Tired of having to send belated gifts? Looking for a way to streamline gifts for people in your office? Whether or not you are in the Raleigh, NC area, the following information from guest blogger Janice Cutler will help you be a hero in the office.

"The corporate accounts program at North Raleigh Florist is truly about minimizing time investment for maximized productivity. When a corporate client sets up an account with us we ask some basic questions so we can streamline the process for them going forward to make ordering quick and easy. Armed with all of the clients' pertinent information and preferences we create a file with which all of our associates are familiar. Billing is arranged on a monthly basis, frequent orders can even have discounts on products or delivery, thereby saving the company money. We can even accommodate custom orders for gourmet or gift baskets and include clients' merchandise, business cards, or gift cards from local businesses. All of these terms are worked out in advance. Some clients even fax or e-mail their recipient information to place orders to save themselves time-we have everything else on file, so ordering is a breeze! Here are some examples of our clients:

Do you feel like your clock is plotting against you because the minutes seem to go by too quickly? I must confess that the older I get, the faster time seems to pass. And yet with all of the changes that go on in our daily lives, time is the one constant. It never changes. There are always 60 seconds in one minute, 60 minutes in one hour, 24 hours in one day, 168 hours in one week, etc. We can do absolutely nothing to speed it up or slow it down.  

I recently came across this quote by Golda Meir, I must govern the clock, not be governed by it. So what do I need to do to not be governed by the clock? Well, first I need to be a good steward of my time. I need to plan what I want to do, how long I want to do it, etc. Now that doesn’t mean that everything will be perfect. But it does mean that I need to exercise good choices where possible. For example, should I spend 20 minutes or 20 seconds on a 140 character tweet? Should I spend three hours or three days preparing dinner for four close friends? We feel governed by time when we are spending it according to others’ expectations.

By the way, “spending time” is exactly what happens. Once it is gone, we can’t get it back. There are no refunds or do-overs. So before you start each task today, ask yourself, “is this the best way to spend my time right now? If not, what should I do instead?” You can’t ever tell the positive impact these two questions might have on your day.

If you've experienced, you are groaning. If not, you wonder if I have lost my mind...

It started early one morning in June, 2005. I was innocently responding to an email when all of the sudden my computer screen turned completely royal blue. I tried everything (short of throwing it out the window!). At the first reasonable moment, I called my computer guy. He lead me through a couple of exercises that didn't resolve the problem. He said something about "a problem" and "blue screen of death" but I was too frantic to really comprehend.

Long story short, my hard drive had crashed and was completely unrecoverable. As an organizer, you would think that I backed up data on a daily basis. Oops! Never made the time. I had backed up some stuff about a month previous...but not everything and not recently.

Would it surprise you to know that a number of people with a "clutter problem" are perfectionists? Well, it's true. Sandra Felton puts it this way in her book When You Live with a Messie,

Perfectionism is a reflection of a control issue. Messies are afraid...of losing control. They hope by having all this stuff, they will be more in control. Of course, it doesn't work that way. They lose control and meet fewer needs by this way of life.

So the thinking goes:

• "If I don't have X, I won't be able to give it to my friend when she (might) need it."
• "If I don't have Y, my colleague will think less of me."
• "If I delegate this task, the person probably won't do it the (my) right way."
• "If I don't say yes to this request, the project won't work correctly."

If this describes you, try a little bit of "thought shift" by asking yourself these questions:

Are you overwhelmed by your email? If so, you are not alone. In his book Communication Landmines, Marty Clarke states, "Keep in mind that e-mail is essentially a speed medium. Communicating through e-mail buys you incredible speed. And this speed exists on both sides of the communication." So why the overwhelm...you receive an email, you respond, they respond, you respond, and so forth. If you start this first thing in the morning, it might be noon before the email go-round stops!

Multi-tasking...you either love it or hate it...you either think you can be really productive with it or it only makes tasks more difficult. While I could (and may!) write a whole article about it for my ezine, I have one specific instance of productive multi-tasking to relate...and I am the beneficiary!

I was presenting 0 to 6 in 5 last week to Chix in Business. I knew that my friend, Stefanie Zizzo, had been waiting to hear me speak on this topic for quite some time. As a Career and Life Coach, she has a real interest in the topic. Knowing her enthusiasm, I asked if she would write a quote subsequent to my talk which I could use in a press release about the event. Not only did she write the quote, but she also posted it as a recommendation on LinkedIn. I was surprised and pleased at the bonus. But then again, Stefanie understands the benefits of recommendations and of saving time...after writing the quote, she just had to cut and paste it into my LinkedIn profile.

...or maybe fiction is the same as truth or vice versa...I was reading Breach of Promise by James Scott Bell. At one point the main character is following three men down the street. While it appears the men are having a conversation, the main character soon realizes that that instead of talking to each other, each of them is talking on their cell phone. This scenario continues into a restaurant. The main character says,

To be hip in LA you have to have a busier-than-thou attitude. You have to believe there is simply not enough time in the day, and so on the eighth day God created cell phones and PDAs to prove your indispensability to the universe. Staying hip is almost a full-time job for Angelenos. And the three major cheese at the back table were in frantic pursuit of their calling.

The other day I passed a place called Extra Attic Personal Storage. What a clever name! But it also got me to thinking...Peter Walsh states, "Self-storage is often supposed to be temporary-...but it's a fifteen-billion-dollar industry. There are more than forty thousand self-storage facilities in this country..." I know that where I live there seems to be facilities on about every street corner.

It occurs to me that "temporary" and "extra attic" are mutally exclusive. An attic is a permanent part of a house, not something temporary. So I think about the attics that I often see. They are a hodge-podge of unknown boxes and bags with little rhyme or reason as to the contents. Often people only venture to their attic to deposit more stuff rather than to retrieve an item. In childhood, attics are associated with ghosts or monsters.

Mind on info overload? I was reading Angela Hunt's novel, She Always Wore Red, when I ran across the following sentences:

Whatever made me think I could go back to school? For thiry-nine years, the neurons in my brain have been fling information away, and now I'm pretty sure the drawers are either full or stuck. I'm not sure there's room for more then a dozen new fifty-cent words.

Do you feel like that? That your brain is overflowing with information and there just isn't any room left? Just like we can have too much stuff in our space or too many tasks in our schedule, there can be too much info in our brain. Let me list a couple of ways to "destuff" your brain:

We are all familiar with the “to-do list”. No matter how short or long yours is it never seems to really be done. In fact, tasks are usually added to the list faster than they are deleted from the list. How frustrating! You may have heard of “not to-do lists”. These are tasks that you have decided for whatever reason, not to complete. This may mean that you delegate them to someone else or you decide they aren’t as important. The reason doesn’t really matter. The point is that you gained more time in your schedule because you determined not to engage in some activity.

Lade Stella Reading says, The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone. Are there tasks that are such a habit that you don’t even question whether or not they are valuable? So often we do things without thinking. This can be a good thing such as our morning routine of getting out of bed, showering, dressing, etc. without thinking. This type of routine makes each day easier because you don’t have to engage your brain. On the other hand, just because you have hosted a Memorial Day party for 100 for the last 10 years doesn’t mean that you have to host it this year. Traditions are great if you enjoy them. Once they become drudgery, time to leave it undone! Change it to a potluck or better yet, someone else can have the party.