The Office Gal

Regardless of how you work - corporate, home office, or freelancer - the following items will be positive tools to add to your arsenal of productivity weapons.  I use each item on the list and together they perform to give me a solid foundation to handle projects and clients.

1. A must for a home office or freelancer - PC and Internet. I use a laptop and wireless cable. This gives me the most flexibility, so that I am able to move about in my home, as well as the advantage of taking my laptop on the go so that I can blog while I travel.

2. The loud thinker is what I call this tool, you know it as a whiteboard. Have you ever seen House? Well, Dr. House thinks out loud - he uses the whiteboard to write out thoughts and then creates a sort of flow chart with them. I use the same concept.

3. With the amount of blogs I work on, I have to keep a calendar of my schedule, what is being written, and deadlines. You can call it a planning calendar, many call it an editorial calendar, regardless of the name you want to use, the purpose is to keep track of every project going on.

4. Laugh all you want, but a simple notepad and pen is an awesome tool. When I am on the go, I usually have an idea, see something, or have people throw information at me, so I take out the notepad and jot it down. 

5. Another tool that I should use more than what I do is a timer. Timing is priority when you have deadlines to meet. Morning planning, reviewing e-mails, making telephone calls, reading sites and blogs, these are all things that need to be timed and monitored so that most of your time goes to producing quality projects for your clients or company.

Now of course these are my top 5, but a top 5 that many others may be using. What is your top 5?

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Time is everything when you work independently from a corporate office or as a freelancer. Home offices can be scrutinized tremendously for being lax, having more free time, and just not being under the same regiment that a corporate office is. Entrepreneurs may also find it difficult to keep documentation on hours worked for a client by logging manually.

What is the best way to squash the rumors? Track the time to better serve your company, or for entrepreneurs, serve yourself. Tracking is as simple as downloading software onto your computer that will automatically log your work and associated time. In turn, logged information will benefit personnel for payroll and attendance; for freelancers, it will help with billing clients correct hours spent on projects.

There are several companies that offer tracking software. Two that I found are TimeClock Plus and Time Sprite. Both are very easy to install and use, and will offer a great reporting system for attendance, payroll, project time, taxes; just a variety of tasks that will keep both the corporate office or freelancer on track and on time.

The following screenshots will give you an idea of what each application will look like during use.

TimeClock Plus

Time Sprite

Other suggestions to stay organized and on track - The BusyBodyBook®

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