Here’s my teeny tiny home office! That baby is a total of SIX square feet! Until recently, my computer/bill pay/filing center was crammed into minimal square footage out of necessity. But now I have an extra bedroom to maybe turn into a guest bedroom/office (just like Sherry and John!) one day. Until I’m hit over the head with inspiration though, my humble home office will stay just like this:
Welcome to part 2 of my three part series on where I work! Between the office and my office at home (stay tuned for that tomorrow!), I spend a lot of time sitting right smack-dab in the middle of these photos – so I figured I’d break it down for y’all.
This part focuses on the area to the right of my keyboard/monitor – where I have my active files, my phone and (spoiler alert) my fake plant.
This is where I spend at least 8 hours a day!
I’ve worked at my current job for more than a year, and it looks very much like this most of the time (except when I’m working on a project). I *love* it when people comment on how clean my desk is… it just makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Believe it or not, I felt there were enough elements to my work areas to spread it out over 3 posts (2 for the office and 1 for home).
So, let’s dive right into part 1 (of 3!) of where I work:
So I realize this isn’t a tip that everyone can use… not too many people have a bunch of very large images they need to shrink down all at once. And not everyone has Photoshop (if you don’t have Photoshop, I have a work-around tip for you at the end).
HOWEVER, I think this handy time-saving tip is pretty awesome and maybe (hopefully) at least a few of you do too:
My office has baseball season tickets for Business Development purposes. Every so often, we have games that aren’t reserved for BD, so we raffle them off for the employees. Before I got here, the raffle coordinator would actually conduct a raffle… printing out each person’s name on a strip of paper, folding it up, putting it in a hat and drawing a winner. What a waste of time! This is so much faster. And since most of our employees aren’t in the main office any way, it doesn’t matter how a winner is selected (just as long as it’s random).
Here’s how we do raffles in Excel now:
1. Set up the list of names in Excel. All the names should be in one column.
2. Go to Random.org and use the sequence generator to generate a squence of numbers in one column:
This is a handy little short-cut if you need to format information in a document that is not continuous. Instead of highlighting each bit and formatting one-by-one, you can highlight everything and then format all at once. This trick definitely takes some practice, but if you get the hang of it I know you’ll use it a ton.
BTW, have you noticed that the cool new word is “ton”… pay attention, you’ll hear it all the time now. I wonder where it came from…
Continue reading for screen captures of the steps. (more…)
I’ve always been a pretty independent worker and consider myself sooo fortunate that all of my managers have not been micro-managers. But I know it’s important that I keep them up updated with my workload and projects. Sometimes we meet face-to-face once during the week, other times I just print the document and leave it on her desk. We try to meet once a week, but it doesn’t always work out that way 
If you don’t meet with your manager regularly, this is also a good document for tracking your work load. I save each week by date (MMDDYY) so I can reference it later.
This is a forth or fifth generation document (the original was created by my co-worker and very good friend, JCo!) and with each revision it gets slightly better.
Here’s how the document works: (more…)
I was supposed to be in Tempe from Tuesday through Thursday last week. My return flight was scheduled to depart Phoenix at 5:40pm on Thursday. Then came the high winds and with it the shutting down of SAN for 2 hours, and then PHX for 2 hours. What came after that was a long effort to get back home.
I was with my boss, my boss’ boss and a project director. Our journey home lasted 26 hours, started with a cancelled flight and included: renting a car and trying to drive home (closed freeway), booking 4 tickets on another airline (that flight was later cancelled), staying another night in a hotel room (that was the only one that still had vacancy and was 14 miles from the airport), trying to rent a car to get to California (the first rental place doesn’t do one-ways to CA), and finally getting a rental car and driving home.
Not everything here will be applicable for future trips, but hopefully bits of it will prove useful eventually! (more…)
I’m in lovely Tempe, AZ until Thursday (1/21). It’s raining and I miss home. I don’t like flying or traveling (unless I’m on vacation!) because I get all kinds of sick: air sick, car sick, home sick… it’s okay though. I like my job a lot so I don’t mind traveling for it.
Since I was going to have 3 days in the office and 2 after-work (causal) events and 1 potential business dinner, I needed a variety of outfits. Continue reading for my plan…
This trick is so handy if you have a table with contacts, or if you’ve exported contacts from Outlook into a table, and you would like to create a block of email addresses separated by semicolons that you can copy-and-paste into the “TO” field of an email. The example I have here only has a few emails (of my favorite female sitcom characters), but you can follow the same steps for a lot more email addresses!
Here’s an example of what you might have in Excel:
If you want to create a block of email addresses (separated by semicolons) that you can copy and paste into the “TO” field of an email, read more
