Good work habits are essential with today’s hectic job demands in order to avoid the procrastination bug – you know, that tendency to say “I’ll do it later”.
People with good work habits tend to be more successful in their careers than poorly organized individuals, and they tend to have more time to focus on their personal life. Good work habits are more important than ever because of today’s emphasis on productivity and quality.
The procrastination “bug” is the leading cause of poor productivity and self-sabotage. People procrastinate for many reasons, including their perception that a task is unpleasant, is overwhelming, or may lead to negative consequences. Fear of success can also lead to procrastination. Awareness of procrastination can lead to its control.
Seven techniques for reducing the procrastination bug are:
- Calculate the cost of procrastination – Think about what could happen if you delay the start of a project or task. For example what could possibly happen if you wait until the last minute to submit your payroll?
- Counterattacking the burdensome task – Don’t dwell on the complexities of your job, consider them as challenges. Deal with the task. You are going to have to deal with the task sooner or later.
- Jump-starting yourself by creating a list of priorities and setting time limits for tasks.
- Pecking away at an overwhelming task will make the task seem less of a chore.
- Motivating yourself with rewards and punishments. Postponing or delaying tasks at work can be self-sabotage so be aware of the consequences and try to be more positive.
- Making a commitment to other people.
- Expressing a more positive attitude about your intentions.
Developing good work habits and time management practices often start with developing proper attitudes toward work and time. Seven such attitudes and values are:
- Develop a mission, goals, and a strong work ethic that provide you with a sense of direction that is needed to accomplish quality work in the shortest amount of time possible.
- Value good attendance and punctuality, do so can get you off to a good start and can be a positive asset on your part.
- Value your time and the time of others by planning your activities and concentrating on one key task at a time. Complete tasks which are top priorities first instead of focusing on the least important ones.
- Value neatness, orderliness, and speed by cleaning up and getting organized. This will allow you to work faster because it will be easy to find things when your workspace is clean.
- Work smarter, not harder by managing your time well. Separate activities into time wasters and those that maximize the use of your time. Find ways to automate time-consuming tasks.
- Become self-employed psychologically by thinking of yourself as your own boss. You want to make thing happen in the business, do good quality work and receive a bigger income from it.
- Play the inner game of working, you know what your purpose is at work and do your job with your own best desires and to the best of your ability.
- Appreciate the importance of rest and relaxation, good work habits are not just about working. Our body and our minds need a break from all of the tasks that we are doing. Taking a short break will allow you to think more clearly.
Eleven skills and techniques to help you become more productive are
- cleaning up and getting organized
- planning your activities
- getting off to a good start
- making good use of office technology
- concentrating on one key task at a time
- streamlining your work and emphasizing important tasks
- working at a steady pace
- creating some quiet, uninterrupted time
- making use of bits of time
- staying in control of paperwork, the in-basket, and e-mail
- using multitasking for routine tasks.
Eight suggestions for overcoming time wasting are
- Minimizing day dreaming, don’t get lost in memories of the family picnic over the weekend.
- Prepare a time log, set time limits for tasks and evaluate your use of time. This will help you evaluate if you have done productive tasks or timewasting activities.
- Avoid being a computer goof-off or cyber loafer by making good use of office technology and avoid using them for personal use.
- Keep track of important names, places, and things to avoid unnecessary and time consuming recalls and trackbacks.
- Setting a time limit for certain tasks and projects at the end of the project compare your planned time to your actual time. If the task took longer than the time you allotted try to figure out why the task took longer.
- Schedule similar tasks together and develop a multitasking routine. Routine tasks are simple tasks which you know that you will be doing all the time.
- Bounce quickly from task to task as you check off the list of tasks for the day. It is easier to move from one accomplished task to the next thing to do. The quicker the transition, the more tasks you will complete.
- Be decisive and finish things. Being decisive would mean having the ability to make firm decisions with speed and clarity.
Sure it’s fairly easy to write an article about how to develop good work habits and avoid the procrastination bug or I’ll do it later syndrome – but it isn’t easy to implement it. This is something that I struggle with every day.
Each morning when I go to work I have a plan and a list of things that I need to accomplish in order to maintain and run our business, from paying bills to creating updated product demo’s or support articles. But once the phone starts ringing my priority becomes the person on the other end!
What are your biggest challenges on a daily basis?
It seems that we are experiencing some technical difficulties – since Sunday I have been receiving an “error connecting to the database” when attempting to create a blog post; yesterday I noticed the same type of problems on our main website.
I’ve spent the last two day trying to track down the cause of the problem, with the help of our hosting provider – and we are not getting very far.
He’s rebooted our server, which usually solves the problem, but it hasn’t seemed to clear it up this time.
We’ve started to look at other things – like traffic to the blog and our main site, and it seems like our server is under a pretty heavy load – meaning lots of visitors! Now you would think that’s a good thing right? Lot’s of visitors – yeah, but I guess it causes issues, such as loading pages and overall site speed.
We are working on this issue and hope to have it resolved soon, so please be patient with us until we get it fixed. If you get an error connecting to the database message, on this site or any other, simply reload the page.
I’ve installed a WordPress plugin called W3 Total Cache, which improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site; hopefully will take care of the issue here on the blog. When I first looked at W3 Total Cache, I was pretty intimidated – the detailed setup instructions seemed totally overwhelming; but my hosting provider said “just install and activate it, check to be sure that it is enabled and it automatically does all the optimizations”. That made my life a little easier!
Now I’m off to see if we can solve the mystery of the connection error on the main website.
Have a great day everyone!
A QuickBooks Payroll Tip for creating a more functional Payroll Liabilities section on your Chart of Accounts.
QuickBooks, by default, provides a limited Payroll Chart of Accounts containing only two accounts – Payroll Liabilities and Payroll Expenses. When you run a Balance Sheet or a Profit & Loss Report (or look at your Chart of Accounts listing) you only see the totals with no details and have to run further reports to find the individual amounts that make up the totals. I find this to be problematic.
This article will show you how to add sub-accounts to the standard Payroll Liabilities account so that you can quickly and easily “see” the individual amounts for each payroll liability and how to edit your existing payroll items to accurately point to these new accounts. A little extra work up front will provide you with a very function Payroll Liabilities section on your Chart of Accounts.
Step 1 – Determine the required Payroll Liability Sub-Accounts
Open your Payroll Items List {Lists menu -> Payroll Items} and scroll to the bottom, and pay close attention to the items that are currently pointing to or assigned to Payroll Liabilities.
Right click on the image to enlarge it
NOTE: You may want to customize the columns that are displayed in this list. To do so, right-click the Liability Account heading -> choose customize columns -> from the available columns list click on Expense Account -> the Add button -> Liability Account -> the Add button -> Payable To -> and the Add button. Click Ok. This will provide you a more detailed and functional Payroll Item List to work with, as shown in the screenshot above.
From this list, we will determine what we need to add to our Chart of Accounts to make it more functional. We will be adding sub-accounts for:
- Federal Unemployment {FUTA}
- Federal Withholding {FWH}
- Medicare {M-CARE}
- Social Security {FICA}
- State Withholding {STWH}
- State Disability {SDI}
- State Unemployment {SUI}
- Employee Training Tax (ESD}
Step 2 – Create Payroll Liability Sub-Accounts
Once you have the list of items that we will be adding as sub-accounts to the main Payroll Liabilities account; go to your Chart of Accounts {Lists menu -> Chart of Accounts}.
- Click the Account button {at the lower left corner of this window} -> choose New -> click the radio button next to Other Account Types and from the drop down menu choose Other Current Liability -> click the Continue button
Right click on the image to elarge it.
- In the Account Name, type in Federal Unemployment -> click the box next to Subaccount of and then from the drop down menu choose Payroll Liabilities. Add other details as required or necessary.
Right click on the image to enlarge it
- Click the Save & New button to create the other items from your list.
NOTE: Create a single account for Social Security and Medicare.
Step 3 – Edit existing payroll items mapping them to the new accounts
Going back to your Payroll Item List, edit each item assigning them to the newly created sub-accounts.
- Click on the Federal Unemployment payroll item -> click the Payroll Item button -> choose Edit -> click the Next button -> from the Liability Account drop down menu -> choose Federal Unemployment
Right click on the image to enlarge it
- Click the Next button until you get to the last window then select Finish.
NOTE: You may receive an Update transactions with new account window, here you can choose to update all existing transactions OR update transactions starting on a specific date. My personal preference would be to update all existing transactions – you may want to consult your accountant about this.
Right click on the image to enlarge it.
When you have finished mapping the items to your new sub-accounts; simply opening and viewing your Chart of Accounts will provide you with a detailed account of each of your payroll liabilities, as well as the grand total.
On Wednesday, we’ll provide instructions for making the Payroll Expenses section of your Chart of Accounts provide more information on Profit & Loss Reports.
More about the IRS requesting backups of QuickBooks and Peachtree company files from the Journal of Accountancy, written by Benson Goldstein, J.D.
In a March 29, 2011 letter from Patricia Thompson, chair of the American Institute of CPA’s (AICPA) Tax Executive Committee, to Chris Wagner, commissioner of the IRS’ Small Business/Self-Employed Division, the AICPA communicated its concerns regarding the Service’s program to request the accounting software files of certain small business taxpayers under examination; the letter cites QuickBooks and Peachtree as examples of accounting software actively used by small businesses.
This is a critical matter because the use of accounting software has become commonplace by businesses in meeting the requirement to maintain proper “books and records,” including records involving income, expenses, assets and other pertinent information. If the firm is subsequently selected by the IRS for examination, the Service’s general position is that the entire file must be turned over to the IRS, even though it may contain information:
- from tax years unrelated to the years under examination; or
- even data not normally considered part of a firm’s “books and records” as it is commonly understood for tax administration or audit purposes.
In response to the AICPA’s March letter, the IRS sent a letter on April 20, 2011 to the Institute stating that “it is important an exact copy of the original electronic data file be provided to the examiner and not an altered version.” The Service wants to see the original data file because it would help identify whether there have been deleted or altered entries to the file. The letter elaborates that “the original data file may provide the date a transaction was originally created, dates of subsequent changes, what changes were made, and the username of the person who entered or changed that transaction.”
The AICPA’s March letter urged the Service to begin a dialogue on the issue to ensure reasonable safeguards are put in place “to protect small business taxpayers from turning over more data in an electronic format than is necessary for the IRS to perform an examination.” In addition to requesting further dialogue with the Service, the AICPA has also begun discussions with two of the nation’s accounting software developers about helping CPAs and their small business clients provide the Service with only the data that is responsive and relevant to an IRS examination—but not more. While stating it wants an exact copy of the electronic file, the IRS’ April letter offered the following “suggestions” to address the concerns of CPAs and their clients:
- The client should consider backing up its electronic data files annually at the end of each tax year. This would lessen the amount of data provided to the IRS should the client undergo a subsequent audit.
- The client’s electronic data files may generally be condensed for dates prior to the tax year(s) under audit, but condensed data is not acceptable (according to the IRS) for the years under audit. However, the IRS reserves the right to request another backup file involving data from the archive file created during the condensing process should the scope of the audit expand.
The AICPA will keep members informed about its ongoing dialogue with the IRS about ways small business taxpayers might provide the Service with the necessary data in electronic format (from the software file) while providing taxpayers with appropriate safeguards.
—Benson Goldstein is a senior technical manager (taxation) with the AICPA in Washington.
Recently, many ProAdvisors and QuickBooks customers alike, have been complaining because the standard reply whenever you talk to QuickBooks Support is, “you need to upgrade to QuickBooks Enterprise”, as if QuickBooks Enterprise could part the Red Sea, should you need that in your accounting software.
The practice has become almost comical and it highlights a true disconnect between Intuit actually hearing its clients in need of solutions versus their perceived opportunity to close another sale.
First, a little background. Microsoft attempted to compete directly with Intuit by introducing Microsoft Small Business Accounting Software in 2007. In response, Intuit slashed its prices on the Pro product so that Microsoft couldn’t beat them on cost at the low end. Thus, Microsoft couldn’t get a foothold in the market.
The good news for Intuit is, that strategy worked and Microsoft bailed out of the lower end accounting software market, the bad news is that the pricing model is still out there, and we know that after Staples and Costco take their 50%, Intuit makes almost nothing on QB Pro. In fact, they probably lose money.
So now, Intuit is stuck with 5 million businesses that use their product for which they lose money. The only way for them to make money is to Sell Enterprise, Merchant Services, Payroll, or some other add on service where they have high profit margins.
This, of course, has turned the entire corporation into the “Up Sell Machine” that is disenfranchising everyone in the loop.
If they would just charge $250-$300 for Pro, they would get out of this silly bait and switch routine with their customers and they would make some profit on Pro. As it is, they’ve turned themselves into the crack dealer, giving out something for free, and then demanding your first born once you get addicted. There’s no middle ground, and Intuit is shameless in its willingness to peddle products and services that their customers don’t need.
So what can you do about it? First, I would suggest getting advice from a local QuickBooks ProAdvisor. In General, ProAdvisors are much more concerned about their clients well being and efficient use of working capital than Intuit. You can find a list of QuickBooks ProAdvisors here (http://proadvisor.intuit.com/referral/). While there are good and bad eggs in any profession, my suggestion is interview a few ProAdvisors until you find one you like. I would also say that you generally get what you pay for. While you may not believe that a ProAdvisor whose rate is $150 per hour could possibly be worth 3X the price of a ProAdvisor that is $50 per hour, my experience says quite the opposite. You definitely get what you pay for and often that high priced consultant can work 3 times as fast.
OK, so now you have a ProAdvisor, but they can’t fix your problem. Now you must navigate the gauntlet that is QuickBooks Support. First, define your issue clearly so you can articulate it clearly to the support personnel (i.e. don’t let them sidetrack you). Research issues around your problem, and get confirmation that upgrading to Enterprise is not what you need. Next, block out time to deal with your issue, and don’t let yourself get frustrated. Lastly, don’t agree to buy anything without a day or two to do some research and sleep on it.
Upgrading to Enterprise may well be what you need in your circumstance, but it’s not the resolution to every problem as Intuit promotes. Do research on the internet and read other articles here in my blog. Based on that information, you should get a good feel for whether Enterprise is really right for your needs.
Finally, if Intuit has already got you to buy Enterprise and your business doesn’t really need Enterprise, don’t feel like you’ve made a costly lifelong mistake. We at QB or not QB have developed a serve where we can Convert QuickBooks Enterprise Files to QuickBooks Pro or Premier Format. The conversion can be performed in a few hours, and the downgrade to Pro or Premier is a complete process where no data is lost. Visit our website for more details, www.QBornotQB.com/. If you were trapped by the Up Sell Machine once, you don’t have to be trapped by it anymore.
