by Eileen Roth
Speakerphones: An often misused but potentially valuable tool, a speakerphone is key for phone meetings involving multiple people on that end of the line. However, the speaker can alienate people in one-on-one conversations and impinge upon privacy, so if you’re looking for hands-free operation, use a headset instead.
Fill yourself in on how to use the phone most efficiently at work and in your life by flipping to Chapter 19 on time management.
Just the fax, please: Fax machines
The facsimile machine is an excellent way to get a piece of paper into someone else’s view fast, or vice versa. From ordering products — why sit on hold or navigate the Internet when you can fax off an order sheet in seconds? — to transmitting business documents to receiving the e-ticket for the plane flight you just booked, the fax is such an efficient friend that it’s not just for the office anymore.
Equipment options and extras
Most fax machines can make copies, which is a great convenience for the occasional page or two. Some can also double as scanners. Consider a fax with plain paper output if you receive many faxes, as heat-sensitive paper is fragile, crumples easily, and is difficult to run through the fax machine if you need to resend something you receive.
Fax programs for the computer are good if most of your outgoing faxes come from files on your computer. Sending them directly via a program that works over your modem can save lots of time and trees. You also get plain-paper output by printing faxes you receive on your computer printer. However, you have to have your computer on to send or receive anything, and you can only send paper by scanning it in — an extra, time-wasting step.
For heavy faxers, a stand-alone machine can keep the computer free for other uses and accommodate nonelectronic documents. You may still use a program to send electronic files. Set it up not to receive incoming faxes if you’d like those routed to the machine instead.
Programming your fax machine
Use the program function to enter your name or company name, fax, and phone number into the fax machine. This header will print on each page of your outgoing faxes and save the need to put a cover sheet on many. You can also program frequently faxed numbers and identify them by the recipient’s name.
If programming a VCR is a challenge, entering data into a fax machine without the instruction manual requires a miracle, so make sure you always have the directions at hand.
Broadcasting
The ability to broadcast, or send the same information to a group of people, is one of the chief benefits of the Information Age, and your fax machine can broadcast for you. Use the option to create distribution lists for groups of people you routinely fax to, so you can send multiple transmissions with the push of one button. Don’t abuse this ability by spamming, or broadcasting unsolicited faxes. Spamming is illegal in some states and annoying in all.
Did they get it?: Those darn reports!
Fax transmission can seem ephemeral — did it go? Did they get it? Transaction reports can provide a useful record. Reports also take time and paper every time they print, so you don’t want to generate them pointlessly. I prefer to program the machine to print a report only when a fax doesn’t go through, so I can take action on the errors and save sorting through the rest. There are times when a record of your outgoing fax is essential — to prove that you did submit a counteroffer on Thursday, for instance, or complied with a deadline. In these cases, print. You can also opt to print a list of the last 20 or 30 messages sent, to double-check against your To Do List or use as accounting to charge faxes to clients.
The Internet and e-mail
The Internet, the mother of all wires, has transformed the world. With the ability to transmit messages and data instantly, deliver information anytime, anywhere, and connect people in real time all around the globe, the Internet has the potential to be the modern age’s greatest organizational asset. But if you have a mess of old e-mail in your incoming queue or piles of printouts on your desk; if you recently wasted an hour on an unsuccessful Web search, you know that the Internet can also eat time and cause physical and electronic clutter. Cyberspace demands advanced organizing systems.
Organizing your Internet use and using the Internet to get organized is a fun and fruitful effort for tech heads and newbies alike. With the reach of the World Wide Web and the portability of laptops and palm-held units, the computer has taken fingertip management to a whole new level. Here are some ways you may not have thought of to use the Internet to make your life easier and save time and money:
Do your banking and pay bills online.
Stay up-to-the-minute on financial news with online news services.
Buy and sell stock with online brokers.
Search for the best available prices on products from electronics to cars.
Buy and print electronic stamps.
Scan the card catalogs of the world’s leading libraries.
Sign on to the Web and send predesigned customizable cards for free. Use a reminder service to prompt you on birthdays and anniversaries.
Put up a Web site for personal or business use. You can create a simple one yourself using shareware. Some Internet service providers host sites for free if you subscribe or allow them to post advertising.
Chat online with long-distance family and friends to save yourself the phone bill.
Compare airfares, buy tickets, make hotel and car reservations, and get travel and tourist information for destinations all over the world at online travel sites.
Create and print a roadmap customized to your trip at many map sites on the Web.
Create your own custom daily news report from the country’s leading sources at various Web news sites.
Surfing: Some tips and tricks
The Internet contains countless resources for productive work, personal enrichment, and efficient shopping, but how on earth do you find them fast? Anyone who’s been on a futile search, spent hours flipping through irrelevant sites, or simply been caught up in a chat or game knows that the Internet can waste time like crazy. Your organizing challenge: To use the technology to put time on your side. Here are the ways to do it:
Learn to navigate. You wouldn’t drive a car without learning how, so why surf the information superhighway without a license? A small amount of time invested in learning Internet skills can significantly increase the speed and decrease the stress of surfing the Net.
Explore different search engines and discover their relative strengths, which can vary considerably.
Discover search techniques, such as enclosing words in quotes to keep them in order, or using a plus sign between words to indicate they should all appear in a target document, to narrow your results.
See The Internet for Dummies, 7th Edition, by Levine, Levine-Young, and Baroudi (IDG Books Worldwide, Inc.) for a one-stop guide to surfing skills.
Bookmark the spot. Use the bookmark function to store links to favorite or most frequently visited sites. These can often be organized into folders and subfolders, which you can set up by category such as any other filing system.
Surf at off-peak times — midnight to 5 a.m. Pacific Standard Time — to speed your progress.
Set a time limit before you sign on to keep you from surfing, shopping, or chatting longer than you intend. A desktop or watch alarm can alert you when your time is up.
Why not to save your Web site printouts
In the Information Age, knowledge gets stale quickly. Facts, figures, directions, and descriptions are constantly changing, and the Internet keeps updates close at hand. Today’s economic statistics may be of interest today, but there will be a new set by tomorrow. Accumulating articles on the real estate market now is unnecessary if you’re not planning to buy a home for another year. Use the right-now rule to access knowledge you need today, and bookmark the rest for later.
Reading e-mail
Many people are now so e-mail reliant that they can’t remember how they communicated
before. The ability to send an instant message anywhere in the world for free (or almost) enables people to chat more than ever before. Need proof? Just look in your incoming queue.
E-mail is mail, and you need to manage notes delivered from cyberspace just as rigorously as the paper the postal carrier brings. Refer back to Chapter 16 for general mail-handling principles. Apply them, along with the following electronic refinements.
Read e-mail during off-peak times. If the beginning of the day counts as peak for you, scan the subject lines of new mail and read only those that pertain to important projects on today’s To Do List. Leave the rest for later.
Junk mail is junk, whether it’s the latest table of contents of a journal you don’t care about or a joke from your beloved brother. To save yourself the time of reading junk mail, remove your name from mailing lists by following unsubscribe directions and politely asking friends, family, and colleagues to take you off their mass circulation lists. Toss the junk you do receive without stopping to open it.
Move each e-mail and attachment you opt to keep (after it’s passed the W-A-S-T-E test) out of the incoming queue and into the appropriate folder in your main filing system. Exception: Keep e-mails you’ll respond to shortly and then delete in the incoming queue. There’s no sense wasting time moving things that are going to be tossed. Items you only use online, such as instructions for listservs or a photo or poem you’re saving to send on Mother’s Day can also be kept by category in your e-mail filing cabinet.
Depending upon your programs, you can often directly open e-mail in your word-processing application. If you can’t, cut and paste each e-mail you want to save into a word-processing document so you can open the document without toggling programs or signing on.
If you like to keep a few jokes or cartoons on hand to lighten your day, start a separate Humor/Inspiration folder — not random files on your desktop, but a folder all its own — in your computer filing system and limit its contents.
Writing e-mail
Dashing off a note is often faster than making a phone call, but how much time do you spend writing e-mails each day? It may be considerable, so make sure you’re making best use of the time with some tips for writing e-mail that can zip you along at Internet speed.
Think first. Before you spend precious time writing e-mail, ask yourself whether e-mail is actually the most efficient way to accomplish the task. The answer is probably yes if you only need to write a few lines to confirm a meeting, while setting one up from scratch may be better done by phone.
Auto-address. Use an e-mail address book to store frequently used addresses and set up distribution groups. Some contact-management programs can interface with e-mail programs, enabling you to store all contact information in one place. If yours does this, use it.
Name it. Use the subject line to provide your recipient with the same clues you’d want to receive while scanning your incoming queue. Change the subject heading for responses that vary significantly from the original topic.
Quote. Use partial quotes to put responses in context. Receiving an e-mail that says “Okay” when you don’t remember what you originally asked can be the ultimate senior moment. To quote key words in an incoming e-mail for inclusion in your response, highlight them before you hit the Reply button. Don’t waste your reader’s time and space by quoting the whole message if it’s not completely relevant to your response.
Attach. Use attachments to send long letters, working documents, or files from other applications. In the body of the e-mail, note the attachment and what it contains. Receiving unreadable attachments wastes everyone’s time, so check that your recipient has the right program and version before sending. Most programs let you save your file as an earlier version if necessary. Some people can’t open multiple attachments, so when in doubt, attach each file to a separate e-mail.
Be wary of opening attachments you’re not expecting. Computer viruses lurk in unexpected attachments! Because people you know can pass them along unaware, keep up with current viruses and consult a knowledgeable Web site when in doubt.
Sign here. Create signatures in your e-mail program to automatically insert your name and contact information at the bottom of each mail that you write. You can set up different signatures appropriate for various uses. You can even add a tag line to describe or promote your business.
Don’t file. If your e-mail program has an auto-file function that automatically saves a copy of every mail you send, turn the function off. Each time you send an e-mail, ask yourself whether you really need to keep a copy, and skip saving those you don’t, which is probably most of the time.
See Chapter 20 on organizing your personal time and for more on using the Internet for cybershopping and services.
Electronic mail leaves a trail
Courts have ruled that electronic mail counts as legal evidence, so no matter how casual the context may seem, be careful what you say. Furthermore, many e-mails are archived on larger systems even after you delete them from your drive, and may be read by anyone from network administrators to your or the recipient’s bosses. Treat this advanced communication mode with respect, and don’t say anything you wouldn’t say out loud, in the office, with co-workers looking on.
Learning Control: The Computer
Desktop, filing system, and mailbox all in one, the computer is one of the coolest tools around when you have it under control. Let the computer get the upper hand, however, and a twenty-first-century nightmare could follow. As an important component of your productivity equation, your computer is the place where getting organized can pay off in spades.
Maximizing your computer savvy
Whether you shop the Web, word process, or create a complex database, you can maximize the efficiency of all your computer work by following four basic steps: learn, save, back up, and clean up.
1.Learn the application or procedure you’re using. How many hours have you spent pulling down toolbars looking for a function or trying to undo something you did wrong? Guesswork wastes time, so learn the task before you begin. Depending upon your resources and preferred learning style, try training manuals, tech support people, self-tutorials that come with programs, ...For Dummies books, courses at computer stores, schools, and colleges, or a personal tutor or trainer.
2.Save your work frequently. It sounds obvious, but though nobody ever sees a power blip or system crash coming, both can and do happen. Most programs allow you to set the time interval for automatic backup of open files. If you do an abundance of intense, important work, set this to be short. Discover how to recover automatic backups after a crash. Then save yourself the trouble by hitting the Save button more often.
Plug all your computer equipment into a high-quality surge protector. Unpredictable electrical events from power surges to a line getting struck by lightning (it happens!) can destroy your equipment and data forever.
3.Back up your data regularly. Total system failures, always a fact of cyber-life, are becoming increasingly common as the number of killer viruses multiplies. A nonrecoverable crash can be a complete disaster. If you work for a company with a networked system and a computer department, someone else is probably handling this for you. If not, here are the basics.
•Choose your backup medium: floppy disk, CD, tape, or backup drive. Anyone with a floppy drive can use a diskette; the rest require more specialized hardware but offer more storage space.
•Most people are best served to back up new data daily and make a master copy of the entire hard drive on a regular basis — usually weekly or monthly, depending upon the volume and critical nature of your work. Backup programs allow you to choose the frequency of archiving and whether to copy only new data or everything, and then the program does the back up automatically.
•Keep four sets of backup: daily, current master, most recent past master, and a blank set for the next one. Rotate so that you can reuse your backup media.
•Store a copy of your cu
rrent master offsite — a safe deposit box, your sister’s house in another state, or a records storage service — to protect against local disaster — fire, flood, theft, earthquake, and so on.
4.Clean up your computer, which makes messes you can’t even see. From viruses to old programs to all the fragments of data created by editing files, a hard disk can get clogged quicker than a kitchen sink. Not to worry; cyberhelp is here in the form of programs and procedures designed to clean up your act.
•Anti-virus. With today’s high-achieving hackers, you need an anti-virus program to keep your computer inoculated against infection. The best programs post upgrades on the Web to fight the latest scourge.
•Scan and defrag. Most operating systems come with two disk-maintenance programs. The scan program looks for and corrects disk errors, while the defrag program consists of rewriting all your edits on a file into a single location.
•Uninstall. When you’re done with a program, don’t just delete it; uninstall instead. Many programs have a multitude of leech-like attachments that can glom onto other system parts and gradually slow your computer down. Uninstalling cleans these out and helps keep you up to speed.
Other cool and quick tasks
What’s the payoff of the savvy computer operations I just described? Quick, efficient work is one. A stress-free cyberexperience is another. And here are several other ideas for leveraging computer power in your daily life: