With today’s variety of note-taking and idea-gathering software, there’s no excuse for stealing your kids’ crayons anymore. Take a look at these multimedia opportunities for storing your thoughts, ideas, photos, blog posts, and more… and best yet, they’re all free!

Evernote

Collect, sort, tag, and annotate a variety of notes and other information. Log in online or access it via your iPhone.  Store your web clips, text clips, videos, audios, and more in a single file. You can even snap a photo with your mobile phone and save it. Oh yeah, you can share it with others!  Find out more at Evernote.com

OneNote

This is Microsoft’s version of a note book that lets you capture text, images, video, and audio notes and take and edit notes with other people in other locations. View and edit your notes from virtually any computer with an Internet connection or your Windows phone. Available with Microsoft Office. Find out more at Office.Microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/

Springnote

This is a free, online notebook based on wiki. You can create pages, keep them in your Personal Notebook or create a Group Notebook to share with friends. Store up to 2GB online. Add photos, comments, and more. Springnote for the iPhone is also available. Find out more at Springnote.com

Tumblr

If you’re the visual type, you might want to take a look at this note book. Billed as “the easiest way to blog,” it’s a fun way to create your own virtual bulletin board with pictures, photos, quotes, audio, video, and more. You can set your privacy level and collaborators, creating a bulletin board just for yourself, or one to share with a team or the public. There’s also a free iPhone app.  Find out more at Tumblr.com

After perusing these sites, you’ve probably come up with a dozen or more ideas that you quickly jotted down on a scrap of paper somewhere. Don’t waste them – choose a note-taking solution and get your thoughts and goals down safely and permanently. You can’t act on your ideas if you don’t remember where you put those notes!

Setting your priorities and sticking to them is a great step towards reducing your stress, but it won’t help much if you don’t have time to finish all the other menial tasks that are involved in running an at-home business. Items like billing, filing, ordering ink for your printer, and a million other little things that pile up over time still need to be done.

Let’s look at five methods to help you keep better track of where your time goes, and keep on top of your schedule:

Write everything down.

Famous productivity expert David Allen, author of Get It Done, recommend getting your to-dos out of your brain and onto paper. I can attest that this method works! When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I have found one of the greatest ways to de-stress is to sit down and write out everything I have to do that’s got my head spinning. Whether those are big projects, little five-minute tasks, or anything, it all goes down on paper as my brain is churning out the words. When I can actually see my thoughts on paper, I can start sorting and prioritizing.

Keep track of how long a task takes you.

It’s a common psychological trick we play on ourselves – we overestimate how long it takes to complete unpleasant tasks, and we underestimate how long we spend on pleasant items. Get real by writing down the actual time it takes you to do things like file papers, log receipts, and any other tedious task. Then you have a concrete estimate the next time you think, “Oh, that’s going to take all day!”

Minimize interruptions.

Turn off your email alert noise, put your phone ringer on mute, and clear your desktop before you jump into a task that requires concentration. Fewer interruptions and distractions allow you to get in that concentrating “sweet spot” where you’re humming along and working at a pleasant clip. That means you’ll get your work done faster and be less stressed. Constant interruptions ultimately result in needing to re-prioritize your day, over and over and over again. You can see how the stress you feel just keeps escalating without minimizing the interruptions each day.

Break down large projects.

Big projects – website overhauls, writing reports, planning marketing campaigns, creating a newsletter – can be overwhelming. When faced with a large project, break it up into tasks you can complete in one sitting, preferably in under 20 minutes. That way, instead of looking for a free afternoon to tackle the project all at once (which you’ll never get!), you just need to squeeze in 20 minutes here and there until the project is completed. I don’t know anyone who can’t find 20 minutes here and there to chip away at  large project.

Take advantage of “lost” time.

Our days are full of five minute breaks between activities. We call these “dead” time. You may be sitting in car-line at your child’s school, or in line at the pharmacy, or even waiting for a pot of water to boil. There you are, simply waiting for something to happen. Keep a notebook with a running list of tasks that can be completed in 5 minutes or less. Schedule an appointment, call a friend to set up a lunch date, clean out your voice mail, file your nails – anything that you know you need to do but don’t get around to doing.

Now when you have “dead” time, glance down at your notebook with the list of 5 minute tasks and start at the top.  Work your way down the list every time you find yourself with a few free minutes. You’ll be amazed at how much you accomplish when you’re ready to go!

The power of time management can have you thinking you can do it all now!  You are Superwoman!  You are Superman!  But, before you go leaping those tall buildings, stop and take a deep breath.  There are still things beyond our control.  Yes, we can do a lot, but we can’t do it all.  Life sometimes gets in the way, even of the most on-task entrepreneur.

Next week, let’s take a look now at how to recover from situations beyond our control.  Meanwhile, please feel free to leave your comments below.

You sit down at the computer to begin work on your to-do list, and the emails start coming in. Instead of having a way to rate the importance and urgency of each request and item on your list, you just respond to whatever is front and center – which is usually whatever email or phone call has come in most recently. Then the end of the day comes, and you still have as many items on your to-do list as you started with. The stress starts to mount as your business goals recede farther and farther into the distance.

So what’s the solution? Setting priorities. When you have a list of goals and priorities, you have a map for your future.

Set one or two business objectives for each quarter of the year. You may choose to launch a new product the first quarter of the year, revamp your website during the second quarter, create marketing materials for the third quarter, and develop an outsourcing strategy for the fourth quarter.

The following is a process for breaking down a large objective into daily, weekly, and monthly priorities:

• Start with your quarterly objective.
• Ask yourself, what would have to happen this month to achieve this objective?
• What would have to happen this week?
• What would have to happen today?

Once you have defined what needs to happen each day, week, month, and quarter, put those items on your calendar and to-do list with a big star next to them. Now you know what has to be completed every day before you start answering phone calls or emails. No matter what the rest of the day brings, you know you have completed the things that will most move your business forward.

This small routine will help reduce your stress because you’ll no longer lie in bed, wondering what the heck you accomplished that day. Instead, you will have taken concrete steps towards achieving your most important goals. (P.S. This works great with personal goals, too!).

Now that you have your priorities set for each day, week, month, and quarter, how will you know if all that work will fit into your schedule?

Come back next week and let’s take a look at how you can manage those fleeting 24 hours we all have to work within.  Meanwhile, please share any of your tips or comments below.

There are several stress points that home-based entrepreneurs face:

1.You’re stressed because you don’t set priorities.

2.You’re stressed because you don’t manage your time efficiently.

3.You’re stressed because a lot of what you do is outside your control.

4.You’re stressed because you can’t say no.

5.You’re stressed because you don’t set boundaries for your family.

6.You’re stressed because you get sucked into the TV/e-mail/blog-reading trap.

7.You’re stressed because you don’t delegate.

8.You’re stressed because you don’t take care of yourself or your health.

9.You’re stressed because you don’t have a support system.

If you were to rate yourself on each point, you’d likely score higher on some than others. You may be a great delegator, but you’re not so good at setting boundaries. Each of us has our own strengths and weaknesses, based on our experience and personality. Even if you answer “yes” to only one of these stress points, you may suffer from more anxiety than someone who has answered “yes” to numerous stressors. Each of us responds differently to outside pressures and stress.

Try taking a look at each one of these in greater detail.  Find out where some of your personal stress points are and what steps to take to begin alleviating them.

Next week, we will take a look at how you can make adjustments and get on the road to increased productivity and a more enjoyable work life. The first stop? Taking a look at your priorities.  Come back next week to find out how.

Have you ever heard of a Headway theme?  Neither did I until I moderated a recent webinar hosted by LegalVA entitled: “Headway and Wordpress for Legal Professionals” by Tina Marie Hilton of Clerical Advantage.  I found the information most useful. Tina Marie discussed the benefits of using WordPress to administer your website, how Wordpress themes work in general, and custom themes such as Headway.

Here are a few items I found of interest:

• Wordpress offers free themes and the ability to customize your site to your individual needs.
• A theme allows you to apply different layouts, add your logo or header, change colors, and more–depending on the theme-with no coding experience.
• Free themes allow you to apply a certain design but with a small amount of personalization.  Free themes can be found by visiting the free Themes directory at Wordpress.org or by doing an internet search for “free Wordpress themes”.
• Using Headway with Wordpress gives the greatest flexibility, personalization and creativity to those who do not wish to learn how to learn or tweak CSS coding.
• With Headway you aren’t locked into one layout design choice.  You can choose to have one sidebar on your home page, two sidebars on your blog page and/or no sidebars at all on another page.

If you are interested in designing your site using Headway, there is plenty of help. Tutorials, a forum, quick to respond help desk, and even virtual assistants such as Tina Marie to help you.  Click here for additional support and information.

When professionals choose Wordpress and Headway, they end up with a quality website that allows for easy changes and updates.

LegalVA is a premiere website exclusive to legal virtual assistants, administrative virtual assistants, and virtual paralegals seeking to partner with attorneys and law firms.  Explore more about how you can join membership to this site to begin developing your virtual legal assistance business: http://legalva.com

In addition, are you interested in learning how to properly respond to RFPs (Request for Proposals) from prospective attorneys and law firms seeking your assistance?  Do you need the proper step-by-step instruction on how to make your RFP stand out above the rest?

Help get your virtual assistant business off to a great start or give your existing practice a boost by joining the legal virtual assistant class and connection site.

Learn how to:

• the best practices on responding to requests for proposals from attorneys looking to work with virtual assistants;
• how to ask the right questions to get the most out of the initial consultation; and
• how to ultimately build relationships that result in a long term growth.

Join here

As much as I appreciated the comfort and usability of the previous hosting site I had for three years, I am absolutely enjoying the outstanding customer service I am receiving with Hostgator.

And adding Wordpress as a website theme was a very nice change for me. Not only am I enjoying the outstanding customer service and hosting options I receive with Hostgator, Wordpress affords me many creative design options, SEO opportunities, blogrolls to link back to, flexibility, and much more.

I doubted myself that I could even achieve what I have already in two days in developing this site.  But I have and still plan to do much more.  As it stands, a website is always a work in progress, isn’t it?

Welcome to Caliber Virtual Services’ Weblog.  This blog will primarily focus on educating, supporting, and sharing information for  small businesses that need administrative support.  The information shared here will be tips, related articles, resources and more.

Can’t wait to get started!  I also plan to share my business experiences as Caliber Virtual Services continues to grow and develop.  And of course, I welcome all questions, comments, and suggestions.  Looking forward to interacting with you soon.

~Delilah