the home office. For some, that means the kitchen table, but most of us assign a specific room to be the base of operations and (try to) do our work from there each day. Given that we must take into consideration strategy

When you work in an office building — even if you’re just a member of the cubicle farm — someone else is usually in charge of handling environmental details. You may be asked to switch off your computer before you leave for the evening or to throw paper into a separate trash receptacle, but that’s…

What would an ideal workday look like? While there might not be a single answer across the board, all of us can relate to the fact that many of our workdays are not designed for optimal productivity. We complain about too many meetings, not enough pay, travel that saps your energy and did…