Coffee heat rising

Organization

The Virtues of Saving Paper…

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So yesterday among the several little sh!t-fits I had after the coffee poured into an open file drawer was one of my recurring frenzies over the SHEER QUANTITY of paper stashed in file drawers in my office and garage.

Dayum, how I hate all this PAPER! So I started shuffling through it looking for things I could throw out.

Tossed out a ton of records of the endless engagement with the insufferable La Morona, the secretary at GDU whose ouster took almost two years. Threw out a bunch of student evals and annual reviews from my teaching days at GDU, dating back now something like eight or ten years. And that emptied…about a third of one jam-packed drawer.

Another crammed drawer has bank statements dating back to before the invention of electricity. Of course every statement has an account number on it, some defunct, some…not. There may also be papers in there bearing my Social Security number. All those pounds and pounds of paper will have to be shredded or burned.

My shredder is too small to rip up that much paper, so unless I want to track down one of those community shred-a-thons, I’ll have to spend an evening cremating fistful after fistful after fistful of defunct paperwork in the fireplace.

In the middle of all this, what should I find but the receipt for the expensive Chinese wool rug I lent to SDXB and that, last month, he ended up donating to charity in my name.

“Expensive” is what that thing was: I paid over three grand for it at a discount. From deep in an old file of warrantees and paperwork for stuff most of which broke or was discarded years ago, up pops a document showing this rug’s freaking registration number plus its valuation: $4,000.

Holy mackerel. Is this or is this not a gigantic 2012 tax deduction?

Will this or will this not cause the IRS to audit my 2012 returns? But…I have the actual evidence to justify deducting a $4,000 charitable contribution!

Shoot. I should have photographed the thing before we decided to unload it. The truth is, it was in excellent condition: after Anna the Ger-shep came on the scene, I rolled it up and put it out of harm’s way. As a result, it’s been out of the reach of dog teeth, dog claws, and dog rear ends for most of its existence, except for a few years on a little-used floor casa SDXB.

This is not the first time I’ve been surprised and cheered to find a document that any sane person would have shredded years before.

• There was the time PeopleSoft decided I had started at GDU a year later than I did. If they’d gotten away with that one, it would have shorted me an entire year’s worth of sick-leave pay, to the tune of about $17 an hour. Amazingly, I had the 15-year-old statement of my first paycheck.

• Then the financial managers decided they needed to know how much I’d paid to buy into some Vanguard funds, way back in the early 80s.

• Now we have the proof of value for a rug I haven’t seen in five or six years.

Hoarding has its virtues.

That notwithstanding, I’m emptying all that trash out of there at the earliest convenient moment. Like, probably starting this evening!

Tax Time Sneaking Up: Are You Organized?

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The accountant is getting antsy for 1099s. Where are the 1099s? Don’t I know it’s TIME TO DO THE TAXES? Well….yes. Where are the 1099s, there in the disorganized organization that passes for my file drawers?

Thought I’d saved the PDFs to disk. But if I did, I can’t find them. As the desktop iMac has slowly faded into senility, I’ve slowly migrated my operations to the MacBook. But the MacBook won’t talk to the decrepit printer; the only computer I can print off of is the iMac. The iMac is connected to the external hard drive, and so I’m constantly e-mailing stuff back and forth because I never have figured out how to hard wire them together and because the directory organization is now different in the two machines and I don’t want them getting conflated and because I’ve been too lazy and too techno-flummoxed to update to whatever species of large cat is the current OS so I can get into iCloud and right now I’m too sick to brave the crowds at the Apple store to contend with that. Which is a disorganized way of saying no, I’m not organized!

The trouble with a small business is that like membership in Medicare, it breeds great wads of paper. Paper multiplies in my file drawers as wire coat hangers breed in the dark of a closet. I need more file cabinet space. And I need to quit structuring my filing system on the fly.

So this morning the dogs got locked out of the room while I spread the contents of several hanging file folders across the floor and reorganized them. Now, I think, we have it:

Hanging file 1: S-Corp receipts

• File Folder: Receipts: current year
• File Folder: Receipts: last year
• File Folder: Receipts: from long ago

Hanging file 2: S-corp tax stuff

• File Folder: Tax paper: current year
• File Folder: Tax paper: last year
• File Folder: Tax paper: from long ago

Hanging file 3: S-corp incorporation papers

• File Folder: CE Desk incorporation paperwork

Hanging file 4: Website hosting and monetizing

• File Folder: Domain names
• File Folder: Bluehost
• File Folder: Adsense

And what, you might reasonably ask, is meant by the term “tax paper”? Well, it’s all those pieces of paper people throw at you or you throw at others that might have some bearing on tax preparation other than receipts for purchases: stubs for checks received showing the job for which the check paid; statements sent to the issuers of said checks; statements sent from vendors; several strange pieces of paper emanated by the Great Desert University. If I don’t know how to classify it and I think someday an auditor will demand to see it, that’s where it goes.

Yeah, I know: why the hell aren’t I scanning all this garbage to disk?

Well, first because my scanner runs s-o-o-o-o-o slowly that it’s actually painful to use. There are other things I’d rather do, in the brief time allotted to me on this earth, than sit here and watch that scanner groan along.

Second, because I don’t trust digital stuff. It’s all very nice to back it up to a hard disk. But what happens when the burglars steal that along with your computer?

Third, because I figure iCloud comes with my MacMail subscription and that’s where I ought to be storing this stuff. It’s cheaper than Carbonite and looks like it will be easier to use. Maybe.

Fourth, because I’ve been too lazy to break free enough time to go deal with the Apple people and figure out how to get iCloud going.

Fifth, because I’ve been putting all that off until I buy a new iMac (or something) but haven’t gotten around to buying a new iMac (or something) because I haven’t decided which I really need, a new iMac or a second MacBook or a Mac Mini with a large monitor/TV screen, and besides I need a new printer/scanner but haven’t figured out which one of those I want, either. We call that “cascading excuses.”

It’s the Niagara Falls of cascading excuses, come to think of it.

Time to turn off the tap on the excuses. Let’s consider what we need to save and how it can best be organized to simplify data storage and retrieval.

For your business you need:

• Records of your business’s organization and registration with government agencies
• Proof of income
• Proof of expenses
• Records of payments to contractors and agents
• Banking records
• Credit card records
• Copies of government forms filled out and submitted by you
• Copies of government forms filled out and submitted by your paid contractors, agents, and customers
• Information about your vendors, clients, and subcontractors

Almost all of these are now accessible electronically and can be saved as PDFs. Others, such as hard-copy checks, can be scanned to disk.

The ideal filing system, in my ideal world, would have electronic and hard-copy incarnations, and both would be organized along the same lines.

Online

Folder: Receipts

• Scanned receipts for operating expenses, supplies, and travel
• Scanned or downloaded receipts for website hosting, domain names

Folder: Clients & correspondence

• Copies of e-mail correspondence
• Scanned copies of hard-copy correspondence
• Spreadsheet recording clients’ e-mails, Website addresses, snail-mail addresses, rates, amounts billed, and amounts collected
• Statements to clients, organized by client name and date

Folder: Incorporation Records

• Scanned copies of original incorporation forms and records
• Copies of annual corporate reports
• Scanned copies of payment records

Folder: Subcontractors

• Each person’s W-9
• Each person’s 1099
• Invoices from each subcontractor

Folder: Banking records

• Copies of checks scanned for e-deposit
• Monthly or semi-monthly Quickbooks downloads
• Scanned or downloaded copies of credit card statements
• Scanned or downloaded bank account statements
• Downloaded PayPal statements

Folder: Income records

• Adsense statements
• Amazon Associates statements
• Advertiser statements
• Royalty statements
• PDF pay statements from community college (personal, really; but might as well keep all the income records together)

Hard Copy

Hanging file folder: Receipts

• Receipts: Original receipts for every expense
• Charitable Giving: Receipts for donations

Hanging file folder: Statements and Invoices

• Statements from vendors and business organizations
• Invoices to clients

Hanging file folder: Correspondence

• Any hard-copy correspondence that arrives or is sent by snail-mail
• Printouts of e-mail correspondence that might be important

Hanging file folder: Incorporation records

• Annual reports
• Copies of annual government fee
• Original incorporation papers

Hanging file folder: Website hosting

• Bluehost
• Domain name records

Hanging file folder: Subcontractors

• W-9s
• 1099s
• Invoices from subcontractors

Hanging file folder: Banking records

• Original checks scanned for e-deposit with bank receipt printout
• Monthly or semi-monthly Quickbooks downloads, hard copy
• Original credit card statements
• Original bank account statements
• Downloaded PayPal statements, hard copy

Hanging file folder: Pay statements

• Printouts of community college pay statements

Hmh. That’s going to take a few hours (as in “days and days”) to put together. Meanwhile of course we’ll be keeping up with blogging, teaching, editing copy, and hustling business at the same time. 🙄

The heck with it. I’m going to take a nap.

Have you got a system? What’s it look like?

w00t! Wednesdays from Hell Are OVER!!!

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Gustave Doré. Charon rowing across the River Styx. Plate 9, Dante's Inferno, Canto III

Yay! Today is the last Wednesday from Hell!

The Wednesday afternoon class let out a little early, giving time to race by the Safeway to pick up a celebratory bottle of wine and the pool store to pick up some chemicals. Then raced home to discover M’hijito had not come by over the lunch hour, and that left Charley caged and unfed for five hours. Opened the crate door, released a nuclear explosion. Fed the explosion some dog food. Chased around. Ran a second hose from the westside bibcock to the empty pool, turned it on full-blast to supplement the full-blast flow from the bibcock on the north wall. Chased around some more. Locked Cassie in a bedroom to protect her from pup’s turbocharged maleness. And on it went.

Still have choir tonight, tho’ I don’t consider that the least bit Hellish.

Most of what has sent this semester’s Wednesdays blowing in from the subterranean regions has originated in my own quirks.

The insomnia: Until the nights get cold (as in the house is around 60 degrees), I wake up sometime between 2 and 5 a.m. By mid-autumn it’s dark outside at that hour, and anyway when you get waked up by insomnia you feel terrible and the last thing you want to do is walk the dog (which is what you should do) even if it were safe at that hour. And so invariably I park myself in front of the computer and start working. So my work day normally begins around 5:00 a.m. That’s after a good night’s sleep…

The ad-hoc organization: On Wednesdays from Hell, it’s meant two hours of work before I notice the time and jump up and race around to feed Cassie and myself before M’hijito shows up with the Animated Rocket (i.e., Charlie the Golden Retriever Pup). Bolt breakfast. Receive pup. Go back to work, interrupted repeatedly and frequently. About 10 a.m., race to bathe and get dressed, fly out the door, teach until almost 5:00 p.m., fly back to the house.

The inability to bring a stop to work: Fix dinner. Bolt down dinner. Shovel Charley out of the house. Feed Cassie. Race out the door to choir. Practice till 9:00 p.m. Race home. Finish whatever I was working on in the few minutes of peace between end of choir and start of unconsciousness. Hit the sack about 10 or 11 p.m. Read ARCs until I fall asleep, which is usually pretty quick. Next morning, Thursday, I have to be in Scottsdale by 7:00 a.m.

A workday that runs from 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning to 10:00 or 11:00 at night, all of it filled with one kind of labor or another, is not a day. It’s flickin’ torture.

Today, lhudly sing huzzah, it ends!

A mountain of stoont papers sits on the server, waiting to be read, but we have a week and a half to get through that stuff. Next Wednesday the once-a-week class meets for a Fake Final (extra-credit quiz for those whose grades are on the borderline, by way of getting them to show up for the required finals week meeting, without which I will not get paid). But only the Wednesday afternoon class meets that day; the two earlier classes’ finals happen on Monday. So that exempts next Wednesday from the Hellish category.

Next semester my schedule exceeds ideal. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30–1:45 and 2:00–3:15. Only two days a week. Time enough to get lunch (or at least a snack) before running to campus. Enough class time to get something accomplished. (I just loathe the damnable, useless 50-minute class meetings! Why bother to meet them at all???) Then out of there before the worst of the afternoon rush hour starts to roar. And classes do not fall on a choir day!

And it means I’ll be able to sing at the noon service on Good Friday. Just simply too good to be true.

As soon as the student papers are shoveled off the desk and grades are filed, all I’ll have left is a week of free labor to rewrite next semester’s courses, and then…F.R.E.E.D.O.M!!!

Just two projects are on the table (just two!) for winter break: kick the marketing plan for The Copyeditor’s Desk into gear, and create a test e-book by way of learning how to make and market e-books.

Funny about Money has almost 1700 posts. From what I can see, there’s enough material there for at least three short books of the size that lends itself to the e-book genre. One of them, actually, will be long enough and substantial enough to qualify as a real book—I may offer that to one of my erstwhile publishers. But at least two of them are going online to be marketed through FaM and Amazon.

The first, which I hope to have ready before Christmas, will be a collection of FaM recipes, supplemented by some of the best from lifetime favorite recipes. That is, the FaM recipe book will contain more cookery than appears on the website.

Quite a few of its recipes will lend themselves to holiday meals. That’s why I’d like to get it together in time for Christmas. That may be asking too much, though.

At any rate, it’s an hour and a half until choir. Charley is quiet. Cassie is lobbying to get out of the back bedroom. Maybe I can sneak a bite to eat and a glass of wine before it’s time to get going again.

🙂

The Joy of Listing

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Yeah, I know: Evan and my other east-of-center friends will be thinking “Yup, the woman lists to the left!” But that tendency notwithstanding, I’m here to testify to the endless benefits of making lists to organize your time and beat yourself into finishing those tasks you just. don’t. WANT. to. do.

By this morning I’d only just started to climb out of the hole I’d dug for myself by falling behind on a single regular chore: grading student papers. That slippage led to a cascade—an avalanche, we might say—of missed deadlines and stuff that wasn’t getting done. Last night I read copy until 2:00 a.m.; then overslept until 7:00 this morning, meaning I didn’t get breakfast before M’hijito showed up with pesky Charley the Puppy, which meant I didn’t get the pool backwashed or the plants watered or the dishes washed or this post written while there was still time to work in relative peace.

With that little bouncer underfoot, precious little gets done. And by now a vast lot needs to get done.

Well, after tying the end of Charley’s long lead to a doorknob, I figured I’d better get organized or nothing would get done: ever again! Hence, the disorganized organizer’s secret weapon: a list on a yellow pad:

√ Refill hummingbird feeders
Backwash pool
Test water
Adjust chemicals
Enter debits in personal and corporate books
√ Read the last straggling student paper
√ Water plants
√ Read new client’s chapter;
….√ Enter preliminary edits in two pages, timing the effort
….√ Write assessment, commentary, and estimate
….√ Compose agreement letter
….√ Send all of the above to him under cover of an e-mail
√ Write October ABPA newsletter
Write new CE Desk website copy
Update LinkedIn copy
√ Find out if there’s a LinkedIn badge that could go on new CE Desk website
Contact former client; ask advice on marketing
√ RSVP to networking opportunity
√ Remember to enter dog training appointment in calendar
Dust furniture
Clean floors
√ Write FaM copy

Well, of course I came nowhere near getting all those things done. In fact, only the items that absolutely positively HAD to get done got done.

For some reason, writing down the things you need to do does something to the brain. It weirdly  motivates you to perform, for reasons I don’t understand. Maybe the satisfaction of checking off yet another obnoxious chore—DONE!—releases just enough happy-chemicals into the brain to keep you going.

I can think of a thousand things I’d rather do than read another student paper. And I especially resent reading late papers, even if the kid has what looks like a legit excuse.

I am sick of watering plants.

I’ve already backwashed the pool twice this week, which is two times too many.

I never want to write the mind-numbing newsletter.

And the prospect of reading client copy (and constructing an agreement letter and writing an assessment that made sense) plus writing the newsletter was enough to send me off on a cruise aboard the Good Ship Google, a fugue that would guarantee the nonaccomplishment of all the above.

Tomorrow I have to teach all day, race home, feed the pup, bolt down dinner, and then shoot out the door to choir practice. So none of the other undone things on today’s list will get done. The gritty floors will continue to stain the bottoms of my feet gray. The books will fall further out of date. More bills will come in today’s and tomorrow’s mail and not be entered in said books. Cassie’s dust allergy will continue to make her eyes run. The Copyeditor’s Desk website will remain out of date. LinkedIn will remain out of date. The recently former client may shuffle off this mortal coil before I get in touch with him.

But at least the worst of today is done.

Mary Kay Ash wrote, in her long-ago autobiography, that listing was THE way she got herself organized and moving forward when she started her business. And, she said, she continued to write and follow lists throughout her formidable career.

She advised her acolytes to write the next day’s to-do list on the bathroom mirror, in lipstick.

Why not? Use the stuff as a marking pen, and you’ll buy all that much more Mary Kay lipstick!

Messy, but you can be sure it worked. It’s hard to ignore a to-do list that’s between you and your morning makeup. You have to see it as you stumble into the bathroom to use the terlet the first thing in the morning. What a reminder.

She also suggested putting the chore you least want to do at the top of the list. For her, it was cold-calling. Her theory was, once you got the don’t-wannas out of the way, the rest of the day would be downhill skiing.

And there certainly is something to that: I find I tend to put off all my chores when there’s some major don’t-wanna lurking. Because I don’t want to do that one thing, I don’t want to get started at all, because sooner or later I’ll have no choice but to face the aversive task. So I don’t do anything at all.

Organizing your tasks seems to organize your time, as if my magic. Automatically, so to speak. And now it’s 8:00 p.m. and I need to schedule this post to go online tomorrow ayem, fix something to eat, feed Cassie, finish reading the current ARC (author’s review copy–a type of page proof), and go to bed.

Tomorrow:

Backwash pool
Test water
Adjust chemicals
Enter debits in personal and corporate books
Write new CE Desk website copy
Update LinkedIn copy
Contact former client; ask advice on marketing
Dust furniture
Clean floors
Meet three classes
Go to choir
Read draft stoont papers before going to bed
Write FaM copy

Yeah. Sure.

🙄

Gorgeous Summer Schedule

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Even though daytime temps have risen into the 100s, early mornings out here on the back porch are beyond gorgeous. This is, bar none, the best time of the day during the summer. Evenings are pretty darned spectacular, too.

This morning for the first time in forever I rolled my lazy tush out of the sack and took Cassie for a walk before breakfast. She was puzzled but delighted. It was still cool by the time we got back to the house, and so it was outdoors for a slice of watermelon and a cup of coffee.

Item: Dog and I need to do this more often. We’re both turning into lumps of Jell-O as I labor in front of the computer between ten and twenty hours a day.

Item: When summer classes start on July 5, a whole new daily schedule is gonna have to kick in.

The 102 class, which runs for 7 weeks and meets 4 days a week, starts at 7:00 a.m., meaning I have to be out the door no later than 6:30. The 101 section is only 5 weeks long; class meets straightaway after the 102s escape, which is great: that means I’m headed homeward by 11:30, and after that section ends, I leave campus at 8:50. w00t!!!!!

Because I naturally awaken at dawn, I’m usually up by 5:00 or 5:30 during the summer. So…it occurs to me that now is the time to build a new and more healthful daily schedule. Mwa ha ha! Check this out:

Evening:

• Prepare breakfast stuff and stash in fridge, ready to be microwaved and toasted.
• Make large batches of orange-juice/fruit smoothies; store some in fridge and freeze some for future use.
• Lay out clothes.
• Load the car.
• Take the dog for walk: approximately 45 minutes.

Voilà! the most time-consuming morning tasks are done. It takes approximately two minutes to microwave a slice or two of bacon and toast a piece of bread.

Next morning:

• Alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m., just in case I happen to be asleep at that hour.
• Out the door immediately to range about the neighborhood in the company of a small dog: approximately 1/2 hour.
• Race in the door; feed dog; put human food on to cook; pour juice or iced tea.
• Water potted plants while food is cooking.
• Eat, read paper, enjoy the cool of the morning.
• Dip in the pool; then bathe and shampoo hair under the outdoor hose shower.
• Paint or don’t paint face, as time allows.
• Throw on clothes.
• Fly out the door.

If I could get out the door with Cassie the first thing in the morning four days a week and continued to walk her every night, as usual…consider the exercise possibilities!

4 days x 30 minutes = 2 hours/week
7 days x 45 minutes = 5.25 hours/week
2 + 5.25 = 7.25 of walking a week!

Dang! Not bad, for virtually no effort at all, eh? If I can find time during the day for a few minutes of yoga and then manage to actually swim in the pool (that’s extreme, I know), I might start to revive a bit.

Cassie’s a pound overweight, so a bit over seven hours of weekly strolling can’t hurt her much, either.

I’ve been terribly spoiled by not having to be anywhere before about 10 a.m. So, getting my act back together is going to require a little self-discipline. But it’ll be worth it!

🙂

OMG…Never rains but it pours

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Just when you think you can loaf (make that “get caught up with all the survival chores you haven’t done”), in rolls another gigantic wave of work. The semester’s end brings three huge piles of student papers. Two of the piles comprise about twenty 2,500-word papers apiece! Those gems, 100,000 words of them, arrive on Monday; grades have to be in on Friday, May 14.

The 101s turned their pile in yesterday—portfolios plus a retrospective essay. Pedagogically correct but just another pointless mound of papers for me.

Meanwhile, one of my clients has been given a deadline of May 15 to submit his huge, arcane project. He wants me to read the entire darned thing. Now. And while I’m at it, format his tables to fit APA style. So, these student papers are going to have to be shoveled off my desk as fast as they come in.

So focused was I last night on finishing the 101 papers before bed-time that I worked without lifting my head until 9:30. About that time I looked at the clock and realized I’d missed choir practice!

Egregious. Especially since it’s my birthday and the choir probably bought a cake to celebrate. Damn it.

Today I’ve got to read the client’s copy. Since I haven’t had a chance to do the laundry in two weeks, the washing will have to be shoved in around that job. Given the time crunch, once again I’ll be working for six- to eight-hour stretches without looking up, stopping long enough to grab a meal, and then going back for another six to eight hours. God only knows how long it will take to read this copy: it’s arcane, complex, and turgid. Not as annoying as freshman copy, but extremely difficult.

I suppose it’s a time management thing. I need to figure out ways to balance this workload so it doesn’t all come pouring in at once.

Of course, I had no way of anticipating that the client would show up on my doorstep with a massive project just as the students disgorged a river of trash for me to read. Well…yes, I did: Murphy’s Law!

Time management lessons learned:

• Always assume that when your workload is greatest, a mass of extra work will land on your head.

• Whenever possible, arrange to do the largest part of a project’s labor near the beginning of the project. Thus when the mass of extra work comes crashing in, you’ll have some space before the project’s deadline.

• Never procrastinate.

• Delegate whenever possible.

Next time I teach 102, I think I’m going to assign the huge research paper at mid-term. It will interfere with the students’ mid-term exams, but tant pis. When it’s due at the end of the semester, it interferes with their finals. If the big research paper is out of the way, then the last set of papers will be relatively easy to dispense with.

And with the 101s, I think we’ll make all their four papers research-based. Delaying until they arrive at the two researched papers that the school’s policy requires means they don’t have enough time to ingest MLA style. About 80 percent of these folks are in community college because they’re not great students. Unless you have a passion for research and writing, which none of them do, you have a really tough time learning the basic principles of citation and documentation. Giving them an entire semester to learn what a style manual is and how to follow it should reduce some of the grading pain at the end of the term. I’m also going to have them buy the MLA manual. I can’t dispense with the textbook, which is largely a waste (it’s wanting in several ways), but I can add something they really will use.

Well, onward. It’s back to work!