Guidelines: Email Etiquette

Whether you are sending an email to a friend, colleague, or customer, take an extra moment to ensure the email is confidential, professional, and relevant.

Keep these tips in mind when sending out an email.

Do not leave the subject line blank

For productivity enthusiasts, being able to quickly identify and reference a message or request is the key to prioritizing their action lists.

Therefore, subject lines are the easiest way to grab someone's attention, and allow them to either reply right away to the message or place it on an action list. Otherwise, your message may become unnoticed, unread, or worse deleted.

Moreover, in some professional settings, properly labeling an email demonstrates a good measure of due diligence. The type of subject line you use, or if you use them at all, can speak volumes about your attention to detail or the respect you give to other people's time.

Marking an email as urgent

There is an inherent risk when you label any message as urgent.

Today, most people are suffering from work overload and struggle to answer all the messages in their inbox without people making unnecessary demands on their time and attention. In marking your message urgent, you force someone to give special attention to your request and deviate from his or her action plan or schedule.

Be sure you need to mark some

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Organizing a utility room for functionality and storage space - Part One -

Whenever you designate a space in your home as a utility room, you run the risk of using the space for too many purposes. It becomes a storage space, a workshop, pantry, freezer space, wine cellar and laundry room.

And, as new items are brought into the home, older items are shuffled into these general use spaces and bury pre-existing items. It becomes a dark and dank corner of the home where objects go to be forgotten.

Even if the room was once functional, it soon becomes impossible to find or do anything in the space. The room becomes an unproductive and unappealing wasteland.

In the next 3 posts we will look at organizing a utility space so that it meets your storage needs and becomes a functional work space.

Posts:

Part 1 Define the purpose of the room.

Part 2 Designing and organizing the space using online applications

Part 3 Practical practices when implementing your organization plans and goals.

Part 1: Defining the purpose of your utility space

It is easy to define most spaces in your home. That room is the den, that is the play room and that is the master bedroom.

It is critical to stamp a permanent purpose to a utility space. Defining a room will focus your organization assignment and your brain will automatically decide what should go into that room and what should not.

When you use general terms like “utility” room or “junk” drawer, you are inviting people to store any object into that space.

It is if you went into a kitchen and saw a dollhouse or a dishwasher in a bedroom.

Two problems arise with this scenario. First, it is impossible to know what is stored in that space and second, useless and surplus items fill up much needed storage space.

If you define it, you own it.

The process of defining a space:

For example, let us imagine that we are creating a laundry and storage space in a utility room.

After you define the room as a laundry and storage space you need to make sure that the area is going to meet your needs.

It is about optimization, so you do not want to undersell or oversell your definition of the space.

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Concentrating on the Writing

Trying to get some writing done during the day can be hard. I have just become a stay at home father and therefore spend a lot of time with my 3 year old son Ethan.

He likes to run around the house roaring like a dinosaur. It is cute, but very distracting.

When he is watching television I can usually block out his cartoons, but I have become a fan of "The Penguins of Madagascar" and I cannot help but get sucked into this great show.

To focus on my writing and remove any distractions, I listen to music or a noise generator.

These are the audio tools I use for this purpose:

· Simply Noise - is a site that hosts a white/brown/pink noise generator. It has an oscillating option that changes up the volume of the noise as you listen.

· Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata - When I write articles I find that this particular piece of music puts me into the right mindset. Putting it on a continuous loop, it settles into the background of my mind and blocks out any other noise.

· Baroque Music - I discovered the power of this classical music subset in University. Besides the ability to focus my attention, I read that it contributes towards memory retention when studying.

· Relax M.P. - Is one of my essential iPhone apps. It has a large collection of natural sounds, melodies and noise generators that you can mix and match, allowing a user to find the perfect mix for relaxation, sleep, meditation and focus. Personally, I like to use the app to mix brown and white noise.

Stephen King talks about needing a writing tool box when you become a writer. I think it is essential to find techniques and tools that give you the ability to remove distractions and focus your attention on your work

If you have your own techniques and tools to block out distractions and focus on your work, I would love to hear about them.

Trim Your Website Visits to Increase Productivity

Kristy Stewart at the Power.me blog sited one of my productivity articles "Start a Productive Workday With the Right Websites" which was published at lifehack.org and added some great additional tips.

You can checkout my original article at this link and Kristy's article here.