Elaine Quinn

Do you love your home office?

When you work from home, there are plenty of excuses to avoid getting down to business. One of the most frequent reasons clients give me for procrastinating about their work is that they just don’t like their home office. Your home office should be a p... Read >

Setting Goals

SETTING GOALS The first step in shaping or growing your business is to decide what you want to achieve. Goals you set should be designed to move your business forward. If you don’t have a destination in mind, how will you know if you’re headed in the r... Read >

Maintaining the Right Mental Attitude

Surround yourself with positive energy Create a supporting environment Create an environment that’s motivating. For example, listen to music that energizes you. Make your office inviting so that you’ll want to be there and will feel good about worki... Read >

Plan For Productivity

Don’t mistake activity for results; just because you’re doing something doesn’t mean you’re being productive. What makes a day productive isn't just crossing things off your to-do list; it’s working on the really important things in your business. In orde... Read >

Choosing a Practical Office Desk

Choosing a Practical Office Desk Your desk will undoubtedly be the largest piece of furniture in the room, and is often the first and most expensive purchase. But before you spend a lot of money on a desk, give some thought to the practical aspects of ... Read >

Planning Your Day

Divide your day o Remember how your school days were divided into different subject periods? Do the same with your workdays now. Consider the major types of work you have before you and divide the day into work periods of an hour or so each. Schedule ... Read >

Make Your Workspace Work for You

If you’re going to work at home, rather than just be at home, you need to create an environment that will allow you to operate in a business-like manner. There is no one “correct” way to set up your workspace. An organized office does not have to mean... Read >

Do Your To Do List

Have you ever said, "I just can’t seem to get my to-do list done!" Do you think if you just got organized enough you could get everything done? Don’t count on it. The average person has so many things on their list that if they did nothing else but wo... Read >

Round Up Resources

When you work for yourself, by yourself, the demands on your time are overwhelming. You simply can’t do everything you want to, or even need to do. As your business grows, this becomes more and more of a problem. However, many solo professionals want to r... Read >

File Systems

• File and Find Documents Fast The only reason to file papers is to give them a place to be until you need them again. A good filing system should take you very little time to file or find documents. Don’t spend time creating an elaborate system, and ... Read >

Deal With Distractions

When working alone, and with no one keeping an eye on us, it’s sometimes difficult to stay on task. As much as we try, sometimes our attention wanders. Then there are the distractions all around us. Here’s a list of common distractions to watch out f... Read >

Breaking through the 'Procrastination Barrier'

Whatever the reasons, procrastination threatens to overtake the work-from-home professional who is not on guard. Here are a few strategies you can use to fight back. When the task is overwhelming… • Break it up. Deconstruct large projects into... Read >

Prevent Procrastination

I prefer the term “creative delay" to “procrastination." It involves dreaming up the most elaborate and unlikely way of doing something, so that by the time the scheme is worked out to the smallest detail, it’s too late to start. With no boss or set sc... Read >

Find Files Faster with these Filing Tips

So much of our work is done on computer these days that it’s worth a bit of effort to keep your systems organized and streamlined. If you save even a few moments each time you access a record or return to a document, over the course of a day it adds up. O... Read >

Conquer Computer Filing

If you don’t keep your computer files organized, you’ll waste time you likely can’t spare searching for your documents. A search tool like Google Desktop (desktop.google.com) can help you find lost computer documents. This handy little program searches yo... Read >