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January 30, 2006

Cell phone noise

I was reminded this weekend to share a tip I have for silencing cell phones. I was in a quiet place where we needed to turn cell phones off completely (not even on vibrate). Immediately after the announcements, a symphony of cell phone shut down tones went off across the room. So here's my tip: turn your phone to vibrate mode THEN turn it off, that way it won't play the phone shut off tone if it has one. Or, some phones even have a silencer even when it's in vibrate mode and on some others you can eliminate the shut down tone all together.

Posted by Kelly at 01:40 PM

January 24, 2006

Easier travel

There are a couple of things that help me out when I travel that I'll pass along.

1. I have a plastic, durable file folder called Travel Support that holds itineraries, boarding passes, maps, confirmation letters etc. Whatever I may need for travel logistics in hard copy will always be in that folder in my briefcase.

2. I always check-in for my flight online at home, whether I'm checking bags or not. That way I have a printed boarding pass and it's one less step at the airport. When I'm not checking a bag it also means I go right to the gate.

3. For cold weather travel, I have the gear I'll need as soon as I land in that city in an outer pocket of my suitcase so I can get it quickly. For example, right now I'm in Wisconsin (about 40 degrees cooler than LA where I left this morning) so I packed my winter gloves in the outer pocket of my suitcase. Same for umbrellas if I know it's raining where I'm going.

4. One of the biggest things that has helped me streamline my travel is to stick with the same companies as much as possible: United, Hertz and Hilton. Not only do I know the routines, but those points eventually add up and can make experience in the air, car and hotel just that much nicer.

Happy travels.

Posted by Kelly at 04:55 PM | Comments (2)

January 15, 2006

More on Groove

I was intrigued by some of Groove Networks collaboration features. The client I worked with last week in Jamaica uses Outlook for email and Groove to share documents, send instant messages and have discussion threads. This is what Lotus Notes does so well and it's no surprise that Groove has some overlap in functionality given Groove was created by some ex-Lotus Notes minds, most notably Ray Ozzie.

Microsoft obviously saw potential in Groove too and bought the company back in April. Or, as one Microsoft employee told me when I asked him what became of Groove, "we ate them."

More than anything, I think Groove fills the void so many Outlook users I work with seem to deal with: sharing documents. What I typically hear from Outlook users is that they key documents are buried in individual users email folders. Everyone is keeping the same copies for fear they won't have the latest. This of course contributes to email file sizes exploding and IT people mandating quotas. With Groove, documents are managed from one central location instead of on individual PC's.

I'll be curious to see what Microsoft does with Groove. Will it stay as a stand-alone product or will its features eventually be folded into Outlook? We shall see.

Posted by Kelly at 09:11 AM | Comments (1)

January 05, 2006

Google Tip

I am a huge Google fan. One of the fun little tricks I've been using lately is weather search. Since I often need to know the weather before I head out on a trip, I'll use Google search to do that.

Type the keyword weather into Google Search, followed by the name of the city or zip code. Sometimes it seems to need the U.S. state code as well and occasionally I enter a place that it doesn't know, but most of the time it is spot on and so quick.

I'm heading to Key West this weekend on my way for some work in Jamaica next week, so I typed:

weather "key west, fl"

Google should show the weather for the next 4 days at the top of the page. There are quite a few little gems like this on Google if you know about them, including calculator, spell check and movie listings.

Posted by Kelly at 09:07 AM | Comments (2)

January 04, 2006

How to handle daily actions

I received an email from a participant in one of my recent seminars who asked:

How you organize your daily to-do's that need action the same day?

If I have an action that must be taken today, but can be done anytime today, I will add it as an All Day Event. In Outlook, this should keep the time as free for group scheduling purposes. For Lotus Notes users, by default an All Day Event will show your entire day as busy, so choose Anniversary instead and change the range of days under Repeats (can even be the same start and end day).

Each morning, the first place I look is today's calendar page. I look at anything with a start/end time and then I scan to the untimed All Day Events. I am very careful about adding things to the Calendar so that I don't get caught with my calendar full of nice-to-do things that don't get done because I needed to handle unexpected stuff as it showed up (and hence having to copy it on to the next day which takes time and usually is a negative reinforcer). But for those must do daily actions, I think the calendar can be a great reminder system.

I like to follow the guideline of:

- if it needs to be done ON a particular day, I put it on the calendar (as an appointment or all day event)
- if it needs to be done BY a particular day, but can be done any day up to the day, I put it on the Action list for where I need to be to take the action (office, computer, call etc.)

Posted by Kelly at 02:18 PM