Fuelled by Coffee

By Nan Berrett - Word Solutions:  I’ve been playing around with the latest thing since sliced pastrami, the AI program which writes like a human and can provide you with content, answers and more – ChatGPT. I fell in love with it, pretty much at first sight, because of what it can do and how clever this technology is. If you like tech you can’t ignore it, and even if you don’t, then you still can’t ignore it. We will be seeing the rise of AI in all shapes and forms over the next decade and the revolution is starting now. What I have asked ChatGPT: ·         Give me some dot points for a blog post on procrastination. ·         Write a customer journey for a small business. ·         Provide some motivational ideas. ·         What techniques do you recommend for time tracking. ·         Ideas for disposabl...

By Nan Berrett - Word Solutions:  I had really good intentions I had really good intentions last year, even though I didn't make specific resolutions. I wanted to form habits which would stick. As a haphazard house keeper with an often disorganised workspace, I decided to make a habit tracker of all the things I wanted to achieve on a daily or weekly basis. I drew up the tracker in my bullet journal - it's the notebook I use every day to log my jobs and reminders, so I knew I'd be able to keep an eye on it. I drew seven vertical lines with a space to the left to write the task or habit. I labelled each line with the day of the week, beginning from Monday. I know there's some argument that calendars should begin on Sunday, not sure why, but Monday is the start of the working week for most of us, so Monday it is! On each line I wrote the tasks - Make bed (abbreviated to 'bed'); Bath (wipe down bathroom); Meditate; Laundry; Work; etc - you choose your own adventure...

  If you are starting or running your business on a shoestring and don’t really know where to spend your hard-earned business savings, then there are plenty of free tools on the web which you can check out. Once you’ve tried some of these free tools you can assess whether or not it’s a viable option to take out ‘pro’ plans. Free websites Paying for professional web design can be costly and can also be full of pitfalls, especially when you’re not sure what you want your website to look like or what you want it to achieve. Try out some free options which have custom web builders, intuitive drag and drop and easy to create websites which practically anyone can manage on their own. Try out the free templates available on sites like Wix.com or weebly.com – websites can also be built on Google sites and on Wordpress. All these sites have useful tutorials either through their own learning platforms or you can look up how to do certain things through YouTube. Free images You ...

  Keeping promises when you work for yourself Keeping your own promises is hard. It’s often difficult enough to keep a promise to others and we’re all guilty of that – saying we will do something in a timely way and then either forgetting or pushing our commitment back behind other more pressing, to us, tasks. Part of the problem is that we don’t accurately forecast our workload or our time burden, so we hastily say yes to things, give timelines we think other people want to hear, and make commitments we end up being unable to keep. We are all busy - and make commitments we end up  being unable to keep We are all busy. Life tends to slip out of our grasp and rush us ahead without considering the lists we have made and the things we have said ‘yes’ to. I am a list maker. I love making lists. The only problem with lists, is that they keep on growing. I have tried taking the three or the five most important ‘must dos’ and putting them on a separate list of their own, so I...

  11 Agenda Items you can use to plan your business week When we are working for an employer or as part of a team, meetings often serve as touchstones for actions and activities. They help with brainstorming new ideas and solutions and, if recorded, they provide a reminder of tasks which need doing and can even celebrate wins. So what do you do when you work for yourself, are your own boss, and maybe don’t have employees or a team – you hold meetings with yourself! Don’t laugh … it works really well. Have regular meetings with yourself -  it works really well! Having regular meetings with yourself helps you focus on what’s important. You can set an agenda, follow through and follow up the next week to see what you’ve achieved. You can set goals, itemise the steps you need to take to get to the end and record how you did. The notes will help you reflect and serve as a bit of a road map, as well as a good aid to your memory if you want to do a similar project again. Do...

My house hippo reminds me to get on with it! I’ve turned procrastination into an Olympic event, so I can tell you, from my heart, that getting what you need to get done is often harder than it looks on paper. I work from home, so have to be my own cheerleader, boss and accountability ‘partner’, so I have come up with a number of ways to get my head into my work and get stuff done. One of the techniques I use to overcome my tendency to procrastinate is to switch my mind away from the task I am meant to do, and do something briefly, which will get my brain motivated and into work. Set a timer for 10 minutes and ONLY work until the timer rings. Then stop – refocus – and get on with the job you have been putting off. I’m going to share seven quick small jobs which you can choose from to kickstart your motivation! The trick is not to linger over them, even if they look like they’ll take longer than the time you give given them – when the timer rings – just stop! You weren’t going ...

  There’s a war out there. A war for jobs, space for new businesses and for confidence. For older women leaving the workforce, for whatever reason, their confidence in themselves as dynamic people with abilities and ideas has often been eroded. We don’t realise it, of course. We drift into ageing without a backward glance. We’ve been so brainwashed into thinking that the third stage of life will be filled by lattes with friends, golf, and the occasional shopping trip. Time to rest and relax the brochures say. Time to be yourself and get off the work treadmill. But what if you don’t want to step off the treadmill. What if you’ve had dreams of running your own business, being entrepreneurial, independent and meaningfully busy? I’m a self-styled Silverpreneur. I have grey/silver hair, am the wrong side of the official ‘retirement’ age for women and I’ve been running my own business for the past ten years – and very successfully too, thank you very much! Being older and likel...