Snoskred - Life in the Country

I am all for making positive changes in all areas of my life, but sometimes you have to put the blinkers on and focus your sights on one specific area. Right now for me, that area is organisation - or organiZation if you’re from the US - and time management.

I have good reasons for wanting to get organised. I want to start a business over the next two months. I realise that if I started a business now without having the right skills in place it just would not work. So it is time to take a deep breath, suck it up, and get to it. At the start of this week I made a personal commitment to myself - I am getting organised.

Now some of the stuff I am going to say here is going to seem.. lame.. silly.. possibly even stupid. In order for you to understand where I’m going you need to know where I am at now. I’m not going to lie to ya’all. here’s my major issues.

I am easily distracted.

I have trains running just fine on the tracks but then suddenly they crash. IE - I can be in the middle of doing something and then my mind throws out something else I need to do, and I will stop and change direction.

I’ll be in the middle of writing something and remember I wanted to check a website. I will be in the middle of one task, and remember one that needs doing RIGHT NOW. Yes, this is happening as I type. I haven’t updated the Aussie Blogs List yet, cos I took a day off today.

It happened again just then, as I was typing this. I noticed my glasses were dirty. This brings us to another issue I have -

I don’t put things back where they belong.

I was watching a West Wing in the lounge room yesterday. Part way through, guess what happened? I noticed my glasses were dirty. So I came in here to my desk and took my lens cleaning cloth out to the lounge room. I had to stop typing this post to go and get it.

My computer is a mess.

On the inside, that is. Information goes in, but I have no easy system, no good way of finding things, my desktop has always been a nightmare of files just dumped there. In fact here is how it looked at the start of this week.

I need to take charge NOW.

When I am running my own business, working to deadlines? All those little distractions and things not being where they should be and not having a system of where things get put and how to find them again on the computer - these things are going to add up and drown me. Especially because the business I want to run is computer orientated.

So how to fix it?

Step One - Done!

Get my computer organised and start a system of where things go that will work for me.

Thanks to this wonderful article - How to Keep your Desktop Organized (without getting insane) my desktop now looks like this.

Step Two - In Progress

I am a digital packrat. There are folders full of files. Take for example our photographs. We have a lot of them. We never had a system for organising them other than to put dates on the folders. Consequently, we now have a lot of this - Yes, that right there is the date we began putting some kind of name on the folders. But the no name folders go back to *cringe* 2 years before that date.

There is no magic wand I can wave here, but thanks to another article I read - A 3-Step Cure for Digital Packrats, and How to Know If You’re One of Them - I now know how to cure it.

I’m looking through two folders a day, naming them, putting aside good photos I want to use for the thought of the day photos. I am also looking through two bookmarks folders a day, sorting, deleting, moving. This will take time - If I tried devoting one day to it, I’d still have a lot of folders not labeled. Better to do little chunks daily than overwhelm myself right now.

Step Three - Time Management - Done Daily

1. Create a daily list of tasks.
2. Give each task a priority A, B, C,
3. Ensure that you work on the “A” tasks first.
4. Handle each piece of paper on your desk only once.
5. Ensure that you make the best use of your time.
6. Don’t postpone anything - Do it now!

Step Four - Day Planner

Click the above for a bigger image

I have done this for the last three days and spent a day preparing for it before that. It’s rocking my socks, ya’all. You have no idea how focused I feel right now. It’s a happy feeling.

Step Five - Checklists
Yes, this is possibly the most lame of all the things I am doing, but it is helping me remember the things I do daily. I plan to update it in a week or so when I have identified more things I do daily. This is laminated so I can tick the boxes each day with a whiteboard marker and then rub that off ready for the next day. Yes, in the past I would forget my head if it were not screwed on, apparently. Now I have the checklists, sitting right in front of me, there’s not much chance of that.

Step Six - Email Check

One of the ways I get distracted is by the little envelope that pops up when I have new mail. Solution - open the mail in the morning, check emails, reply emails, close emails. Open again at lunchtime, dinner time, before bed. So if I don’t reply urgently, now you know why - and you can know when to expect that reply.. approximately..

Step Seven - Time Off For Good Behaviour.

This new stuff I’m doing is pretty intense right now, because I have a lot of organising I am doing. The major two things I need to finish are sorting my google reader and going through my archives here. These are both time consuming. So at lunchtimes, I step away from the computer for an hour. At dinner time, I step away for two hours.

I plan on having at least one light schedule day each week until I have a good handle on things, but I still want to make sure I get two of photos and bookmarks done each day. I took today off, got a haircut, went to see a house, put in an application so we might be moving, got my glasses fixed, did a little shopping. Whoa, what was that? Yes, we might be moving to my dream location. More on that tomorrow.

Step Eight - Buy In Bulk

The inexpensive things I find myself looking for, I need to purchase them so I can have one in each location I may need them. The lens cleaning cloth is a good example. They’re not expensive and it will cost me less to buy 2 more of them (I have 2 now, one in the car - one on my desk) than my time is worth to keep chasing them from room to room.

Step 9 - Put Things Back

The things that I can’t buy extra of, I need to put them back when I’m done. Simple, hey? It’s not as easy as it sounds, but I am committed to doing it.

What happens next..

I’m taking it one day at a time right now. I am hopeful that in three to four weeks I will become unconscious competent in being organised. However I think it may be a habit I need to keep working on and these skills of time management are going to be so useful to me in my business, I’m going to keep using them.

All I know is, I’m feeling motivated. I’m sleeping a bit less because when I wake up, I want to get onto the daily tasks I have set. I’ll update you urgently on developments. so stick around!

Long time readers of this blog will recall that I used to go to work and in that workplace there were some.. hmm.. how shall we put this.. people who didn’t treat me too nicely. Which was odd, given I was the Boss’s Daughter. I mean that’s a pretty bad career move, one would have thought. But for those who haven’t been long time readers, here’s a bit of history so you can understand Karma in action.. this post will be long, my apologies in advance.

One staff member who I nicknamed Birdsnest NEVER spoke to me - no hello in the morning, no conversation during the day, no goodbye at night. That would not have bothered me, had it not been combined with a few other factors -

- That whenever my Dad left the store she and several of the other staff would congregate around a desk, chat with each other, and ignore the customers. I was forced to watch customers walk out without being served and I could do nothing about it.

- That she washed her hair once a week and on the days in between she would not even brush it, she would just put it into a pony tail. Can you say skanky? It looked bad but it smelt even worse when you got up close - cigarette smoke mainly but sometimes with a hint of I don’t even want to know what. When you’re serving customers personal hygiene is a *little* bit important.

- That she was running several at home businesses (catalogs, party plans) and that she would use the phones at work to call her customers and on occasion she would get them to come and pick up the goods from in the shop - an absolute no-no and against her terms of employment.

- That she would deliberately steal sales from the other staff members. There’s a simple rule - if a customer walks in and says “I saw (staff member) and I want to buy one of these” you write the sale up in the name of (staff member). If the customer comes in and says “I was in speaking to (staff member) but I’d like more info” and you spend a significant amount of time with them, its now your sale. Birdsnest was the only member of staff who never followed this rule - and the other staff often would not know she had stolen their sales.

- That one of the staff’s husband went away for an overseas tour of duty, and that girl began hanging around with Birdsnest, going out at night, partying - and soon she stopped speaking to me entirely unless it was necessary. Which did not go down well with me - we’d got along fine previously and I hadn’t done anything to deserve that (which she has admitted since).

- That she befriended one of the very young and impressionable girls who worked in the shop and started taking her out partying at night - and that girl soon stopped speaking to me also, previously we had got along very well. I could see a pattern here.

- That my parents and I would argue about *all* of the above, and they would tell me to let it go off my back like water off a duck and not pay any attention to it. Much easier said than done.

Now I’m not going to pretend like I was a perfect person during all of this. If she were writing this, I’m sure she would come up with a list of things that I did wrong and it would have a lot more things on it than what I’m about to say I did wrong, I’m sure.

- When I realized she was not going to speak to me, my attitude towards her could be called frosty at best, disapproving at worst. I had no respect for her, a 40 year old woman with two kids who acted like a teenager and a spoilt brat.

- When she did things wrong, I marked it down on my mental note card, and you can bet I brought all those things out during the arguments with my parents. I allowed these things to add up to the point that had she suddenly decided to treat me nicely, I would not have been able to return that niceness.

- I was not the only person who was upset by the ignoring customers etc, and when other staff complained to me about it, I cut them off and encouraged them to speak to the boss and tell them how it made them feel - I made it clear I was not there to pass their messages about being upset on to the boss for them however these all got added to my mental notecard as well and brought out - I should not have done that.

- Once, in a post I called her a skanky ho here on the blog, but two weeks later after THREE weeks of those braids not being washed and absolutely feeling sick to the stomach from the stench of three weeks worth of cigarette smoke - you cannot imagine the smell and everywhere in the store I went I could smell it, she was finally called into the office and TOLD to wash her hair before returning to work.. She complained about this in front of me and when she walked away I called her a skanky ho to other people - not to her face. She’d pushed me to my limit that day. I honestly would have preferred to say it to her face, but my parents would have deaded me. The message did get back to her, though.

The whole episode came to a fiery blowup in September when the younger girl who she had befriended hung around a rep that was in the store all day ignoring the other customers in order to get some sales from the rep and there was this big blowup over a sale she stole from one of the other girls - and I did not stop myself from saying what I really thought when she came to me looking for sympathy. All I said was “If it were your sale, your name would be on the invoice”. But it was enough to cause her to have a major meltdown.

After that I stuck it out for a little bit longer, before fizzling out to a quiet end in October last year - a quiet end which I never blogged about, but one day it all just got to be too much, and when the other half and I came home at lunch time I simply could not stop the tears, and decided I never wanted to go back. This resulted in the other half calling my parents to tell them I wasn’t coming back and he needed a bit of time but he’d be back later that day.

Within minutes the parents turned up here, there was a quite unpleasant confrontation where they kept telling me I should just let it go off my back like water off a duck, again, and I kept saying it wasn’t fair to ask me to do that and they should sort things out within the store. In the end they decided the best thing to do for the time being was for me to stay home and for them to help us out financially in order to do that - which they have done, they pay our rent.

Really I have never been happy with this outcome - I enjoyed my job, and I felt like they should have stood up for me because all I was doing was going to work and trying to do my job in quite unpleasant circumstances. To add insult to serious injury my mother keeps asking me “Do you think you’ll get a job”. When she does that I have to firmly hold onto my temper and try not to remind her that I had a perfectly good one, it’s just that the employers were stupid.

On the other hand, it has enabled me to do a lot of things I really wanted to do, like read more blogs, comment on blogs, and work on my own blog. I really have no desire to go back to work anytime soon, and am considering my own starting a business options - if we move where I want to live I have a few pretty good ideas.. we’ll see.

So finally Karma has caught up with Birdsnest - as it always inevitably does. If you have doubted that Karma is real and that it exists doubt no more. But also be aware that I get all of this third hand, so I’m not 100% sure on the details of some parts of this.

After I left the workplace Birdsnest has been quite nasty to the other half - he’s still had to go to work and deal with her. For months now he and several other staff members have been hoping, wishing and possibly quietly praying that she would leave.

Birdsnest met a new man who lived about an hours drive away from here. After a couple of weeks she moved in with him. I will not comment! Driving between there and here, she was caught doing over 120kms in a 80km section of road. When they told me which section of road I honestly believe she is lucky she was not in a major car accident - it’s a curvy windy stretch of road where 80 is possibly too fast for most cars.

Not long after that, she was in a serious car accident where she ran the BMW of the new man into the rear end of the car in front of her - what caused this? She was looking at a wedding dress in a shop window and didn’t see the car in front had stopped. The car was apparently not able to be repaired. I’m sure this did not go down well - especially as it was a company car.

I’m not sure what the laws are here but I suspect she didn’t just get charged with speeding for the first incident. I would suggest she may have been charged with reckless driving and that is why she had to attend court. She’s been thinking for the last few weeks that she would be able to charm them into allowing her to keep her license - and she failed. They took her license away, for how long I’m not certain. So today she had to resign because she will no longer be able to drive to work.

Me, I forgot about her for the most part after leaving work. I didn’t have to deal with her and out of sight, out of mind. But there were some days when the other half came home angry or upset about things she’d done and I know the other staff have still had issues with her. My mother has been quietly angry with her since I left but has had to tolerate her and pretend to be nice - something my mother is excellent at. The other half said he and my parents had trouble hiding their happiness at the news she is leaving.

Upon hearing this news, I felt pretty much nothing for the most part - if I had to put a word to it I would call it content. I have no wish to gloat - though the thought of dropping in and congratulating her on losing her license did cross my mind momentarily -but I feel very happy for the staff and I really am hopeful this will mark the beginning of a more positive workplace for all of them.

If you are viewing this with Firefox, it will all look fine. That’s because Firefox rocks. If you are viewing this with Internet explorer, you will see one entire sidebar missing which is now at the bottom of the site somewhere. That’s because Internet Explorer is pure evil.

Let me not get into my.. hmm, how can I word this.. prejudiced view of people who use Internet Explorer. I’m not racist or sexist or any other ist, except for *browserist*. It’s wrong of me to think like that, it is unfair and I know I’m a browser snob but I can’t help it! I just don’t know how anyone could use Internet Explorer when Firefox exists. I know a lot of people end up using it by default and switch over when they know more about the interwebs.

I know a lot of workplaces make people use Internet Explorer but damnit, people, RISE UP and fight such stupidities! It’s pure discrimination in the work place, forcing you to use one kind of browser. In my opinion, this is just as bad as saying “you have to be heterosexual to work here”. But they’re saying “you have to use an evil piece of software to work here, and compromise everything you know to be right and good in the world”.

And no offence intended to you if you’re using it by choice. But if you are, this site will look pretty bad until Sephy and I figure out how to fix this. May I recommend..

Mozilla Firefox - get it here.

My Grandfather started a business in his shed many years ago, not long after the 2nd World War. By the time I was 13, it had built into a successful business with 5 stores. My Dad was the general manager. Of course I spent a lot of spare time at the stores, and in school holidays would go to work with my Mum, who was the courier for the company and took stock from the central warehouse to the stores.

Coming up to Christmas that year, I begged to be allowed to work in one of the stores. I *said* I would wrap Christmas presents, but I had a secret hidden desire that nobody knew about. My parents finally agreed to me working in the main branch, where my Dad was, so he could keep an eye on me. On the very first day, he had a meeting and left the store shortly after it opened. By the time he got back, I had sold $500 worth of small appliances. I’d written down each item I sold on a little piece of card. There were 28 of them. Dad hit the roof! I was supposed to be wrapping presents, not selling things.

I knew then that I was born to be a salesperson, and this was just second nature to me, and I explained it to him, and the next day there was no more talk of wrapping things, I got out there on the floor and sold stuff all day. A passion was born, and I was hooked.

I learned a lot from my Dad. He was the best salesperson I ever knew, but he was also one with plenty of bad habits, all of which I picked up. The good did outweigh the bad and I survived for years on what he’d taught me, working in several of the family’s stores. There was no mention of training, because I was doing just fine.

There came a point where I had to go out on my own. If you can sell, you can work pretty much anywhere, but I was drawn to the same things the rest of my family was. Electronics. I went out into the real world to discover that the place my parents had owned was unique in terms of looking after your staff, being as loyal to them as they were to you. In the real world, someone would have a knife in your back while smiling to your face.

I’ve done a lot of training over the years now. You can approach training from several angles but the two most common are - this is a waste of my time and I’m not going to get anything out of this so I’m going in with closed ears - or - I’m willing to listen and try new things out to see if they work for me. I always chose the second path. I have seen many people choose the first and I always find it hilarious when they get left behind because everyone else in the store is trying the new stuff and it WORKS.

One thing salespeople hate to do is “ask for the sale”. It’s something I have struggled with all my life and it really is ridiculous. Imagine for a moment that you were the customer, and I was serving you. You wanted a washing machine. During the time we spend together, I would ask you a number of questions. It’s sort of like a funnel. We salespeople ask all the questions, we listen to the answers, and then we think about what product is best going to suit you - and that is what pops out at the end of the funnel.

So by the time we get to asking for the sale, I probably would have asked things like -

- How often do you wash?
- What kind of washing machine do you have now?
- Have you been happy with that machine?
- What do you most like about that machine?
- Would you prefer a front or top load machine?

All those, and probably a bunch more. So a salesperson will have been asking questions for a good 15 minutes, then they show you the options you have. At the end of all that, many salespeople are too scared to ask the most important question, which is essentially do you want one? Though you have to find the right way of wording it.

I struggled against it like a fish trapped in a net. I would just rather not ask. I felt like if someone appreciated my service they would buy from me. Until one day I went to a training session and finally understood it when someone explained that I’d already asked them a lot of questions, what is the harm of one more? I just had to find a way of asking the question that I was comfortable with. And I did, and my sales figures went up and up.

Sometimes it is about someone presenting it to you in the right way.

Sales is a bit like sport, many people compare it to that and they are right to do so. You can not improve unless you are willing to try new things, experiment. And one of the things so important to a sports team is to think positive. Imagine if you went out onto the field thinking “I can’t win this game”. Imagine if when you lost you took it very personally and that negative self talk starts up in your head. “I’m no good at this game. I lost last week, and I’ll lose this week. I’ll always lose. I’m a loser”. You’re defeated before you even walk out onto the field.

This quote from Arthur Golden’s “Memoirs of a Geisha” explains my philosophy on negative thoughts in your head..

“I made up my mind to be like the fisherman who hour after hour scoops out fish with his net. Whenever thoughts of the Chairman drifted up from within me, I would scoop them out, and scoop them out again, and again, until none of them were left.”

You have to scoop those negative thoughts out, or else you end up dwelling on them. But you have to replace them with something, too. My preference is to replace them with a positive thought.

So, in light of this, each day from now on I will be posting a “thought for today” as well as my usual blog post. They might come from the cards I use here, they might be quotes from books or other places. I hope you might find them useful. If any of them really speak to you or you feel like you want to work on that thought, it might be an idea to write them down and put them in front of your computer screen.

If you have any thoughts to put forward, just email them to me..