by Gwen Bortner | Tips & Tricks, Training & Instruction
People who know me consider me to be confident; in fact, I attribute much of my success to that confidence. What I now understand is that success and confidence are inextricably intertwined.
I was lucky to be raised by parents who instilled confidence in me from an early age. I also was able to experience success in school as my learning processes lined up with the ways information was taught and tested. I have been known to say that many of my accomplishments were a direct result of my ignorance of the challenge I was facing. In recent years I have come to discover that one of my gifts is not just possessing confidence, but the ability to help instill it in others.
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by Gwen Bortner | Tips & Tricks
Last May I attended the CopyBlogger marketing event in Denver. The speakers were great and the information was valuable – but the one piece that came up over and over was the idea that consistency is king.
Consistency has been a struggle for me over the years. Creating and maintaining habits has never been a strong suit. Trying to post consistently to a blog has had periods of brief success followed by long spans of randomness. This blog has been just another example of inconsistency ruling my behavior. Even so, I still strive to improve. I know consistent behavior creates a sense of dependability and that is important to me. But even when consistency was not happening in this part of my business life, it was happening elsewhere.
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by Gwen Bortner | Office Productivity, Tips & Tricks
I have run my business affairs for as long as I can remember around my task list, calendar and – as soon as it was widely available – e-mail. It has been my method of organizing my day, ensuring priorities and projects are completed and very few (if any) details fall through the cracks. But was I keeping an empty inbox? Not quite.
The challenge has been to update and modify my behaviors as new technologies are developed and become widely used. Although I have done reasonably well in the realms of my task list and calendar, e-mail has always been a bit of a challenge. When I first started using e-mail, it was the exclusive domain of business people sharing “important” business information. As time marched on, it became more prevalent for personal correspondence to the point that today it is often our primary mode of communication. The result is an inbox that contains dozens, hundreds or thousands of messages; keeping an empty inbox, then, seems like fiction.
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by Gwen Bortner | Tasks & Goals, Tips & Tricks
Over the past several months, we have been living in a vast sea of dirt. Our fenced yard is about a half an acre and we are completely remodeling our landscape.
As part of our yard remodel we have worked with a number of contractors including a builder, designer, landscaper, gutter installer, “cement guy,” outdoor lighting professional and metal worker. Not all of these working relationships have been stellar, but they haven’t been all bad, either.
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by Gwen Bortner | Tips & Tricks
Although April is “Tax Month,” most of us starting thinking about taxes in February (or at least March). There is no way around it (at least not legally).
Whether you’re a tax professional or just the “average” person, no one actually looks forward to tax season. Regardless, at some point we have to deal with the reality of getting taxes filed. However, filing taxes does not have to be difficult or particularly time-consuming. I have used these tricks to simplify filing taxes for years and getting taxes filed is just another task on my list, no worse than any other administrative activity. I am already nearly done!
by Gwen Bortner | Office Productivity, Tips & Tricks
I was always being told to clean my room when I was a kid. It wasn’t because I was disobedient (actually the opposite is true); I was just naturally messy. I think it is the way some minds naturally work.
[featured-image single-newwindow=”false” id=”140127-Messy” alt=”A Messy Room”]Photo Credit: risaikeda via Compfight cc[/featured-image]
I can’t speak for all the messy folks out there, but my issue is once I know the outcome, I rarely need to finish. As such, I am ready to move on to the next thing. For a child, that means toys don’t get put away, craft projects are not completed and their room is super messy. For adults it means papers are not filed, lots of projects are in progress and the surface of the desk is only a distant memory. But there is hope for those of us that are naturally messy.
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