Okay, then let’s go back to planning your vacation. We’ll use the stacks of papers that surround you to help.

How can purchase orders and sales tickets, shipping instructions and labels, inventory and financial reports, telephone messages, letters, postcards, envelopes, and more help you plan your vacation? They can help you get and stay organized so you can take time away from work. They can attract and keep customers so you can pay for that vacation.

Office forms are the tools that will keep you in control of your business. There is more than one reason for calling them office forms. Put together as a unit, those papers form your office. Every day you form and re-form your office through those papers you handle and hand off to your customers.

Before you opened for business you formed an image in your mind of what that business would be, where it would be located, and how you would run your business. Is the office that surrounds you the one you imagined before you started?

As you look at those papers, what do you see? Are they stacks of papers begging for your attention or are they the tools that help you get your work done so you can take that dream vacation?

Take time to look at how your office forms are functioning. If two or more forms are doing the work that could be done by one, you are working harder than needed. If all of your forms do not work together, they do not present the image you want your customers to have of your business. It is time to reform your forms.

Take control of the office you formed before your office forms control you. With experience in publication and database design, Site Schemes can help you reform those forms, create automated systems, and get organized.

As we expense and invest our money, we do the same with our time. “By the time I show them how to do it, I could do it myself”, many say. This is looking at time as an expense. It makes no sense to spend an hour to show someone how to do a ten-minute task. But a good time manager understands investment. If that one-hour saves ten minutes, but ten minutes every day, in less than a week, the investment is re-paid and continues to pay dividends well into the future.

Increase your long-term productivity by investing more of your time and expensing it less.

—Dr. Donald E. Wetmore Productivity Institute http://balancetime.com

Why you need a virtual assistant

Delegate tasks to improve your time management, spend time efficiently and productively, focus on profitable areas of your business, and create balance between your personal and professional life.

Delegate tasks that you never seem to have time to do.

Avoid overloading your staff with special projects or hiring an employee for special, one-time projects.

—Site Schemes Virtual Assistant Services http://siteschemes.com