Staying Organized for 2011

By Aaron Garcia

Keeping organized can be among the most difficult tasks on the planet for some of us – especially when it comes to email, task lists, and notes.  This year, make it your resolution to keep your professional and personal life organized.

Staying organized isn’t just about making a promise and leaving it be, it’s a commitment to change your way of thinking.  If every year you find yourself promising to stay more organized, but ever year you fail to meet that promise, then you need to try something different.  Spending money on organizational tools is a good way to get ahead, but you need to be smart about how you spend your money.  Here are three tips to staying organized this upcoming year.

1. Invest in a Task Management System

Do you feel like tasks literally and figuratively get lost on your desk?  Well you need a better system.  Post-it notes and chicken scratch aren’t going to keep your processes running smoothly – what you need is digital reform.  There are a few online programs, such as LiquidPlanner, which will help you get and stay organized from an individual task to a broad picture approach.  Keeping your tasks digitally organized is a great way to reduce oversight and better predict your future capabilities for handling new projects.  Marking tasks off digitally allows you to keep a precise log of when items were completed, how long it took, and who (if at all) they were delegated to.  Even the best task management system is only as good as you make it, so be sure to find one that fits your style and habits to increase its success rate.

2. Reduce Physical Clutter

If you are anything like me, you find it hard to even get your brain moving forward if your workspace is cluttered.  Investing in a filing system, cabinets, shelves, etc. can be a worthwhile investment if properly utilized.  Make sure you refrain from using the extra organizational space to pack with more clutter, however.  Make the new space accessible and come up with a system to file the clutter away.  Try this simple rule – if you aren’t going to use something within the next 2 weeks, it needs to be thrown out or put in long term storage.  Coupons and junk mail are usually the guilty parties when it comes to home and office clutter – ask yourself when (if ever) you will utilize the coupon or ad and proceed accordingly.  If you have more than 5 papers on your desk, you’re doing it wrong.  If you are an IT Manager, consider investing in some server racks with cable managers to keep your IT room organized a little better. Take 2 minutes out of your day to properly file the pieces away because everyone knows you aren’t working on 5 different things at once.  Clearing away clutter can clear your mind and provide a more organized, productive work or living environment.

3. Be Picky

This one is probably the hardest thing to do for some people, but in order to stay organized, you cannot say “Yes” to everything.  This is kind of a catch-22 because staying organized allows you to easily know what you can and can’t say yes to, but start off slow.  If your friends ask you to pick up their kid from school or meet them out for dinner, unless it’s a spur of the moment deal, genuinely let them know that you will have to get back to them.  A lot of times, disorganization comes from having too much on our plate to handle.  In today’s go- go-go world, it’s hard to say no lest we look lazy and uninterested, but trust me, it will pay dividends in the long run.  If you are unsure of your current workload or list of responsibilities, it is impractical to take anything else on until you are sure.

Let 2011 be the year of organization and progress for you.  Reducing stress is sometimes as simple as saying no to clutter, arbitrary requests, and outdated solutions.  Get organized today and stay organized all year.

Author Information

Aaron Garcia is a project manager for MorePro Marketing. His duties involve organizing and delegating work requests, projecting future resource availability and developing project delivery timelines.

Photo Credit: Amy Burton

How Social Media Will Impact Online Marketing In 2011

By Kevin Harris

By now, most everyone has heard of social media and many businesses have at least attempted to incorporate social media in their marketing campaigns.  Social media has taken the online world by storm, first with MySpace and then with Facebook and Twitter, and these sites have completely revolutionized online marketing.

But where do we expect to see social media go in 2011?  For the most part, we don’t expect any big changes.  Social media is a growing phenomenon, and simply put, we expect it to continue growing.  Many companies, including small and mid-size businesses, are currently experimenting with using social media in their marketing campaigns.  Because social media marketing is a low-cost alternative to traditional marketing such as print ads and direct mail flyers, businesses are able to use it to reach more people while budgeting less for marketing overall.

A lot of businesses currently use online marketing and a large portion of those use social media in some fashion in their marketing campaigns.  The number of businesses marketing via social media outlets is expected to grow substantially in 2011. Some experts believe as much as 80 percent of businesses will have used social media marketing by the end of the year.  Businesses are also expected to start devoting more of their budgets to social media marketing, indicating that this form of marketing is leaving the experimentation stage and becoming more of an expected part of online marketing.

Another trend we have seen in social media marketing is a lot of new contracting and consulting businesses springing up.  This is to be expected for a relatively new form of marketing that has taken on such epic proportions as social media.  In 2011, as social media marketing becomes more commonplace and businesses learn what to expect from it, we predict the number of contracting and consulting companies start to narrow.

Businesses are learning to be more results-focused, and marketing companies that don’t produce results are going to start to die out.  As a result, social media marketing as a whole will become a tighter, more results-driven market — good news for businesses who are serious about marketing.

As 2010 comes to a close and businesses start looking to the year ahead, the question on everybody’s lips is where social media marketing is headed in 2011 and beyond.  Predictions range from fantastical growth, to an epic failure — a sort of “social media bubble” that will burst in the coming year.  True enough, things can change pretty quickly in the world of online marketing.

Google announces some new factors in how they determine their search engine rankings, and suddenly everyone is on the new thing like flies on. But social media is a bit different.  It has shown that it is going to be around for a while, precisely because it is so popular with regular people, and so long as that is true, social media marketing will continue to be used and refined by businesses great and small.

Author Information

Kevin Harris is a freelance writer for Adobe.  Adobe software, such as customer management software, and services revolutionize how the world engages with ideas and information, anytime, anywhere, and through any medium.  They also offer many other services such as customer experience management.

Photo Credit: Dieter Joel Jagnow