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When you leave a voice mail message, do you really expect someone to call you back immediately? Usually, what we are calling about isn’t urgent and a few hours won’t make or break the deal. When I moved to California, I feared it would be impossible to run my Internet travel agency with East Coast customers. It wasn’t. My voice mail explained I was in California and asked customers to leave both day and evening numbers to reach them. People in the East think Californians are flakes anyway, so they accepted the unusual hours. In fact, it was a plus, because, since I specialized in exotic spa vacations, many people didn’t want to discuss mud wraps and de-stressing getaways at their jobs anyway. Fellow West Coasters understood the odd hours. What If I Have to Work During Regular Business Hours? Never answer the phone when you are sleepy. Trust me. I found this out the hard way. If you can afford it, hire someone or an answering service to cover the phones for the first few hours. Even if you have to get back to customers
later, they will be far happier if they talked to a person instead of a machine. If you have to use a message machine, record a message something like this: “You’ve reached Mike Nelson at Spa World Reservation Service. Our regular business hours are Noon to 8 p.m., PST. Please leave both a day and evening phone, so we can help you.”

Make your home office operate like an office. Start at 9 a.m. (or noon if you are a night owl). Stop at 4p.m. (6p.m. for night owls, but don’t worry, you get to go back later). Spend some time doing personal or family things. There is one important exception. We have the power to intersperse daily household chores like doing the dishes, washing clothes, vacuuming so that our weekends can be free. We build time for that into our daily schedules. Where did my day go? Since we don’t have a boss to keep us on track, we fritter away time without realizing it. Our justification is, “At the office, I wasted time in the coffee room. Now I don’t do that.”True, but you waste time on the nonessential. Keep a log (just use general times) of nonessential things you do for a week or two. Don’t keep track of the important stuff you accomplish. Concentrate on wasted time. You have to approach it this way so you’ll become acutely aware of what’s happening. If it has a lot of notations like: played Freecell, played solitaire, talked to friends.. .you’ll know it’s a good list. Everything else I suggest accentuates the positive. But to fight the devil, we have to go to hell.

At home, our personal space flows into our work space. Don’t let i Laundry belongs in the laundry room. Dishes belong in the kitchen. Mai belongs in a designated mail area. None of these things belong on you desk. Almost all of my respondents said their cluttering got worse where they worked at home. Even if you don’t have a separate room for an office, there is hope. Mary French was profiled in the Wail Street Journal for her philanthropic project of putting a dictionary into the hands of every third- grader in South Carolina (www.dictionatyproject.org). She works from a Lble in her living room. Still, she keeps personal mail and clutter from ntruding. She’s learned the “sacred space” principle of keeping only things bat belong in one place.

“I keep only business-related items on the table. don’t have a PDA. I keep everything in my head.”
“Others in the household may also have the tendency to use the workspace designated for the home office and leave items behind on the desk. So not only is there the challenge of keeping the business stuff organized, but you are constantly moving other family stuff out of the way so you can work.”
—Nancy Kruschke, Professional Organizer

By eliminating the boundaries between your kid’s lives and yours, you are just encouraging and teaching them to clutter. Your kids may be the reason you work, but they are not part of the work. Give them their own space. Doing so will teach them boundaries and a sense of organization. It will help them make natural separations with less stress.

Mary had a couple of problems. Behind every good intention, there is a shadow intention. Briefly, our Shadow Self is like a sack of “ought to” we carry around with us. We “ought to” be devoted to our kids. The good intention was to have more time with her daughter. The shadow intention was the fear that she couldn’t balance work and home life any better at home than when she worked in the corporate world.
Her solution seemed to be logical. A clutterer priding herself on being logical is like a baseball pitcher priding himself on his batting ability.
Mary’s situation was difficult, but not unsolvable. By setting up an “office” in Samantha’s room, with places for her crayons, scissors, paper, books, school notebooks, etc., it gave her a sense of her own place. To help her overcome Samantha’s initial feelings of rejection, Mary dropped in to several times a day to see how she was doing for the first few weeks. Samantha began to appreciate having her own space and eventually asked
Mary to “stop interrupting her work.” From the mouths of babes.

I am always thinking, “It’s my office and I want to be close to my kids.” I have a young child that I need to watch, love my kids more by giving them their own space. Mothers have told me that generally, children should be 6 years or older to be in another room without your keeping an eye on them. Whether having them do their drawings and school work next to you will work or not depends on the kid. If your child it is constantly distracting you from your work, see if you can set up a separate space as her own “office.” Everything in this book is about individuals, so do what works for you. Rixzel is a home-based worker and she says “My son is unobtrusive and can work at the same desk as I do. He is home-schooled and does his lessons next to me. He understands my needs for work and actually raises his hand when he needs to ask me a question.” I have been asked to help many people with home offices and commonly see kid’s toys, clothes, or even dishes cluttering up the area. One woman I worked with had a nice computer desk and a great ergonomic chair but couldn’t use it, because it held a laundry basket, two Tonka trucks, and a pile of clothes that covered the file folders on the bottom of the chair. There was so much child debris around that her fax machine was stuffed over on the kitchen counter. We’ll talk about how we got her chair back in a little while. Right now, we are concentrating on the kid challenge. All other woman had a child’s desk next to hers, which was cluttered with crayons, paints, and cut-out animals her daughter was working on. Here’s what she told me. “I’m a single mom and I’ve worked at home as a technical writer for five years. I really like not commuting, or being around people I don’t like. At first, I was wildly successful, with more jobs than I could handle. I took on every one because I was afraid there might not be anymore. To complete them, I had to work 14 hours a day. This didn’t seem to fit into my life-plan of having more time with my daughter, Samantha, so I ‘solved’ the problem by putting her desk next to mine, so we could be close. At first, it worked well, and I appreciated the time we had together. But, when I have a deadline to meet, her frequent interruptions get on my nerves. ‘Mommy, look at the frog I just drew.’ That’s nice, dear, I would say, barely glancing at the picture. She could sense I wasn’t really paying attention, so she’d follow up with, ‘Why are frogs green? What’s the difference between a frog and a toad?’ I realized that giving her half my attention wasn’t going to save any time. When I moved her table into her room, she got angry. ‘You don’t love me anymore! You’re sending me to the dungeon.’ What can I do?”