Timely Tips© Volume 4, Issue 4; April 2007: A Great Web Browsing Tip

Dear Timely Tips Reader,

Happy April! A quick reminder to all Timely Tips subscribers: always keep your eyes open for new processes and techniques on ways to save time. I happened across this month's tip by doing just that -- I actually witnessed my intern Bridget using this technique, and as soon as I saw her do this, I knew it could be a valuable time saver for anyone that regularly browses the web.

This Month's Tip: Consider "Right-Clicking" Links in Your Web Browser

As I said, my intern Bridget and I were doing some comparison shopping for a new printer for the office, and she was pulling up several browser pages of comparative data on several printers. I noticed that instead of just doing the standard "left click" on the links to the web pages with the printer information, she was instead right clicking on the links, which gave her a whole set of options on what she wanted to do with that link. Those options included "Open Link" (the same as "left clicking"), "Open Link in New Window" (extremely useful -- more on that soon), "Save Target As" (helpful when downloading executables like small audio or video files, or new software programs), and "Copy Shortcut" (great if you want to copy a web page URL into an e-mail or document).

I've used the "Copy Shortcut" option a ton in the past, but for whatever reason I didn't make the connection on the value of the "Open Link in New Window" option. When you are doing any kind of comparative research (like researching different flight options on different airlines, or possibly buying a new office printer!), you can very quickly open up two or three browser windows and quickly tab back and forth to compare the different options. If you've got one of the new large TFT screens, you can easily go three windows wide, and most definitely save time in cross comparisons.

I tried the "right clicking" option in both Internet Explorer and Netscape -- the options in each browser when right clicking were somewhat different, but the most useful options seemed to cross over both browsers. I would bet similar options are available if you are using other browser tools for your Internet surfing. And I'm sure this same useful option can be used in other clever ways -- I strongly recommend you try it next time you do some Internet-based research!

Where in the World is Randy?

I am writing this from the lobby of beautiful Keystone Resort in Keystone, Colorado. I'm here to present at the Annual National Association of Legal Career Professionals conference, doing an updated 60-minute version of my popular "Finding an Extra Hour Every Day" program. Keystone is quite beautiful this time of year, but make sure to check the weather! When I drove over the pass through the Eisenhower Tunnel on I-70, I actually ran into a white out blizzard -- I certainly wasn't expecting that as it was sunny and 70 degrees in Denver. Still, some amazing hiking trails and a chance to see some gorgeous scenery.

Coming up -- Boston, Northern Michigan, Miami, Pittsburgh, Tucson, Harrisburg, Maryland, and Michigan's beautiful little town of Frankenmuth. Let me know if you will be in any of these places in coming weeks -- maybe we can find a time to get together!

Until Next Time ...

Obviously, a quite busy May and June coming up. I hope that all of you can take advantage of these Timely Tips so you can get out of the office a bit early and enjoy this beautiful time of the year. I know I'll be doing the same. Stay Timely!

Timely Tips© Volume 4, Issue 3; March 2007: Two More Air Traveler Handy Tips

Dear Timely Tips Reader,

I hope that wherever you are in the world you are enjoying the coming of spring. I myself have had the luxury of witnessing the beginning of spring in both Germany and the Czech Republic in recent weeks due to some wonderful client engagements. I’ve also been traveling extensively around the U.S. in recent weeks, and I wanted to share two important time and stress saving tips for all of you air travelers to remember next time you get to fly.

Tip #1: Use Early Online Check In – most domestic carriers in the U.S. now allow you to check in and print your boarding passes online up to 24 hours prior to your flight via your internet connection on your home or work PC. If you can do this, I strongly recommend that you check in using this method. By checking in early online, you beat the rush and the stress of lines at the airport. And often, you can check the available seats to get a better seat on your flight, before the majority of travelers have checked in. (A quick mini-tip – if you have a flight connection on your itinerary, check in early online, and try to get an aisle seat as close to the front of the plane as possible. This will help you to deboard the first plane as soon as possible, and will greatly increase your ability to make your connection.)

Tip #2: Use Sky Caps to Check Your Bags – the second tip I strongly recommend is to find and use the sky cap baggage check whenever available. These men and women usually will collect your bags curbside at the drop-off area in your airport (you can usually find the locations of your sky cap baggage check options on your airline or airport web site), sometimes for a small per bag fee (and usually a small gratuity – typically $1 per bag checked). If you have already checked in online and have your boarding passes printed, you can go directly to the Sky Cap to complete your check in and baggage check – and it is definitely worth the small additional fee or tip to do this. This will often allow you check your bags in a few short minutes vs. the 15-30 (or more) minutes it sometimes takes to get through the standard baggage check line. And, it allows you to not have to personally transport your bags throughout the large spaces of most airports. After sky cap baggage check, you can usually proceed directly to security, and then get to your gate in plenty of time to make your flight without the stress and burden of carting around your bags and dealing with big check in lines.

Obviously, these strategies only work for domestic flights – international travel requires gated check in for passport control. But they will save you significant time and stress, and will allow you to actually enjoy your travel process vs. the stress and worry that often accompanies your flights.

Until next time, Stay Timely!

Where in the World is Randy?

Well, I’m actually writing this from the airport in Prague in the Czech Republic, although you’ll probably actually receive it after I return to Michigan via Paris. Thus, the March Timely Tip might actually be received by many of you in April – April Fools! As many of you know, I definitely have a bit of a personal travel bug, and very much love to explore. I have not been disappointed this year.

Since the first of the year, I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to visit North Carolina, Houston, Marco Island, Wiesbaden and the Rudesheim in Germany, Phoenix, Palm Springs, Los Angeles, Sedona and the Grand Canyon, and of course, Prague. And in coming weeks, I’ll be visiting Keystone, the Boston area, Miami, Tucson, Pennsylvania, Chicago, and Northern Michigan. Obviously, if you see that I’ll be in an area that you will be in, please drop me a line – I’d love to get together with you. Also, I’m planning to create a new feature on my You Tube channel – picture and video travel blogs. I’ll basically start to take the pictures and video snippets from my business and pleasure travel excursions, and post these on my You Tube channel for any and all of you that might be also traveling (or thinking of traveling) to these locations. Look for the first of these travel blogs – likely featuring Wiesbaden, Germany, the Grand Canyon, Arizona, and Prague, in the next couple of weeks. By the way, Prague is absolutely beautiful this time of the year – a great springtime location.

Watch future Timely Tips for more traveler updates and occasional traveler tips.

Taming the E-mail Beast Update

My new book, Taming the E-mail Beast: 20 Key Strategies for Managing Your E-mail Account (and Regaining Your E-mail Sanity), is progressing nicely. Several chapters have been completed, and the book should be on to the copy editor quite soon. For the many of you that have participated in one of my recent teleseminars, webinars, or live “Taming E-mail” programs, you are invited to take advantage of a few special pre-publication offers on my web site regarding this new and extremely useful book (and related audio CD program), and take your e-mail management capabilities to an all new level.

Timely Tips© Volume 4, Issue 2; February 2007: Consider YouTube as a “Spot Training” Resource

Hi everyone! Randy Dean here writing this version of Timely Tips live from Wiesbaden, Germany, where I’ve had the pleasure of leading some training programs for a valued client. This month’s tip is an interesting tip for all of you Internet surfers and “YouTubers”, and may provide a clever way for you to provide “spot training” for yourself and others on the acquisition of desired and very specific technology skills (and possibly spot training in other areas).

What I’ve found out is that many training and performance consultants have been posting “mini” skills-training videos out on YouTube YouTube, and I’ve decided to join this party by adding my own channel:

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=JanaRandyDean

Here, you can see my recent “Taming the E-mail Beast” demo video (Parts I & II), produced by Take2Media http://www.take2mediaproductions.com. Kim and Jim from Take2Media deserve some great credit here – they took my raw video footage from a recent live training and did some excellent post-production enhancements to truly make this a wonderful demo video. They also helped me through the technical details of posting this video out on YouTube so that the whole world can see. If you are looking to do any kind of video production work in the near future, from simply moving old taped footage to disc or DVD, all the way up to creating, producing, editing, and posting professional quality video productions, I recommend you contact Jim or Kim at Take2Media –Take2mediaproductions.com

You’ll also notice on my You Tube channel that you can listen to the “picture-enhanced” audio replay (Parts I to VII) of my most recent “Taming the E-mail Beast” preview teleseminar (nearly 50 minutes of audio) – good for all of you that weren’t able to make one of the recent “Taming the E-mail Beast” teleseminar calls (another round is scheduled: www.randalldean.com/email_teleseminar1.html This way, you can actually listen to the entire audio program at your own convenience, and also see some really nice travel photos from some recent trips I’ve taken! (In the future, we’ll actually be doing a screen-capture version with an integrated “Taming E-mail” MS PowerPoint presentation that will be presented with the audio file – look for more information on that soon.)

This is the goal of what my channel on YouTube will be all about: creating and posting relevant and useful “mini-content” training snippets that will be available as a post-program resource for people that attend my programs. What better way would there be to reinforce your learnings from a live program you recently attended than to have a related web site with audio and video content you can visit one to two weeks following the program? I recommend that you consider subscribing to my YouTube channel – that way, you’ll be notified whenever I post new content – including these new “mini-content” training snippets.

And I also recommend that you visit my “Playlists” section of my YouTube channel. Here, you’ll see links to my teleseminar replays, and also to several Outlook tutorials. I have found several useful MS Outlook training tutorials from other expert users out on YouTube, and have posted them here in my “playlists” for your convenience. This leads to my final suggestion this month: if you ever have a very specific technology training question for a specific piece of software, or a specific software process, you might want to try searching for it on YouTube, and also possibly on Google and Yahoo! There might be a mini-audio or mini-video file out there on the web somewhere for you to find and use to answer your question. And if you find one that is really useful, consider sending the link to that audio or video to your whole work team! Because YouTube generally limits most providers’ videos to 10 minutes or less, the videos are usually short and sweet, and that is perfect for adult learners – quick, encapsulated content that they can immediately acquire and assimilate – a useful tool indeed! (The only downside that I see – you sometimes have to spend some time surfing through some silly or “questionable” content to find the ones that have real training/skills acquisition value.)

So, if you haven’t already, take a spin on YouTube, and use my new channel --

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=JanaRandyDean -- as your first place to start (remember to subscribe!) If you find great content-rich training videos while out there “YouTubing”, please send me the link. If I like them, I’ll post them in my playlists section.

Until next month, Stay Timely!

Timely Tips(c): Volume 4, Issue 1; January 2007: The Power of Pocket Voice Recorders

Welcome back from a (hopefully) happy holiday season. I hope that you are all well rested, getting over your food comas, and are building your plans for a wonderful 2007! You'll see below that we certainly had a very busy holiday season -- with the wonderful New Year's present that only a new baby can bring. (I'm writing this under the influence of significant sleep deprivation!)

This month's Timely Tip comes from a suggestion from one of our subscribers, but is a tip I've been actually using for a few years now. One of my New Year's Resolutions is to use this tip and this tool even more in the coming year, due to it's wonderful usefulness.

The tool I am talking about is the portable personal voice recorder, and the tip I'm sharing with you is to keep one of these very handy anytime you are mobile!

Portable voice recorders are a wonderful tool for helping you be better organized and less forgetful. I use mine primarily in the car, but I also find it useful to keep one on me whenever I am out of my home or office and also away from my laptop/PDA (yes, I do occasionally leave home without my Palm and/or Blackberry!!)

Why? So I can leave myself messages and capture good ideas whenever they happen to hit me!

I really like having one in my car -- they tend to be a bit easier to use "on the fly" than even my PDA SmartPhone (those can be somewhat dangerous little buggers to be fooling with when driving in traffic!) The two different models that I have both have a large, easy to find "RECORD" button right on the front and center of the device. Thus, when I'm driving, and an idea hits me, or I think of a task I need to remember to do when I get back home/to the office, I just pick up the recorder, hit the button, leave the message/reminder to myself, hit the button again (to stop recording), and I've got an audio reminder that is there waiting for me when I'm ready for it. Then, when I get back home or to the office, I just play my voice recorder messages, transcribe them into my task list or "ideas" memo, and I never have to worry about losing those ideas/to do's again.

I mentioned that I have two recorders -- let me tell you why. First, one of them I bought a few years ago -- it runs on batteries, records up to two hours of audio, and works just great. I keep this one in my car (and often keep on my person whenever I'm out and about), for whenever that random great idea pops up. There is one limitation to it though -- it doesn't synchronize with my PC, and thus, I can't download my audio files into my computer.

Thus, just recently, I purchased a newer version -- once again digital -- but with the added capability of automatic synchronization with my computer. Anything that I record into this one I can download into my computer and automatically convert into a universal MP3 file.

Why is that important?

Well, for me, I'm right now in the process of writing a new book on better e-mail management strategies, and I want to write it quickly. I can talk WAY FASTER than I can type (if you've ever seen one of my programs, you'll know that's no lie!) So I'm using this new digital audio recorder to "record" my first draft of my book, and then I'm using a transcriptionist to take the MP3 files generated to type the book for me. I'm figuring this could take weeks off of the writing time.

Also, I'm a professional speaker and trainer, and occasionally I have to develop new speaking programs. I've also used my voice recorder in the past to help me get these new programs "organized". As a matter of fact, about a year ago, I was struggling with a good introduction for a new program I was developing. I just couldn't get the proper words formed for the opening sitting in my home office, so I decided to try something different. I jumped in my car, took my voice recorder, took a long drive in the country, and built my introduction one audio "snippet" at a time. (Basically, I drove around and would record one or two sentences at a time, then stop recording, drive some more, think some more, and then record the next piece of the intro.) After about two hours of doing this, all I had to do was play them all in order once I got back into my office, and I ended up having a very good 10 minute intro developed! I've also been known to "write" with my voice out on the golf course (always playing solo!), on walks in the woods, and of course in my car.

My new digital voice recorder works so well I can even use it to record my teleseminar and webinar sessions (see info on that below too!) and turn them into nicely packaged audio products (watch for a bunch of these in 2007!). One final note for all of you PDA users out there -- many of the top end PDAs and SmartPhones do have "onboard" voice recorders built in. Unfortunately, the devices I am using don't, but I'm sure my next PDA will have one! If you are in the market for a new PDA or SmartPhone, I recommend you look for one with a built-in voice recorder -- it is always better to have a "single source" device. And, being a PDA, you can be pretty sure it will synchronize with your PC, thus giving you the capability to "talk-write" your next great opus (not to mention help you remember where you parked your car at the mall or airport!)

Timely Tips© Volume 3, Issue 12; December 2006: Call Your E-mails (Part 2)

I know – it was only a week or so ago that you received the last Timely Tips, and I usually get these out later in the month. But I’m practicing my own time management principles here, and trying to get out in front of a few things - for a good reason! As many of you know, my wife and I are expecting our second child later this month (please wish us luck for a safe and uneventful delivery!) And of course, when a new life joins your family, you really can’t expect to get much work done (nor should you!) Plus, the holidays are coming up – I plan to take some time for my family and friends and just enjoy myself. I hope you all do the same! (Speaking of the holidays – keep reading past the Timely Tips for a special holiday “Thank You” gift for all of you – my Timely Tips readers!)

I’m basically trying to follow my own principles by frontloading my projects and tasks wherever possible, and one thing I can push up is my monthly Timely Tip – so here it is:

Last month, I gave you the tip to consider calling people rather than e-mailing them if the material is confusing, easily misunderstood, or possibly contentious. Many of you responded that this was a great common sense tip, and have started not only using it, but have started training others in your office to do the same. This month’s is of a similar “common sense” nature. It is specifically designed for PDA/smart phone users that can get their e-mail on their mobile device. And here’s the tip:

If you receive an e-mail on your PDA/smart phone device, and the required response is fairly simple and straightforward, rather than replying or forwarding the e-mail using your device, consider calling the sender/receiver with your response. Here’s why: typing information into PDAs and smart phones is typically slow and inefficient for most users. For most people, it is nowhere near as quick as you can type on a regular full-size keyboard, and that is nowhere near as quick as you can talk! If the response is quick and clear, and you are on the road/mobile, just call the person and give them the response/info they need.

And if you are really smart (and really busy!), call with your e-mail response at a time when your receiver might not be at their phone – then you can just leave a quick message in their voice mail, and not risk a drawn-out conversation. That’s why I often call people at 7:30 a.m. (before people get in their office), at lunchtime (when they are away from their desk), and after 6:00 p.m. (when they are on the way home – hey, isn’t this another Timely Tip in and of itself??). This strategy of calling my e- mails and catching people’s voice mails allows me to be VERY efficient –- avoiding the slow typing of my PDA device, and also avoiding unnecessary conversation. (By the way, I do encourage you to also occasionally call when there is a GOOD chance people WILL be at their desks. Sometimes a live conversation with a friend/colleague/coworker is a beautiful thing!)

One final little tip: I noticed that when I read e- mails in my Blackberry, if the person sending the e- mail has a phone number in the text of the message or in their e-mail signature, my Blackberry will automatically highlight that number, and then I have the option to just click my “thumbwheel” and make the phone call directly from the e-mail. You should check to see if your PDA/smart phone device has the same capability. This can also save you a few seconds of time!

Timely Tips© Volume 3, Issue 11; November 2006: Call Your E-mails (Part 1)

Keeping up with the craziness of a holiday week, I'd like to give everyone a short but sweet common sense time saver related to your e-mail. This is a tip I've been sharing in my "Taming the E-mail Beast" course, and is a great reminder for all of us to stay focused on efficiency and effectiveness when utilizing ANY communication tool.

The tip is simply this -- when you receive (or are about to send) an e-mail communication that is "fraught for misinterpretation", consider greatly whether e-mail is even the best option for making the communication. If you believe e-mail is going to create a "chain of miscommunication", meaning that you and the original sender/receiver are going to trade multiple e-mails trying to figure out what each other are saying, then maybe the smarter thing to do is actually pick up the phone or even just go find the person. I know it is an amazing concept, but, yes, you can actually have a live conversation with a person rather than simply send an e-mail! If the live conversation can help clear up the confusion, then the five minutes in conversation is a much more efficient and effective communication tool than trading numerous e-mails several times throughout the day, each taking a few minutes to read and respond to.

Now, I know this seems like a "no-brainer", but every single time I teach my time management and e-mail courses, I have people tell me about these frustrating and seemingly never ending e-mail "loops", where people are obviously miscommunicating, and yet no one thinks about "cutting off the loop", picking up the phone, and resolving the miscommunication or misunderstanding. I'm asking everyone to build an e-mail miscommunication "radar screen" and identify when they are in an inefficient e- mail loop, and then take the action to cut off the loop and solve the miscommunication via a phone call or personal contact.

I know -- this isn't rocket science -- but if you can get into the habit of cutting off those loops, you will literally save hours of time, and also tons of aggravation, by clearing up the miscommunications in a live conversational setting.

As I said, a short but sweet tip this month. Next month, another "Call Your E-mails" tip -- this one for PDA and smart-phone e-mailers. Have a wonderful turkey day (don't eat too much!), and until next month, Stay Timely!