Random Stuff

Here is a bunch of random information I’ve discovered over the last few months.  I figured it might be interesting for someone, so I thought I’d post it all together.  If you see anything that you think would be interesting to see a full post about, please leave a comment and we’ll try to write about it in more detail.

Overdrive Digital Library

Many state libraries have digital books, audio books and movies that can be checked out electronically from a company called Overdrive.  Most of the time, all you need for access is a card from a local library or your state library.  The checkout process works like it does for physical books.  If the library has only purchased one copy, only one person can access it at a time.  When you are finished with it, you check it back in, which makes it available for someone else.  You can search for a library here.

Property Tax House Valuations

I imagine the process is different from state to state and county to county, but where I live, you can go in and protest the valuation the county placed on your house to determine property taxes. Basically, you go in and they show why they think the house is worth X and you show why you think the house is worth Y.  If nothing else, it gives you a chance to make sure they aren’t taxing you for a carport or other building that doesn’t exist.  I found it humorous that they had our property listed as having a “deluxe outhouse.”  I’m not sure how the deluxe model differs from the standard model.

Sprint Discounts

Sprint offers a bunch of discounts that you probably won’t find unless you get one of their employees to tell you.  For example, if you work for the USPS, you can get a 25% discount.  There are a bunch of other employers and organizations that would qualify you for a discount as well.  Not working for the USPS meant we had to settle for the 23% discount gained from having a Costco membership. Other phone companies may have similar discounts, so it is worth it to ask a lot of questions to see if there is anything that would qualify you.

DECT 6.0 Cordless Phones

DECT 6.0 is a standard for cordless phones that are designed (among other things) to not interfere with WIFI signals.  Also the headsets and base stations are theoretically interoperable.  This means you can take the handset from a Uniden and hook it to a Panasonic base station.  Also some of the handsets I’ve seen will let you automatically connect to whatever base station you are closest to. As usual, the implementation is a bit more complicated than it sounds, but it does offer some flexibility.  For example, I wanted a handset with an earphone jack and it was possible to add an additional handset of a different model to our existing base station.

DLNA

Digital Living Network Alliance is a standard to let your home electronics talk to each other.  In practice, this means you can do things like use your television to browse and view the photos and videos on your desktop computer. It isn’t quite as simple as it sounds, but it is a very big step forward toward getting everything integrated. If you are in the market for a TV or DVD player, it is worth looking into.

Free Tax Preparation Sites

With April 15th rapidly approaching, many will start looking for fast, efficient ways to file taxes. The IRS has partnered with a number of sites to provide free online filings. This helps the IRS by decreasing the number of paper forms they have to process. In most states you are still going to have to file a state return. If you plan to use software, it may be easier to do the Federal and State together at the same time. Still, for states without an income tax, this is an easy way to do your taxes and get them submitted for free. Here are a few free sites that offer free filing services:

• http://free.free1040taxreturn.com/
• http://www.fileyourtaxes.com/Alliance
• http://www.eztaxreturn.com/scriptsez/start.exe/eztax/p/alliance2009/start.html?r_link=www.irs.gov
• http://www.efiletaxreturns.net/home.aspx
• http://www.completetax.com/FFAindex.asp?welcome=GY1318083
• http://www.taxactonline.com/index.asp?sc=0850302
• http://free.123easytaxfiling.com/
• http://www.1040now.net/freefile.htm
• http://www.free-tax-return.com/2008/
• http://www.icanfreefile.org/
• http://www.taxslayer.com/americanpledge/default.aspx?source=ihtffgtsd
• https://www.taxsimple.org/index.aspx
• http://onlinetaxpros.com/index.php?linkid=ff
• http://citizentaxfree.com/
• http://www.esmarttax.com/freefederalfile.asp
• http://www.olt.com/main/oltfree/default.asp
• http://turbotax.intuit.com/taxfreedom/
• http://www.freetaxusa.com/
• http://www.hrblock.com/taxes/partner/index.jsp?otpPartnerId=180

Originally published March 18, 2009.

High Goals and Expectations

Everyone has a different idea about success. Many times our expectations are determined by the way we were raised and our interaction with our peers. These expectations can cause us to set artificially low goals.

I know a man whose goal is to get his GED so he can get a job and make payments on a car. I just met a girl who has a goal to finish a 9-month cosmetology program so she can work at SuperCuts in front of Wal-Mart.

When looking at your goals, make sure you understand the expectations you carry that influence the magnitude of those goals.  If no one in your family went to college, you will probably set your expectations for your education lower than someone whose parents both had graduate degrees.

When I was in second grade, a higher level student was polling everyone at the school to see if they planned to go to college.  When she asked me I said, “you mean it is optional?” Granted, that is the point of view of a second grader, but as I grew up, I never really entertained any thought of not going to college because it just wasn’t part of the mindset I was raised with.

Here are some things to ask yourself when you make a decision to help make sure you aren’t setting your goals too low:

• Why did I make this choice? Did you pick a particular option because of how you were raised or because of your parents’ experience?  It isn’t bad to do something that everyone else in your family has done, but spend a few minutes making sure that you aren’t doing things only because of peer pressure.
• Are there other options I didn’t consider? Make sure you aren’t blind to other alternatives.  Just because you don’t know anyone who has done something doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be an option for you.
• Are there options that you feel are beyond you? Don’t assume you can’t do something because other people are smarter, better looking, etc.  Just because something might be harder for you than for someone else doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try for it.

Be careful to set your goals based on what YOU really want and not based on the average of your peers.

Tuesday’s Tip: Dressed for Productivity

You’ve heard of “Dressed for Success.” Well, what about “Dressed for Productivity?” I think that the way we dress can have a big impact on our performance. Where I went to college required that all the guys wear ties and all the gals wear dresses to class. There was quite a bit of debate among the students about whether this was really beneficial or not.

Many students met the dress code to the letter, but were extremely sloppy in the way that the were dressed. Overall, it would probably be impossible to tell if having a dress code helped make anyone a better student (although it helped guarantee that all the guys knew how to tie a tie by the time they graduated.)

Personally though, I know that my performance is sometimes influenced by how I’m dressed. If I get dressed for business and feel business-like, I function better than if it is 1pm and I’m still working in my pajamas.

Even more important than how I feel is the way others respond to me, based on the way I’m dressed. When you meet someone for the first time, they make a whole slew of assumptions about you based on the available data. One of the easiest pieces of data to latch on to is how you are dressed. If you are dressed professionally, this influences their opinion about whether or not you are likely to behave professionally.

In fact, there was a study that showed students who were allowed to rate a college professor after only having watched a 30 second silent video of him teaching, gave the same rankings as students who sat in his class for an entire semester.

The point is that they were able to pick up enough information in just a few moments, visually, to form the same opinion as students who spent the entire semester in class–or perhaps their first opinions were so strong that an entire semester of teaching couldn’t shake what they had initially decided.

When someone sees you for the first time, they are going to make assumptions (right or wrong) about how you are dressed. These assumptions have a direct influence on how the person interacts with you. So if you dress like someone they would want to work with, you’ll find it much easier to get things done than if you don’t. Your productivity in the interaction is determined in a large way by how you dress.

This is easy to take advantage of. If you are going to a meeting, spend a few moments in the morning thinking about what others are likely to be wearing and how you can dress in a way that will make you as productive as possible. If it is something really important, you might even want to do some research to find out what is acceptable dress for particular situations. For example, if you are going for a job interview, it might not be a bad idea to find out how others dress that work in the position you are applying for. Better yet, if you can find out what the person interviewing you is likely to be wearing, you can adjust your wardrobe that day, accordingly.

This method isn’t going to suddenly make you an extremely productive person, but if it helps you retain even 5% of opportunities you might have otherwise missed, it can make a big difference.

Originally published July 3, 2007.

The Most for Your Minute

(In this series of posts, we are examining ways to better manage our time.)

The Order of Tasks

There is a survival simulation where you are trapped in a cave.  There is a single ladder going to the surface that can only hold one person at a time.  There are two other individuals with you.  One is younger than you and can climb faster.  The other is older than you and can climb slower.  Your job is to  decide the order that people should leave the cave–oh I forgot to mention there is water rising and if you don’t do it in the correct order, someone will drown.

The trick is to send the older person last because they can  still be on the ladder climbing as the water covers the area where you are currently standing.  If you try to send the older (slower) person first or second, someone is going to drown.  With the first two people, it doesn’t matter what order you use.

The point is that certain things work better when done in a particular order or at a particular time of day.  If I sit and watch television for 4 hours in the morning, and then try to write late in the evening, I am not being my most productive.  It is far better for me to write in the morning and then (if I have time), watch some television before going to bed.

Some of this comes down to understanding how your body mind works.  For me, I’m better off doing any writing before noon or a few hours after lunch.  I do better programming, when I know I will have no interruptions so I often am at my best when everyone else has gone to bed for the day.  If I’m meeting with a client to discuss their business processes, I am at my peak mid morning around 10 am. It is personal and can be different for each person, but you have to make a conscious effort to understand yourself and put tasks where the work the best.

A task out of place (like trying to read a dense report when you are exhausted) can easily take twice as long as a task placed optimally in your day. By giving a little thought to the order in which you do your tasks, you can easily get more done with less effort.

Originally published March 1, 2007.

Getting More Out of Your Job

Most people focus on their paycheck as the reward for their work. While it is true that this is a significant portion of what you get in exchange for your time and effort, there are often other benefits.  Many jobs offer benefits like:

• Health insurance
• Life insurance
• Retirement accounts
• Financial planning services
• Training opportunities
• Tuition reimbursement
• Contribution matching
• Mentoring programs
• Corporate discounts
• Wellness & Fitness programs

Not every job offers every benefit mentioned above, but I’m consistently amazed at how many people have no idea what their company offers.  The best way to find out what is available is to get a copy of your employee manual and re-read it every year or so.  Some of these programs can add a significant amount to the value you receive for your work.

Here are a few examples from my career:

Early on at my first job, I took advantage of the retirement account and financial advice that were offered through my employer.  This planning allowed me to save tens of thousands of dollars in taxes and heavily funded my retirement while I was still young and had a lot of time for it to grow.

The same company offered some training in project management and regulatory changes at their corporate headquarters that I was able to take advantage of and helped make me a much more valuable employee, which in turn allowed me to get some significant raises.  Even after I moved on to another job, the training has still benefited me and I’m even using some of in my consulting practice over a decade later.

I once took a 40% cut in pay to go to a company that offered better tuition reimbursement benefits along with a very flexible work schedule for people pursuing additional education.  This eventually led to my second master’s degree and the foundation for the skills that let me work as a consultant today.

One employer offered life insurance after two years of employment.  I got signed up for it as soon as I could and took the policy with me when I left the company a few years later.  I still have the policy today.

If you don’t know exactly what benefits your company offers, you may be allowing a significant amount of value to slip through your fingers.

Easier to Buy Than to Use

It is much easier to buy exercise equipment than to use it to get into shape.  I’m taking advantage of that right now by creating a home gym of used equipment for about 1/3rd the cost of new. Exercise equipment isn’t the only thing that is easier to buy than to really use.

It is very easy to become enamored with high-tech devices that promise to save hours of time when we are in the purchasing stage, but fail to execute when it comes to really implementing them. This isn’t just a problem for individuals.  I routinely see businesses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on software designed to make them more efficient, only to lose most of the advantages because they don’t have the discipline to follow through in the implementation stage.

When you are looking at buying a new device or new piece of software, be sure to consider the expense of really learning how it works and using it. Here are a couple things I do to lower the amount of time I need to spend learning new technology:

• Upgrade my primary computer every 3 to 4 years. I tend to buy at the very top end, but keep it a long time. Switching computers can be a big time drain.
• Skip versions of software. On one hand, I need to stay up-to-date in order to get support, but on the other, if everything is working, I don’t want to take the risk of running into a bug by trying to follow the manufacturer’s update cycle.
• Don’t be the first.  I usually try to wait a while before upgrading software or hardware.  There are plenty of people who simply must have the latest and greatest and I’d rather learn from their experiences than join them.
• Standardize.  When my family was switching cell phone providers, I got everyone to go with the same Blackberry that I use.  One reason is so I don’t have to spend a lot of time figuring out a new phone if they need help.  The other reason is so they can help each other.
• Learn from other people’s experiences. Amazon reviews are a great way to find out what people don’t like about something.  Also, a search for “product name review” will find a lot of other reviews that are helpful.

Regardless of where you fall on the technology adopter spectrum, keeping a focus on the true productivity benefit of every new device will help you save time and money.

The Most for Your Minute

I still believe that the most productive people are the ones who only do a few things, but do those things very, very well.  However, that isn’t a luxury most of us have–especially early on in our careers.  In this series of posts, we are going to look at ways to better manage our time and get the best return on investment.

Time is an Investment

Speaking of your return on investment–just thinking of time as an investment can help you become more productive. Changing your mindset about time and seeing it as a currency that you can spend as you choose helps put you in a frame of reference to value time appropriately. When you spend your time, you can spend it in areas where there is a high rate of return or in areas where there is a low or negative rate of return.

Time I spend building my client list or learning a new marketable skill has a positive return.  If my new skill allows me to do something in 1 hour that previously took 4 hours, that is a pretty good investment.  If finding new clients eventually allows me to raise my billing rate, that is a good investment.  Some things have a negative return.  Filling your car with water instead of oil will cost you time in the future.

Okay, so it is unlikely that anyone is going to do that.  But what about signing up for a magazine that you don’t really need or paying for a bunch of premium cable channels that are just going to distract you from things that you feel is really important in life?  I’m not saying that you should never have cable, but it is something that is likely to cost you more in time down the road.

By thinking of time as an investment, you should be able to start focusing on doing things that are profitable and minimizing things that have no return.  This is really a mindset thing more than anything else, but the right mindset can make a big difference in what you are willing to spend your time on.

Long Term Benefits

One major difference between people who are productive and those who aren’t is how they view long term investments of their time.  Often, activities that will have the biggest positive benefit are the ones that have very little or minimal short term gains. For example, when I started writing Productivity501 and had virtually no subscribers it seemed like there was very little benefit to sitting down and writing a new post for the site.  Honestly, it took several years to start seeing a significant benefit from my investment.  However, after making the investment in content for five years, we have over 18,000 subscribers and over 1 million unique visitors. Productivity501 is successful enough that it bought me a nice house overlooking a river valley on one of the few hills in our part of Kansas. But, it took years to get to this point.

It is hard to work on things that don’t give you an immediate return.  Time discounting causes us to under estimate the value of future gains.  This makes it harder to mentally justify investing our time now for future benefit.

When you invest in things that will give you a long term benefit, you use current efforts to secure a more desirable future.  People who don’t have the ability to make future investments are usually left wondering why everyone else is so lucky.

Concentrating with Ambient Sounds

Do you ever have a hard time concentrating because of noisy distractions?   Wouldn’t it be ideal if you could break out the walls in your office and place your desk 25 or 30 feet away from that noisy employee, grinding printer, or chirping phone? Most of the time, you can’t do anything about your physical space and your proximity to noisy distractions. But you can give yourself some sonic space.  Just think, if you could take the sound of your co-workers’ chitchatting 5 feet away and make it sound like they are 30 feet away.  Wouldn’t that accomplish pretty much the same thing as physically moving your desk away from them?

Unfortunately workers don’t come with volume controls, so you can’t turn them down and it is generally considered impolite to physically push them to the other side of the room.  One potential solution would be to play music, but then you become part of the problem for other people.  You could use headphones, but most of the time that will leave you a bit too isolated.  (I know someone who does this and it is impossible to get his attention without making him jump three feet from his chair.) Also with music, part of your brain power goes toward listening.  This may be fine if you are just adding a list of numbers, but less than ideal if you need 100% of your mental capabilities focusing on a specific problem. The ideal solution is something that will mask the distracting sound without becoming a distraction itself.

Think of the ocean. On the beach the sound of the surf and the wind help create a certain degree of sonic privacy.  You can still talk to people near you, but you aren’t dealing with as much distraction from the conversation of people sitting nearby. Even though the ocean is making quite a bit of noise, it isn’t a distraction.

Most people don’t realize how much distractions cost them. If your job involves anything beyond very mundane work, it is impossible to jump right back into where you left off once something breaks your concentration.  Even for very average work, it will often take 10 to 15 minutes to get back to your full level of concentration.  That means if you make $20 per hour, every interruption costs you around $5 in work value. Yes, I know you probably still get paid–even when you are interrupted, but your output is often what will determine your raises and promotion, so interruptions of your concentration do eventually cost you money.

Productivity501 has created several sound files designed specifically to help make it easier to concentrate on work.  They have been selling for $12.50 each, but we are temporarily dropping the price to $5 each for the download versions. Depending on how much you make per hour and how distracting your environment is, the value you get in the first day is likely to be 5 or 6 times what you will spend for the file. If you are a student, work for yourself or are on salary, reducing your distractions can make a dramatic decrease in the amount of time you have to spend working or studying.

These are very large files.  They come zipped and weigh in at 130 Mb.  Our goal was to give you the best sonic quality in an hour long recording of nature sounds designed to make it easier to concentrate by blocking distracting sounds. If this sounds like something that would help you, please consider buying from the links below.

• Brook Ambient Sound MP3 Download . . . . . . $12.50 $5.00
• Ocean Ambient Sound MP3 Download . . . . . . $12.50 $5.00
• Rain Ambient Sound MP3 Download . . . . . . $12.50 $5.00
• Rain on a Lake Sound MP3 Download . . . . . . $12.50 $5.00

If you prefer a physical CD, you can buy them from the products page.

Odds of Success

It has been years since I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, but one of the things I remember the most was the way Robert Kiyosaki said he approached starting his business.  He knew that four out of five businesses fail, so he figured he should plan on starting 5 businesses in order to get one that succeeded.

This is valuable thinking.  When you approach your success goals with the idea that you will need to learn from some failures along the way, you can be much more realistic about what you are trying to achieve.  It is also much easier to handle failure when you see it as part of your path to success.  Failure should be a springboard to help you do better on the next try. But if you start out with the idea that a failure is something that is totally bad, it is a lot easier to give up when things don’t go the way you like.

Do your best to succeed, but give yourself room to make mistakes and learn from them.

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