Messing with Other People’s Time Management

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I write a lot about how to be more productive, but what if that really isn’t your thing? What if you don’t like productivity? What if your goal in life is to ruin productivity for other people?

In an effort to expand our readership to people striving for unproductivity, here are six things you can do to guarantee that your co-workers get as little done as possible. Productivity501 takes no responsibility for the results of actually implementing any of these ideas.

1. Randomly put entries on their calendar like: “1:30 meeting with John White Important!” or “Call Sally 535-321-1242″. Place them far enough in the future that they won’t suspect you did it.
2. Write in fake delegated tasks and followup reminders: “Ask Joe for status of XYZ presentation.”
3. Set up their copy of MS Word to autocorrect their boss’s name with “The Silly Clown” or “The Surpreme Ruler of Canterbury”
4. Switch their phone display to Hebrew.
5. There are still a number of “Fax Back” services out there where you call in, select the documents you want and then give the system your fax number. Call in an use their desk phone or cell phone number.
6. Put an ad on Craig’s List saying that you have 4 Superbowl, Hannah Montana, or Blueman Group tickets that you aren’t going to be able to use and you’ll give them away free to whoever tells you the funniest joke on the phone. List their work number.

Originally published April 01, 2008.

International Travel Tips

I’ve done a lot of traveling in the past, so I wanted to share some of things I’ve learned (many times the hard way) that make international travel easier. You should try to get as much information as possible about the country you are visiting, but this list of tips should give you some good starting points that are relevant for most any destination.

A couple great sources for safety information on foreign countries are the CIA World Factbook and the US Travel Advisory site.

1. Take Copies - Having a copy of your drivers license and the first page of your passport are very handy in getting your visa or vehicle permits.  They also serve as backup if your wallet and passport are stolen.
2. Understand the Law – Make sure you understand the laws at your destination.  There have been many cases of U.S. citizens thrown into Mexican prisons because they had a firearm in their vehicle–something quite common in the U.S., but a very big legal violation if it is found by the Mexican border officials.
3. Know the Altitude - When planning your trip, be sure to take the altitude into consideration.  If you are going from a place that is 800 feet above sea level to a place that is 8,000 feet above sea level, you’ll need to give your body some time to adjust to the thinner air.
4. Get an International Drivers License – This is something you can get from AAA even if you aren’t a member.  It costs about $10 for the license plus the cost of your photo.  Basically, an international license just says you are a licensed driver in the U.S. and it does so in about 15 different languages.  In many places, your U.S. license is valid by itself, but some countries will keep your license if you have a driving violation.  Sometimes this is used as a threat to extract a bribe.  If you give your international drivers license out and someone decides to keep it, you’ll still have your regular state-issued license.
5. Power Adapters - Make sure you know what it takes to use any electronics or laptops at your destination.
6. Cell Phone Rates – If you are taking your cell phone, make sure you understand ahead of time how you will be charged for international usage. You also may need to have your carrier turn on international access in order for the phone to work.  In many countries, you can get a local SIM card that will work in your phone for placing local calls at a much less expensive rate.
7. Emergency Numbers - You should make sure that you have numbers for the U.S. consulate or embassy at your destination.  Also make sure your friends and family know when they should expect to hear from you and give them the emergency numbers just in case you disappear.
8. Credit Cards – Make sure you call your credit card company and let them know you plan to be out of the country.  Otherwise, they may shut down your card, thinking it has been stolen.  Also, be aware that some stores process cards differently, so it is possible that your card might be rejected.  Make sure you have other means of payment available.
9. Addresses – Make sure you have your destination address written down in the local language.  This can make it much easier to communicate with a taxi driver who speaks another language.

Originally published December 14, 2006.

Tuesday’s Tip: Removing Superglue

Have you ever gotten superglue all over your fingers and had to live with it for two weeks as it wore off? There is a simple way to take it off, but first, let me tell you a story.

When my wife worked in the ER of a large county hospital in Dallas, she saw a lot of very strange cases. One of the most interesting was the guy who came in with his eyes closed. Evidently, his wife had accused him of looking at other women and they got into a fight. Somehow, he decided that he could prove that he wasn’t looking at other women by super-gluing his eyes closed. (I am not making this up.)

After the glue dried, he began to think it wasn’t such a great idea and got some people to drive him to the emergency room. My wife said the doctors and nurses laughed at him for a while and then gave him Vaseline to rub in his eyes.

Petroleum will break down super glue, so you can easily remove it with gasoline. However, a less flammable and less dangerous solution is to use Vaseline to rub the hardened glue off your fingers.

Originally published December 4, 2007.

11 Steps in Becoming Educated for Your Dream Job

I had quite a few comments about taking classes online in my post “17 Things You Should Stop Doing“.  When LifeHacker linked to the article, they had even more comments from their readers. Many of the comments were negative, saying that you shouldn’t take classes online. So, I wanted to take some time to talk about the best way for college to fit into your career.

First, here is a little background about my education to give you an idea of where I’m coming from.  I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree in music composition (both taken at physical universities where I was sitting in class).  I am currently working on my thesis for a master’s focused on software engineering that I took primarily through online classes.  I am 31 years old and (apart from one semester after I got married) I have been enrolled in a college or university since graduation from high school. (My areas of interest tend to exceed what a single person can learn in one lifetime.)

This is a potential plan for getting a college education.  It is based on things that worked for me and things that I wish I had done.  It isn’t going to work for everyone, so it is probably best to read it as source for ideas–not something you should try to follow line by line.

1. Get your undergrad degree at a physical university. 90% of what you learn the first 4 years out of high school will not be in
   the classroom.  It is often painfully obvious if a 24 year old has been to college–not by their intelligence, but by their social skills.
2. Live on campus for your undergrad degree. If 90% of what you learn has to do with social life skills, living on campus is a good way to make sure you don’t miss any important lessons.  I’d also suggest living at least 2.5 hours from your home. If you are any closer, it starts becoming too easy to go home every weekend.
3. Network. Your undergraduate friends are likely to be some of the strongest friendships you’ll build.  Make an effort to meet new people and to stay in touch after college. Choose your close friends carefully because they will have a great impact on the habits and traits you develop.
4. Choose a school where people are smarter than you. If you are in the top 10% of the students at your school, it is unlikely that you will reach your full potential like you would if you were in the bottom 50%.  Professors have to tailor their courses toward the average student.  If the average student is well below what you are capable of, then you won’t get as much out of the classes.  Unfortunately, this often means going to the school that offers you the least in scholarships.  If you do go to a school where you are in the top percentile, make sure you constantly push yourself beyond what is required for an A.  Realize that getting an A may be like getting a B or C elsewhere and is not an indication of whether you really achieved your potential or not.
5. Study something you love, but find difficult. This may be controversial, but I don’t think your undergraduate degree needs to be focused on getting a job.  You will probably get more use out of a degree that made you a smarter person than a degree that prepared you for a particular industry that might be shipped to India in 4 years. Use your undergraduate degree to learn how to learn and how to think. For me, this was studying music theory. Choose a field where you can pour your whole heart into it.
6. Learn to write. Take classes that require lots of writing.  In the workforce, a lot of your co-workers are going to shy away from writing.  If you have developed your skills in this area it will help set you apart–regardless of where you are working.
7. Get a summer job. Don’t go for the job with the most money.  Choose the one where you will learn the most.  See your summer job as part of your education. Use your summer job to develop some type of skill that you can make good money at.  For me, this was working in computer networking.  If you can get a job during the school year to get more experience, that is even better.
8. After graduation, get a job. Hopefully your summer jobs will have given you a good idea of what you like doing.  Take that experience and put it to use.  Once again look for a job that will give you the best experience for the future, not just the best short-term pay. Also, look at their policy on paying for continuing education.  A job that pays less, but offers generous reimbursement for classes toward a Master’s degree, may be much more valuable than a higher paying job. Keep in mind that you are wanting more than a paycheck.  This job is a networking opportunity.  Try to build a base of people who will give you a good recommendation later on in life.  Take on projects and responsibilities to specifically fill out your resume.
9. Get a Master’s degree through distance education. If you like what you are doing, get the degree in that field.  If you don’t, choose another complementary field. Ideally, choose an area that your employer will help pay for classes.  Choose the best school possible (I have been impressed with Harvard and Stanford’s distance education setup).  Working full time and taking classes at night is hard, but it can be well worth the effort.
10. Look for your dream job. Now that you have a few years of experience and a master’s degree in a field you enjoy, you need to work
    on a plan to get your dream job.  It may take a few more years of getting additional experience, but know where you are headed.  For me, my dream job was to own my own company.  It took a number of years and a lot of hard work.  I’m still not completely where I want to be, but I’m definitely headed in the right direction.
11. Never Stop Learning. The world is not going to stay the same and neither should you.  It takes a conscious effort to acquire new skills for the rest of your life, if you want to stay on top.  Take advantage of distance education, but don’t overlook other non-classroom types of training.  Working with someone you really admire can be even more educational than spending a semester in a classroom.

Originally published on April 25, 2007.

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5 Tips for an Organized Computer

1. Use Your My Documents Folder

The My Documents folder is there for a reason. If you don’t have a My Document’s folder, create one. The idea is to keep all of your documents in this folder. This makes it easy to backup your computer and easy to find stuff instead of looking all over your hard drive.

You can take this idea step further and create folders for the types of items you produce on your computer. Here is an example of how OS X sets up your home directory by default:

One of the big benefits of this type of setup is that you can go to one place to start looking for anything you’ve previously saved. It also gives you a single place where you can tell your backup software to start to archive everything. I’ve seen people keep files all over their hard drive. When they need to switch to another computer, it is a nightmare. With files all over their computer it is very difficult to be confident that everything got moved over because you are bound to overlook some obscure folder that contains some of their important data.

2. No Top Level Files

A lot of people just throw their documents directly into the My Documents folder. You organization will improve if you promise not to allow yourself to put documents directly in this folder. Create subfolders and put the documents in there. The advantage to this method is that you create a way to associate similar documents–by putting them in the same folder.

If you have a file that is truly a one-off document and you will never have another similar document, you will still benefit by creating and putting it in a “miscellaneous” folder.

An important way to think about folder creation is to stop asking “where do I save this” and ask “where will I look for this when I need it”. You’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to organize when you start out planning for retrieval instead of focusing just on the storage part.

3. Create a Downloads Folder

Part of using the Internet is downloading files. Many people have their computer set up to store downloaded files on their desktop. If you are extremely disciplined about keeping your desktop clean, this might not be a bad setup. However, if you keep any files on your desktop, the downloaded files can quickly clutter things and make it hard to find what you are looking for.

By creating a folder specifically for downloaded files, you can keep all of these types of documents together. If something is important and needs to be saved, you can move it to a different folder. If your “downloads” folder only contains downloads, then it is much easier to clean out. You can just scan through it to make sure there isn’t anything important and delete the contents every few weeks.

To make this work effectively, you’ll need to make sure your web browser is set to automatically put downloaded files in your new folder. Here is the place to change the setting in Firefox’s preferences. Other browsers have similar settings, as well.

4. Version Control

Version control lets you keep multiple versions of the same document. Instead of keeping a bunch of different versions of the same thing, you keep one version, but you have access to the document’s history to go back to prior versions.

There are several ways to implement this. On OS X, TimeMachine gives you this type of capability. There are several version control systems that will give you this capability as well. Subversion is probably one of the more popular systems for this. Subversion comes already installed on OS X. It can function in a variety of different settings, from a simple local repository to a repository with multiple users on an external server. Both Windows (TortoiseSVN) and OS X (SCPlugin)have some nice add-ons that let you use the version control directly from the graphical file system browser. This lets you use a menu system instead of learning a command line interface.

If you set it up correctly, Subversion can give you version control and backup capabilities. For most users, TimeMachine is quite a bit easier to set up, but it doesn’t give you the full capabilities of version control.

5. Aliases, Short Cuts and Links

Sometimes you need a file to exist in more than one place. For example, you might have your contract stored under each client’s folder and want to have another folder somewhere that contains all of your active contracts all in one place. Normally you wouldn’t want to just make a copy of the documents. Not only would the copy take up additional space, but if you made any changes, you’d have two different versions of the same document.

By creating a short cut, you can make a pointer to the original document. These types of links are also sometimes called aliases. To make a short cut on Windows, right click and copy the file, then right click and select “paste shortcut” in the directory where you want to put the short cut.

In OS X, option click and select “Make Alias”. It will create an alias in the current folder and you can then move it to where ever you want.

Note: Since OS X is based on a Unix style operating system you can also create links using the command line. I’m not going to get into the details here, but links will allow you to basically put the file in two directories at the same time while still only storing it once on the hard drive. From the graphical OS you’ll have a very difficult time telling which one is the original and which is the link. One of the advantages of this is you’ll get a thumbnail preview–something that is missing with the alias function performed with the gui.

Originally published February 26, 2008.

Text and Image Documents

There are two basic types of documents you can use in a paperless office.  The first type of document is text based.  These are formats like .TXT .RTF .DOC, etc.  These store text as editable information.  You can go in and change the document, fix spelling, copy sentences, etc.

The second type of document is an image based document.  This includes formats like .TIF, .JPG, .PNG, .GIF, etc.  These documents just represent a bunch of pixels.  The computer can’t edit the words themselves other than by deleting pixels and putting new pixels down.  You can’t copy a sentence and paste it into another program if you are using this format.

The advantage of the text-based formats is the fact that they can be searched.  If the document contains the word “Smith Contract,” a search on your computer for those words should show the document in the results.  With image-based documents you don’t have that luxury.  If you want to be able to find it, you had better name it using the keywords you might use for your search, put it in a directory with the name you will search for, or associate meta information with the document containing all the keywords you might use.

The advantage of image-based documents is the way they preserve the layout and non-text elements.  If you have to go to court to show someone signed a contract, you are going to want to have an image-based document with their signature. (There are some ways to do things with digital PKI signatures that will stand up in court, but that gets quite a bit more complicated.)

Of course, the problem is, you may have a hard time locating the particular contract unless you were particularly careful about where and how you saved it.

The PDF format solves many of these issues.  PDFs allow you to store a document as an image AND as text.  Think of it as two layers: you have a text layer that contains the words in a computer-readable format and you have the image layer that contains a picture of the document–including any pictures, annotations, etc.  So if you want to search for a keyword, it acts as a text-based document.  If you need to print out a copy of the document, it acts as an image-based document.

When you scan your document, you want to make sure both types of information are recorded.  To get text information from a scanned document, you need to use some type of optical character recognition.  Usually your scanner will come with some type of OCR software.  Many scanning programs will automatically add the text layer into a PDF.  The newer versions of Acrobat have OCR capabilities built in so you can take image-based documents and add the text layer with a few clicks.

In my work-flow, my scanner sends the image of each document directly to a program that  performs some optimizations, does OCR and then saves the results as a PDF in my document repository.

If you are looking at setting up a paperless office, you will need to consider how the character recognition takes place.  The more you are able to automate the process, the easier it will be to work with.

Note: If you are creating a PDF directly from your computer, there is a way to skip the image layer while still preserving the layout of the page.  If you start adding signatures and markups, it will create an image layer to put those items in.

Originally published January 17, 2008.

Your Employer Owes You Nothing

I see many people working a normal job with the idea that if they work hard they will be rewarded for their good service. That isn’t the way it works. Your employer owes you nothing. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve worked at the job or how loyal you’ve been. In the end, your years of service aren’t going to turn into some valuable investment that you can cash in.

Just the other day, a friend of mine was let go (along with all the other employees) at a business where he had been working for the past several years. The sad part is that, he had several offers over the past few months for jobs that he really wanted to take, but he decided to stay out of loyalty to his current company. His commitment to his employer turned out to be detrimental.

I have seen people invest their best work years at a company that suddenly decided to shut down. I’ve seen others invest 10 years helping a non-profit grow through very tough times while taking a very low salary only to be ousted by management once their 10 years of hard work were starting to pay off.

My point is this. You need to invest in something that you control if you want to benefit from the cumulative benefit of your years of work. Many people think that starting their own business is risky. It is true that many businesses fail. However, working for someone else’s business as an employee isn’t any safer. It just means you have less control over your future.

Originally published July 26, 2007.

Integration is More Important than Features

I am working with a client that has about 10 employees. They are starting to hit a wall when it comes to productivity. While each of their systems have a bunch of nice features, none of them integrate with each other. As a result, they spend most of their time moving information back and forth. The more their business grows, the slower their back office processes become.

Here is an example: when someone buys something from the online store, that information has to be manually entered into the accounting software. The customer information must be manually entered into the customer relationship management system. If a customer gets a refund, the accountant handles the refund, but then the information must manually be entered in the online store to adjust the inventory levels.

While all of their software is considered “best of breed,” none of it talks with the other parts of the process. When it comes to their productivity, they would be better off with fewer features and better integration.

Your Integrated Solution

When you design your personal work flow, make sure that integration is your top priority. For example, when you add a personal contact to your address book, does it automatically show up on your cell phone? If your spouse adds an appointment to the calendar on her computer, does it automatically show up in your PDA?

If you choose your solutions based on integration instead of features, you’ll increase your productivity–even if you have to sacrifice some features. If you choose your solutions based on features and ignore the integration aspect, the time savings benefits will be greatly reduced.

When you are looking for ways to increase your productivity, look for the right process–not the right tools. The best time management software/gadget/planner in the world is only as good as the process it enables. A well-designed integrated process with average tools is much more productive than the best tools, but no integrated process.

Originally published June 25, 2007. Oh and this client is now using a fully integrated system that doesn’t have any of the duplicate entry issues described above.

Where Did My Day Go Contest Winner

We have a winner in our most recent contest. Chad Harless won a copy of Where the !@#% did my day go? by Matthew Cornell. I’d encourage you to subscribe to Matt’s RSS feed or newsletter for more tips on his time management method.

Thank you to everyone who participated. If you’d like your own copy of Where the !@#% did my day go? or his other ebooks checkout his products page. Also

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