Category: Pamela Ayuso

The Importance of Time Away and How It Can Improve Performance

Pamela Ayuso October 8, 2018

I travel whenever I get the chance. During my trips, I usually work remotely, but at other times I disconnect entirely. Occasionally, just because of the time difference, I do both. What I have discovered from my experiments in travel is how critical distance from the office is for strategic thinking, problem-solving, and creativity. It is during these trips that I have had some of the most important insights for my company.

It is not necessarily the travel that makes the most difference in my work quality, although it helps. What does make the most difference is taking time away from the office to let the mind rest, whether it’s to relax or to do a completely different activity. Deliberate rest during vacation or spending time away from the office in an average week is critical for growth and fulfillment. It is just as important as the actual work that gets done, and it is a practice we need to cultivate.

How to Stay on Top of Organization on a Monthly Basis

Pamela Ayuso October 1, 2018

Being organized is a critical component of professional productivity. When everything is in its place and easy to find, work gets done more quickly and with the least amount of friction. As an added benefit, I find it more pleasant to work in an organized environment.

Therefore, I try always to maintain control of my inbox and my computer desktop, and to ensure that the top of my work desk is clean. My goal is to have all emails responded to, archived, deleted, or set as tasks within 24 hours. My computer desktop should have no files (everything should be uploaded to the cloud), and my desk should be neat at any given moment.

Creativity and the Workplace: How to Derive Inspiration

Pamela Ayuso September 24, 2018

In a rapidly changing digital world, innovation is not a luxury. Products and processes must be continuously improved to remain above the competition, and creativity is what drives that innovation. Managing the daily to-dos can often make finding inspiration impossible. The challenge then is developing and nurturing a playful mind, one that will continuously come up with new ideas.

I’ve been searching for mediums that trigger ideas for me. As I continue to explore more and more, I have found some practices and sources that have helped me nurture my creativity.

One Last and Powerful Benefit of Our ERP: Enhancements

Pamela Ayuso September 17, 2018

We recently implemented an Enterprise Resource Management System (ERP) at our firm. The program we selected is NetSuite, which is one of the top cloud-based ERPs available. It has been a 180-degree improvement.

As a real estate development firm, our accounting process and workflow is fully integrated, from inventory purchase to the sale/lease of residential or office units. NetSuite also has tools that organize and catalog our various databases. For more on NetSuite, please refer to my posts: NetSuite: How to Select the Best ERP, and What Happened During Our Year Implementing NetSuite.

Some systems, like NetSuite, come with tools and platforms that allow businesses to modify the system itself to adapt it to a company’s needs more closely. The ability to customize is an additional benefit of transitioning to more advanced systems. NetSuite, for example, has a platform called SuiteScript that allows companies and developers to add to and modify it. Once we implemented NetSuite and were able to manage all of our principal transactions through it, we decided to develop enhancements to automate further and eliminate errors in our operations.

What I Do When I Need to Focus

Pamela Ayuso September 10, 2018

My flow of work depends on what I have to accomplish. For some tasks, I have to be active and communicative, responding to questions or contributing to a project. During these times, I am moving from one task to the next.

Other times, I need to sit down and focus, shut off the world to get a project done. I find these types of tasks much harder to finish than active decision-making and responses. Writing my blog articles, filling out long application forms, taking notes from the books I read, and creating plans for implementation are all examples of tasks that require diligent focus. My mind tends to wander, and I procrastinate endlessly, so I realized I needed a new approach to help me maintain my focus.

How to Make Sure Processes are Always Up-to-Date

Pamela Ayuso September 3, 2018

If there is one constant in the office, it is that everything will change. Once processes have been developed within a company, they need to be reviewed recurrently to ensure they are still effective, relevant, and up-to-date. A new member may have recently joined the team, or perhaps a new system has been implemented which alters the workflow in the office.

We have developed a system for keeping our processes updated at my company, Celaque. It includes periodic reviews, ad hoc modifications, and self-reviews. The best way to make sure the entire body of processes is always updated is through a programmed annual or semi-annual review. Self-review procedures and taking the opportunity to correct processes when mistakes are found are both essential practices to ensure that processes are in the best shape possible.

The Benefits of Company-Wide Meetings You Need to Know

Pamela Ayuso August 27, 2018

I discovered the concept of company-wide meetings in Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg’s insightful book How Google Works (read Valuable Ideas from Google for Growth and Innovation: Part 1 and Valuable Ideas from Google for Growth and Innovation: Part 2). According to the authors, the CEOs at Google held weekly Question and Answer sessions to discuss company policy and direction. The goal of the meetings was to also foster communication and transparency across the company. The idea sounded intriguing, and I decided to give it a try to see how the model could fit at our firm.

I was not 100% sure about how it would work for us, so I implemented a similar idea during our company’s holiday event. A representative of each of the core teams got up to speak about their greatest achievements during the year; as people shared their experiences with one another, I could see invisible communication barriers breaking down. It turned out to be much more powerful than I had originally imagined.

The End of Excel and How to Substitute It (For the Most Part)

Pamela Ayuso August 20, 2018

I have been on a crusade to eliminate Microsoft Excel at our company for the past year and a half. Excel is a wonderful tool, don’t get me wrong. I have been using Excel for years and years, and that very loyal, noble spreadsheet has been my support through thick and thin. During my days as an accounting student, I programmed my financial statements and balanced them using Excel. As an investment banking intern, I learned to create advanced financial models with the same tool. In Alianza, the company where I worked previously and where I ran the accounting department, we also used spreadsheets to create our financial statements and their supporting documents.

Through all those times, Excel was dependable and a true friend. Eventually, however, we started having problems. If I look back and analyze it, the issue wasn’t Excel itself, and it still isn’t. It was the errors we kept finding: we either added an extra digit to the number by mistake or the spreadsheets weren’t all connected with one another, so they needed to be reconciled between each other. Once Alianza grew to a certain size, we quickly realized that we spent more time checking to make sure Excel was right than working with the information in the first place. So, when we started Celaque, the company I currently run, I knew our dependence on Excel had to go.

What Happens When You Automate Your Business Processes

Pamela Ayuso August 13, 2018

Creating and organizing a firm’s processes is not easy; it requires a lot of work and persistence, but it’s worth it. Once all business processes within an organization have been mapped out and designed to work together, everybody on the team will interact like a beautiful symphony. Less time will be spent wondering about possible missing pieces, and more time will be spent foreseeing future problems and thinking about strategy and innovating.

Streamlined business processes are highly beneficial to any firm. It makes all the difference in the world when everybody is working together.

Your To-Do List: How to Manage Future Tasks

Pamela Ayuso August 6, 2018

Promising ideas and future tasks constantly arise as a product of daily interactions. These future actions must be cared for so that they can have a chance to yield their best results. One of these could mean the birth of the next big product idea or could simply be a task that must not be forgotten because the consequences will otherwise be detrimental.

Because most of what demands our attention is related to present tasks at hand, developing a technique for planning into the future is important. The more skill that is developed in handling these types of actions, the more that can be accomplished.