E-mail Bankruptcy?

I recently read an article about e-mail bankruptcy. This term was quite new to me but the essence of it is that someone has so many e-mails that they will never possibly catch-up on them so they delete them all and tell everybody if they had sent something important they should try again.

So, I have translated traditional bankruptcy avoidance advice into e-mail bankruptcy avoidance advice.

• Don't overextend yourself, with e-mail it is easy to overextend yourself by signing up for every e-mail newsletter that looks even remotely interesting. It will cost you time (money) even to delete each of those e-mails. Each time you fill out a form online, pay close attention to the lines that offer to keep you updated, update=e-mail.
• Spend less than you earn, just because you can sign up for 14 different e-mail accounts plus your work e-mail doesn't mean you should. Keep it simple, one home account one work account. If you can use only one for everything. Make sure people know you only respond to certain accounts.
• Save money, not sure how this translates in e-mail. Maybe save disk space by deleting, maybe don't ever delete.
  
• Pay your bills on time. Don't ignore your inbox until it is unmanageable.
  

If you cannot get out of the e-mail debt you are currently in maybe e-mail bankruptcy is for you. There is after-all no e-mail credit reporting agency! :) If you need a strategy for paying off real (financial) debts then you might be interested in what Dave Ramsey has to say.

A Passive Voice Was Used

What is the difference between passive voice and active voice? Passive voice is when your writing makes it sound like something is being acted upon rather thank doing the action. Here are a couple of examples:

• Passive Voice - Information was presented to the crowd.
  
• Active Voice - I spoke to the crowd.

The differences are subtle but have a huge impact on readers. Word can check for passive voice as part of its spell check tool. To turn this on go to Tools>Options, Spelling and Grammar (Tab) and look for the settings button. Under the Style section you will see a check box for "Passive Sentences." Make sure it is checked.

If you are interested in reading more about the passive voice, the University of North Carolina has an excellent handout posted to their site.

Resume Writing… Keep it a Secret?

Oh no! You were on your lunch break and your boss saw you updating your resume. Will he bypass you for that promotion now because he thinks you are looking elsewhere? Actually, keeping your resume up to date is a benefit for any employer. When that promotion opens up (within your current company) you will be ready with a resume that shows why you are the right person for the job. The guys over at Resume Edge have a really good article on why you should keep your resume up to date all of the time.

Think of your annual performance review and all of the documenting you do for that as just one of the outcomes of your constant resume process. The ongoing resume process is the horse the annual review is just the cart.

Recently, I got connected to former co-workers and current co-workers using an employment-related social networking site called LinkedIn. One of the great strengths of this tool is that you can request endorsements from people who have worked with you in the past, or you can endorse others. These endorsements could be very valuable if your company tanks and you need some shining words to help you get a new job. Hopefully you don't need it for this reason , you could even use this to help you with your annual performance review. Some folks even include their public profile on LinkedIn on their e-mail signature.

Our Trip to Wyoming for Grandma's Funeral

We just got back from our trip to Wyoming to attend grandmas funeral. Her funeral was really amazing. You can indeed learn a lot about a person by looking at their friends. As we experienced Ten Sleep Wyoming in the past it was clear to us that Anella and Hank are a big part of that small sleepy little city. Being there this time we were so amazed to see all of Ten Sleep step up to honor her. She attended a very small church there but every single congregation pitched in food and people to serve food at the dinner after the burial. There were about 250 people in attendance at a funeral that took place in a city of only 300 or so people.

The kids are all very good road trippers. Her is a photo of them in the back seat of the Acura.

Here is a photo of a reservoir we saw on the way up this place is about half way between Shoshoni and Thermopolis. This was a beautiful drive. We had always taken the Buffalo route down the pass.
We had a good ride up with the exception of Braydn getting ill. We ended up staying in Casper overnight at the Motel 6 and I even got pulled over by the police for forgetting to turn on my headlights after I picked up some groceries. We also found that Dawby could sit up by himself when we were in the hotel room.

Another video was taken while were were still in Colorado. Before Braydn got sick (I know I am doing this backwards) he was telling us about his Mack Truck toy that he just got.

So as it goes with funerals this was a sad trip but it was also a celebration of Anella and her life.

Here you can see her Obituary taken from the Northern Wyoming Daily News.

Grandma's Funeral

Here is a panoramic image of Anella's funeral.

Google Yourself to De... Productivity!

Do you ever find yourself having a hard time searching the Internet? It is a big place so how do you navigate it? Most people have a favorite search engine, some even have many favorite search engines that they use for different purposes. A search engine, like any software resource, is only as good as its user. If you don't know how to use it properly, you are not going to get the kind of results you are hoping for. So here are a few tips you can use when using Google (the author's favorite search engine):

• Use the "Advanced Search" option, you will see a link for this next to the search box. It allows you to further narrow your search and to get really specific. If you are getting 1,874,987 results your search is pretty worthless, I mean do you really have time to go through all of them?
• Get Help - Why are people so afraid of getting help? Google has it's own page of, "Advanced Search Tips." Read them, they are pretty helpful.
• Don't stop using the search engine just because you have found the website you are looking for. Open a second browser window and use Google to search that website for the content you are looking for. This can save you valuable time going through the website trying to find specific content when chances are Google already crawled it for you.

So what about other things you use your computer for? Below are a couple of examples of things that Google can do for you, if you don't believe it click the links and see the examples.

• Calculator - Yeah that program that is buried in the accessories folder and takes a couple minutes to find if you have not used it in a while. Typing the math problem you need solved into the Google search window will return the results quickly. It can also tell you how many quarts are in a liter and other useful stuff like that. You can get help here
• Do you have a hard time tracking down the phone number for your local theatre and then hate sitting on the phone listening to the times that each movie is playing? Then how good are you at understanding the scribbled notes you took while the message was playing? Well you can search for movie listings and show-times using Google too.

Keep in mind, the Internet should make your life easier, your work quicker. It should not be the thing that bogs you down and gets you stuck.

This is not an endorsement of Google, there are a number of sites that offer very similar features. Getting good at one search engine will help you increase your productivity, and you have to start somewhere, so this is my suggestion.

Word 2003 Can Summarize it for You

So, you get some long document or story and you want the executive summary of it (also known as the abstract). So you open the story in Word and go to Tools>AutoSummarize and you will get the screen shown here.

You can choose from four different options and it only takes a couple seconds to do it. Sometimes it does a great job. Other times Word totally misses the mark. What do you have to lose though? I especially like being able to use the, "highlight key points" option. That way the whole story is still there but Word is using it's intelligence (I know that is a stretch) to figure out the key words and paragraph structure to indicate the key statements for you.