Over 30 years ago, while working for General Motors I got handed a Franklin Covey planner, and a week of training. The topic was so interesting to me, and I have been studying it ever since.

But, that world is gone. Paper planners may still play a role in your system, but there is no denying that we have way more "information" to manage than we did 30 years. Things such as:

- Emails

- Website links

- Reference documents

- Screenshots

- Our own notes and thoughts

- Personal calendars

- Shared calendars within our family

- The dozen papers that come home from school every day

- Medication and health information

The list goes on and on. If you do not have a way to deal with all these various types of information, life becomes overwhelming real fast. If you are too busy trying to keep up, have fun, find some time for rest, and doing it over and over again, you probably don't have the capacity left to figure out a system that can help manage all this information.

Let me do that for you. No "one system" works for everybody. That is why you can not just pick up a book, read it, implement a system and be done. Otherwise, I would see no value in offering this type of help.

Instead, I will work with you and understand your personality and how you think. I can help you map out your current process. Even if you don't think you have a process, you do and that might be the biggest help of all. Then, I can make recommendations how to improve and streamline that process. Finally, I will show you how to evolve with the process. The process will never be 100% perfect from the start, and that is okay. By figuring out what works and what doesn't, it can continuallybe tweaked to make it the best for you.

Let's say that you have your personal life figured out. Or, maybe it is simple enough that there is not enough friction there for you to need any help. That is fine. But, what if you are struggling with your professional life?

I get it. I have worked in corporate America for most of my career. There are good things about it, and bad things about it. The goal here is to maximize the good, minimize the bad, and let you enjoy your life outside of the work environement.

In order to help here, I would need to know more about you and your specific scenario. There are too many variables here to try to put together one plan that would help.

I also understand that in a business environement, people are often limited to the tools they are available to use (Microsoft OneNote, Teams, etc). Trying to get a company to adopt a new tool is not usually an option, which creates a different set of challenges.

But, in general, here are some of the ways that I can help streamline things in a more rigid professional environment.

- Organize, prioritize and identify important tasks

- Find direction, when no direction is provided for you

- Be accountable for your career, because nobody else is going to do it for you

- Resolve conflicts with other people in your company

- Create a team dynamic when it seems like others are not cooperating

- Improve communication with those around you

- Be a leader, regardless of your role

Are you a creator, a writer, an artist, a builder, an accountant, a lawyer, etc? If you are, you are probably really good at doing what you do.

I have been there as a small business owner, and I know, every minute that you are not using your skills to do what you do, you are not getting paid. Which makes it really tough to think about how your business operates. How to make better systems, and how to make things more streamlined. Especially if your business is expanding, or worse yet, the lack of processes and systems is keeping you from expanding because you simply do not have the time.

Whether efficiency without scaling is your goal, or efficiency so that you can scale, these things are both vital to have figured out so that you can spend as much time as possible doing the things that bring in the paychecks.

My process for helping out small businesses include:

- Reviewing your current workflows the way they currently are. How is data stored, how is accessed, what is needed to do your job efficiently.

- Make recommendations on how to improve you current workflows.

- Reviewing and mapping out your business processes. From the moment a phone call (or e-mail) comes in, to the day the money hits your account, what happens in between?

- Make recommendations on how to improve and simplify your business processes.

- Collaborative task managment. Even if you have a small team, keeping team members on the same page on what needs to be done and when is extremely important.

- Identify tasks that can be automated.

- Identify tasks that be done by people other than yourself. If you are tired of handling ALL the aspects of your business, and want to get back to what you started the business for, getting others to help with business operations is the only way. You should be spending your time bringing your unique talents to the world, and not making invoices.

Some times, just taking the time to review these, and have an outsider objectively make recommendations, it is enough to be able to implement it. Small business owners just sometimes do not have the time, or know where to start to audit processes. If that is enough, we can be done after these steps.

If you need more, I can offer more. Such as:

- Setting up new systems. New software is great these days, but if they are used right away without being setup correctly, they become an unuseable nightmare as more and more data flows in. I can setup and organize new systems so that you don't have to.

- Document the new processes. Whether it is in document form, presentation, or training videos, being able to have everyone on a team be able to understand things with having to ask YOU is the next step to both efficiency and scalability. Do you want to grow your business? Being able to allow others to do things with minimal involvement from you is the way to do it.

- Training. Sometimes documentation is not enough. While it is important to do first, change is difficult, even if it is for the better. Sometimes it is also beneficial to have a human explain new processes, their purpose and their value, and allow them to ask questions and address concerns.

Medium and large businesses can be really challenging. Often there are ways have doing things that have been done for the last 30 years. People are used to the processes and the culture and things can be tough to change. Systems changes can be monumental for an IT department to implement across a large organization. But, there is also hope.

Not everything has to be a major tear up. One of the things I find with larger corporations are not necessarily the tools being used, but the process that the tools are being used in. Or even worse yet, the lack of a process, or a process that is not understood by all team members. All of those things lead to large inefficiencies and are worth taking the time to address.

While you are in the process of making progress every day on your projects, it can be difficult to do a process audit to see how it can be improved. Or, the process could be in your head, and you assume everyone else in the company should come to the same conclusion. Here are some ways that I think I can help in the larger corporate environment.

Collaborative Task Management

If teams are keeping action items in Excel, OneNote, Powerpoint, meeting minutes, and in multiple locations for multiple projects, you need my help. This old school process is very inefficient. It requires the people doing the work to actively go out to multiple locations to find what they are supposed to be doing. Which means it never gets done. It requires managers to check multiple locations across multiple projects to figure out what is going on. There is no wholistic view of what is going on in the organization to anyone.

So, how is that dealt with? More meetings. To review what has been done in the past, re-live e-mails that people have already seen, and re-cap conversations. This is a very inefficient way to try and keep people in the loop. For somebody trying to be productive and get work done, the two biggest time killers are the M&M's. Meetings and Managers.

A collaborative task management system will give Managers the ability to create and assign tasks in a central location. They will be able to see where multiple projects stand at the same time, and get the progress information that they need all while keeping disruption of work to a minimum. It will also keep meetings short and efficient becuase all the detail that would normally be reviewed in a "meeting" is already captured. Meetings can be about tasks that have roadblocks and tasks that are late, and how to make progress on those. That is a big paradigm shift from the meeting being a re-cap of what has occurred in the past.

Process Audits

Have you ever created a value stream map of your existing processes to see if they actually make sense? Often this goes undone, becuase it is not fun for most people. It is fun for me, so let me do it for you.

Often, once you have a visual map of your existing processes, the inefficiencies can be easily identified. And, that is the point. The make more efficient, useful and effective processes for the whole organization.

Visual Problem Solving

I am not saying this to brag on myself. I am going to say it so that you understand the importantance. I have been through the Design for Six Sigma Yellow Belt training twice, at two different companies. I also hold a Design for Six Sigma Black Belt Certification. In all that time, learning new techniques, new tools, and new ways to analyze data, I learned ONE very simple technique that I am going to share with you.

The way you solve a problem, is not to hide in a corner, find the solution and tell the whole company about it. The way to solve it is to take the information that you have, and create a visual representation that displays the problem in a way that a 10 year old can understand it 4 seconds.

That is much easier to say that actually to do, which is why I am here to help. Once a problem is represented in this way, it is no longer about trusting a single persons recommendation on how to solve the problem. It becomes very clear what the problem is, and the solutions become so much easier.

Another tip I picked up from Six Sigma training is that "A well defined problem is a problem half solved." Most corporations go from the identification of a problem (Scrap rate is too high) to a solution (let's change something and see what happens). The step in between there that is ofent skipped, is to define the problem. Understand the inputs, noise, factors, and their contribution to the output. Once that is understood, it can be balanced with a business case of what is capable of being change, and then the solution can be optimized. Want specific examples? I could talk about this for days with examples, so simply contact me and I would be glad to discuss.