Watch the movie or read the book The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger and you’ll get a good laugh. At first, the hard driving boss, Miranda Priestly, seems like a joke. How could anyone be so mean to their staff? (She’s even worse in the book!) Then you will inevitably begin to muse if your management style resembles Miranda’s. (I know I did.)

There’s got to be a little part in all of us that would love to bark out orders without having to think about our tone or proper word choice so as not to offend or to effectively motivate our staff. I know I would! It is especially prevalent in a small business where the owner/manager hasn’t had a lot of training in staff development or who may have relatives as staff. In addition, we always seem to be juggling a million balls and the effort to communicate starts feeling like a “game”. Why can’t our people just do what we say with a smile on their face and do it right the first time? Why can’t our assistant think ahead and take care of routine things without us having to remind her?

At home, the clean laundry is left at the bottom of the stairs. After a few days, it makes its way to the bedroom chair. It finally gets put away in the drawers and closet when its time to do laundry the following week. Why? Because you needed the basket! (Hmmm - this sounds like my kids.)

At work, the mail gets opened and a pile of paper accumulates that needs “to be filed”, even though you are pretty ruthless about throwing out the junk. You don’t really know or have the time to decide where to file it. Soon, the one pile becomes several piles and you can’t see your desk anymore.

Does the “stuff” lying around bother you? If not, you can stop reading. Does it possibly bother someone else you live or work with? Then keep reading!

If “stuff” lying around does bother you or someone else, then something in the process isn’t working effectively. Figure out why the “stuff” is still sitting there. Do people not know where things should go? Is enough time being allocated to complete the task? Or are the people involved just lazy and not completing the task of putting things away?

A task isn’t finished until the stuff is in its “home”. But how do we ensure this happens?

1. Make the decision where things go (their “home”) and communicate it to those involved. Sheets in the hall closet, newspapers in the bin, tools on the rack, and papers in a defined filing system.
2. Allot enough time to do the entire job. Far too many of us underestimate the time to get something done or try to multi-task.
3. Begin to instill good habits of completing tasks by seeing them through all the way to the end before you start to do something new. (I know, it may mean climbing some more stairs to put the laundry away right now, but it will be good for your health in the long run.)

At work, a sale is not complete until the check clears the bank. This is the same with “stuff”. The task is not complete until the stuff is put away where it belongs!

Recently, a client was creating sales flyers and price lists in graphics software and needed to email the files to his distributors. The file was too big to send through email due to all of the pictures. The distributors couldn’t open the file anyway, because they didn’t have that particular graphics package. When asked, the client didn’t want the distributor to be able to edit the information anyway.

An easy solution was to save the file as a PDF type file. This is an occasional task for them so they didn’t need to purchase the Adobe software to perform this task. (We probably all have the free Adobe reader to view files but we can’t create them.) We got them using PDF995, available for free at www.pdf995.com . It installs a print driver so when you want a PDF- type file, you print to the PDF995 printer and the file is saved in a PDF format ready for you to attach to an email and send. For $9.95 you can purchase the software so you don’t see the advertising banner but this client felt fine looking at the ads for the few times they used the tool. Some other free PDF tools place a footer in your document listing the name of the product until you purchase the software. PDF995 doesn’t do this. I’m sure there are others out there but this product works!