It doesn’t matter how organized you are, doing your taxes means two things;

1. Taking stock of the year gone by in a purely factual way. How did it all add up, how did all the work, the effort, the dreams and the disappointments – how did they all add up and what do they reveal on paper? When you look back and reflect over another year gone by it is with feelings. Tax time forces you, as a business owner, contractor and artist to reflect on the past year as the sum of its worth. There is a terrific opportunity here – it might not have been the year you were hoping for but the perspective you can get when doing your taxes will give you insight into how to make next year the best ever.

2. Dealing with a lot of receipts of all types, shapes and memories.. and adding them up. There is so much paper to deal with when sitting down to “doing” your taxes.

Here’s the thing about receipts: You have to keep them, you have to categorize them and you have to add them up at the end of the year.  I think most people just stuff them in a really large envelope and at the end of the year pass them off to their accountant to have someone else sort them. But if you don’t do that, and I don’t, and I think it is an important part of taking stock of where you spend your money, how you spend it and where you could be spending it more effectively as a business then you will need a system of keeping your receipts so that when it comes to you adding them up, it’s not such a dreadful and boring ordeal. Here’s a solution that looks good on a shelf, is easy to maintain and was very quick to add up at the end of the year.

The Binder & Box

Get a binder and a nice box – maybe match it to the colour of the binder and the box should be no bigger than the binder – or deeper. Choose a large binder, 2 inches or bigger. In the binder you will put clear sleeves which are individually labelled by category (Research and Development, Travel etc). The idea is to put your receipts in the box at the end of the day/week. When the box is quite full of receipts then that is when you transfer the receipts into their categorized clear sleeves.

The reason I found this method to work personally was because the box means that there’s one place and one place alone where receipts are put when they first leave your pockets, bags and car. It is also portable so when you go to categorize your receipts in the binder you can take the box and binder and do it while you watch TV or chat on the phone. Some people keep their receipts in categories in the filing cabinet but I find means inevitably that the receipts never get put in. Categorizing your receipts is something you can do in your least productive times.

And the reason I have a binder to put receipts in a categorized fashion is that at the end of the year when you sit down to do your taxes it is the worst part of the whole process and you also forget what a receipt was all about anyway or it’s faded. It really does pay to do the categorizing during the year.

Hope this helps. Drop me a line if you have any specific questions.

Really it’s all about perspective; how we see or experience something is not necessarily the only way or even, at times (like for me yesterday), vaguely realistic. It can be very frustrating not to mention alarmingly confusing when we find ourselves not being able to figure out how to organize our home when we seem to be able to have a perfectly organized office. Or when we were single somehow everything found a place but now that we are sharing our life with someone we find it almost impossible to even find a place for our tooth brush! It’s very common.

Yesterday I had the perfect excuse to go for my first drive in a car on my own! I was so looking forward to it. I needed to pick up some supplies for a client in north Toronto and drop them off to her home in east Toronto and following that I had a meeting not too far away. It was ideal. I got into the car and made my virgin voyage odyssey. I drove to the store, picked up the supplies and then headed east to her house. I couldn’t believe how easy everything seemed with a car. I drove up her street, saw her driveway and drove up. I thought to myself “Wow, this is so cool!” I did a flawless reverse out of the driveway when I had dropped everything off and headed to my meeting. The whole day was perfect, blue skies, hardly any traffic – couldn’t have been happier. When I returned home I dropped my client a quick note saying I had left her supplies in her back garden on the glass table.

My computer made a sound informing me a message had come in… from my client marked URGENT. “How odd? I wonder what’s up?” I read her message. “We don’t have a glass table in our back garden” Blimey!!!!! Where the +%$#@ had I left her things! I mean I distinctly remember driving into her driveway. I am sure it was her driveway. Turns out it wasn’t. I had left all her things in a complete strangers back garden. The stranger happened to be a friend and neighbour of my client so all worked out well.

But here’s why I mention this: I had only ever approached someone’s house as a passenger or pedestrian. I had never driven up a driveway. Until yesterday evening all driveways looked alike to me. Of course I didn’t realise that all driveways looked alike to me but obviously they did or I wouldn’t have driven up a complete strangers driveway, unloaded my car and made the few trips back and forth to their back garden dropping strange boxes off onto their glass table. I have no idea what they thought looking out at my happy face.

When we take on a new role, be it as a parent, a partner, or entrapreeur – we think that everything looks and is the same. But our world has changed but we are still looking at it through our old eyes – and they don’t give the true picture. Organizing your office when you are now sharing it in the same location as your home and personal life does change everything. It means seeing things from a new and completely different perspective. A lot of my work when I first start with clients is about getting them so “see” things in a new way. Not trying to fit the new life into the old perspective. Your life changes regardless of whether you see it or not. It’s all about perspective and learning to “see” in a new way. I promise I will never look at a driveway in the old way again!

I passed my driving test! First attempt too. When I reversed the car into the parking space at the end of my test I was almost sick with dread and shame. I dreaded being told “You seem like a nice person but you and driving? Yea not a good mix. You failed – but that’s a good thing as the world is now a safer place. All the best with being a passenger!” And I was full of shame because here I am a mature somewhat intelligent woman in my 40’s only learning to drive now. Particularly in North America where most people learn in their teens.

I switched off the engine of the car. I had no idea what to say or if I should remain silent and wait for the dreaded news that I was a hazard on the road. He looked down at the form he had been taking notes on and said “Well, I have to tell you… you passed, congratulations”. Seriously, I was so stunned I didn’t even get excited. I looked at him as if he insane and said “Are you sure?” Apparently it was true. We shook hands and he hopped out of the car. I saw my driving instructor was making his way over to me. I opened the car door and fell flat on the ground – my legs had turned to jelly! I had to laugh then.

I mention this because it made me think about fear and why I had put off learning to drive so long. Well, I knew why. I had been in a few minor car crashes in my youth and also lost a favorite teacher at school because she was killed tragically in a car crash. And the subconscious conclusion I had come to then was that cars are like tanks and they kill people and animals. And this belief stayed with me my whole life!

Recently I started with a couple of new clients who remarked that they had put off calling me because they were too embarrassed or too frightened or waiting till they felt more positive about things. It’s very common for people to say to me “I know this is easy, I should be able to do it”.  Why do we fear asking for help with the basic things in life? Because they are basic and somehow we make the conclusion that if something is basic then it should be easy and not require any help.

I find that men feel less unease in asking for help with their home office or home than women do. As women feel we should have this “keeping house” down pat. But our offices, our jobs, our lives and our homes are more complex now than they were for our parents. Doesn’t mean that life wasn’t harder for our parents but the boundaries of the different roles they played in their lives were clearer. Sunny Bates explains it so well in this video post.

Sunny Bates on Linchpins, Passion and Fear from Seth Godin on Vimeo.

Putting off asking for help because of a belief system that says you should be able to do this on you own is limiting. It limits you from having the environment you need to thrive and relax in and it limits you in that it avoids growth and change occurring. Life always welcomes forward action.

A couple of my friends got the new Kindle as a gift this year. Wow, it really is a beautiful piece of  technology. My friend John loved his because he is a father and now he can put all his child’s books on the Kindle. Now, when they are travelling, he doesn’t have to carry a huge array of books for reading. But the other thing I learnt is that it is not just books but magazines that you can download onto the Kindle! That really excited me.

So many of my clients get professional and life-style magazines. They love them. The main problem with magazines is that they take up a lot of space and are really difficult to store effectively. The other problem with storing magazines is that most people keep them because they want the articles in them for future reference. Finding that article when it is 6 months or 1 year after you read it entails going through an awful lot of magazines and creating a huge mess as you do so. But not with Kindle:

Newspaper and Magazine Reading

Using Kindle’s 5-way controller, you can quickly flip between articles, making it faster and easier to browse and read the morning paper or your monthly magazine. Want to remember the newspaper or magazine article you just read? Clip and save entire articles for later reading with a single click. Newspapers are auto-delivered wirelessly to Kindle before they hit news stands.

Bookmarks and Annotations

By using the QWERTY keyboard, you can add annotations to text, just like you might write in the margins of a book. And because it is digital, you can edit, delete, and export your notes. You can highlight and clip key passages and bookmark pages for future use. You’ll never need to bookmark your last place in the book, because Kindle remembers for you and always opens to the last page you read.

I really think this is a fantastic solution for individuals who want to keep all their magazines and periodicals.

A great solution for keeping your magazines

Although what I mainly focus on with my clients is about how their home offices can work for them in a more efficient and productive way at the end of the day the space we create must look good, feel good and be the kind of environment that they want to sit down and work in. Particularly when you work from home. There are so many excuses to leave the “office” and pop a load of laundry in the washer… and “oh the mail has arrived, I must take a quick peak at my magazine that’s just arrived”.

My brother Eugene hosted Christmas this year for the family and extended family. All the children bounced, ran, rolled and laughed around the house in a constant hum. And it was really only the dogs who broke up conversations with their power struggles. The subject of home offices came up in conversation – mainly because yours truly was there and everyone wanted advice on their own home office. It got me to thinking about the design of the office as opposed to the functioning of it.

The home office goes in the space or room that is available. Sometimes, that is a corner of the kitchen, bedroom or living room, sometimes (if you are lucky) it’s got it’s own walls, and sometimes it’s split between different rooms.

I did some browsing on the web to see what’s out there on this subject. Most of the information I found assumed you had a room with walls and a door. Check out the following link from MakeUseOf.com:  http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/home-office-design-ideas-and-tips-that-every-web-worker-needs-to-know/  There are some useful tips and web resources in this article.

However, what if you don’t have one room for your office?  How do you even begin to design your home office when it has to be split up?  It comes down to defining the actions involved in your work and the environments best required for them to be accomplished and the time of day involved.

Computer and desk: Only put the computer and desk in the living room if you think you definitely will have consistant and scheduled time to be alone there. If you can’t control the environment then you won’t be able to control your work output. Think about when you work – daytime or evenings. Where you put your desk and computer is VERY important as this is usually the back bone of your work processing.

Paper/File Management: And if it is to be in your living room or bedroom then you will want your “office” to be invisable when it is no longer required as an office. I have found that having a drawer for “Action” (any bills you have pay or items you have to take action on) and a drawer for “Filing” (needs to be put in the filing cabinet) means that papers are kept from becoming piles or getting lost. Being in a drawer also means that they are hidden from sight and are quickly accessible.

Filing: Whatever your filing system – binder or filing cabinet – you will need to assign somewhere for it. The most important thing here is that you can get at it. If you are hiding your filing cabinet in the back of a storage locker then you will never do your filing. When papers get out of control your stress levels go way up. There are many attractive filing solutions out there that don’t look like ugly filing cabinets and can live in any room in any home without offending. A working filing system means that you can find any piece of paper in five seconds but if it takes 15 minutes to get to the cabinet you are kind of setting yourself up for failure. My filing cabinet is in my kitchen and no one would know.

Good luck and drop me a line if you have any specific questions on the design of your office.

Filing: How I love thee, let me count the ways…

Well, as a new blogger, we may not know each other very well – but I’ve got a confession to make. I love filing! I am here today to declare my mission to make filing functional, fast and fashionable. That’s right – Functional, Fast and Fashionable! I love designing filing systems, I love shopping for that perfect filing cabinet, I even love file folders. Yes, file folders (I will write a whole other section on file folders one day soon and you will see why they are the best thing ever!). I’m having a love affair with filing, and I’m not at all afraid to admit it. In fact, I’m so enthralled with efficient, proper filing that I’ve made it my personal mission to get you excited about filing too!

It’s my job to be organized, and I truly love what I do. Just the fact that I can find anything in my office in 5 seconds (sometimes less!) is enough to get me fired up inside. Thankfully my sense of humour gives my obsession some perspective, but the task of locating something in my organized filing system isn’t a chore, it’s a pleasure.

Filing is a personal affair. With all of the cabinets, closets, and offices that I’ve organized, I have never created the same filing solution for any two people. Choosing the right system for your lifestyle, personality and living space is important. The way you organize your life is a statement of who you are and how you live.

I intend to use this blog as an (organized!) space for all things filing; recommendations, tips, great finds and the endless gushing of my passion. I hope that over time you’ll join in my excitement!

Tip # 1

Buying a filing cabinet: Make sure you buy a good, well made cabinet. It is a pet peeve of mine to find flimsy, non-weighted filing cabinets. Seriously. A cabinet that is not properly weighted will tip over and could really injure you. Also, make sure the drawers come out fully otherwise you will never be able to reach the files at the back, and when you do these cheap models hurt or graze you hands. Remember: a proper filing cabinet allows you quick and easy access so that you can keep on top of things. Not the other way round.

Favorite Find #1

Many clients feel the need to fit a bulky cabinet into their home – but seriously, are they not the most difficult item to blend into your home decor? It doesn’t have to be this difficult. Here’s one of my favorite filing cabinets which I discovered at Ikea.

IKEA - Effektiv

Why I like this system: First off, these are properly weighted, very well designed and sturdy. They come in great colour and design combinations. And what I like most, on a purely fashionable-happening level, is that they do not look like traditional, industrial, steel filing cabinets. I have one in my kitchen and no one knows it’s a filing cabinet. I love that. Why filing cabinets have to look so dour is a mystery to me; there is absolutely no reason for it.

This is just the beginning of my love affair – I would love to hear about your filing journey, passions and problems. Leave me a comment and tell me your favourite filing stories – I know you’ve got them!