Category: GTD Moments
This long awaited feature that has been backfilled by companies like Timebridge, Tungle, TimeTrade and Genbook is arriving for Google Calendar and Google Apps in a browser near you soon!
With appointment slots in Google Calendar, you can setup blocks of time that are publicly available for reservation.
“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”
— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
One of my favorite quotes out there because it asks you to stop and think about what you really spending your time on. How can days, weeks and eventually years go by causing you to wonder what the heck you’ve been doing with your life? When you’re caught on the hamster wheel looking at the small, parallel bars you’re running on, it’s truly challenging to think bigger and realize you’re in a hamster cage and that’s the real problem. Read More…
Join me for another great set of Zendesk webinars this month!
We’ll explore how you can:
You can also attend the weekly Zendesk 101 and Welcome to Zendesk webinars!
Zendesk is an easy to use, flexible, cloud app that helps increase customer satisfaction. It helps you keep a pulse on the needs of your customers and interfaces with a ton (and I do mean a TON) of other popular apps like Salesforce, Basecamp, Mailchimp, Harvest, Get Satisfaction and more!
With an elegant, simple interface, helping your customers is straightforward and dare I say, “enjoyable”?! That’s why I got hooked on Zendesk in 2008 and can’t stop talking about them! That would also be why I’m doing the webinars *smile*
As you may have noticed, I’m running the lively and upbeat webinars at Zendesk!
Once a customer and now an evangelist / trainer, I show people how to get started using Zendesk in their support workflow process. The webinars are not “one way” discussions like many of us have experienced with online webinars. You, the customer, are part of the action! We discuss how companies, large and small are using Zendesk to deliver outstanding customer service by centralizing requests in one spot.
Zendesk is very easy to pick up. If you’ve been providing support to your customers via email, don’t worry! You still can do this but now have the added features of being able to search, assign and run reports against all those emails because they’re captured in Zendesk too! I enjoy the “ah ha” moments people have when they see how well Zendesk will fit into their business workflow!
In addition to the 101 webinars, I’ve been doing more in-depth sessions to include CSS design of your Zendesk account and Email & DNS redirection.
For upcoming webinars, we’ll showcase SSO (Single Sign-On) for Microsoft Active Directory and Drupal. You can read about the API options to interact with Zendesk including REST, remote authentication, widgets, targets and the ability to set properties via email.
Sign up for the Zendesk newsletter to get announcement for upcoming webinars!
Photo credit: LaughingSquid
I like deals and coupons as much as the next person. People have been burned by forgetting to cancel their 30 day trial of and end up seeing a charge on their card. A few years ago, I began to put cancellation reminders for trials in my Google Calendar.
I’ve used this for Amazon Prime, Audible, cloud apps, credit report monitoring and a variety of other deals on-line and then gracefully step out before I get charged.
Here’s a screenshot of my Google Calendar. I have both email reminders and pop ups enabled so I can keep track of upcoming events. I enter in the url where I signed up or link to the welcome email. This saves me the hassle of trying to dispute the charges later via email or phone. That’s a hassle no one wants to deal with!
Exciting news!
37Signals announced they will be relaunching their suite of extremely successful cloud apps using SSO (Single Sign On)!
They were one of the first SASS (Software As a Service Subscription) companies to bring us a site toolbar that allowed us to access our different account areas (and tools). I received the announcement today via email and couldn’t be happier! It looks like the changes will begin to affect accounts December 13th. You will need to select a new user account and then you will be able to access all your tools like Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire and Backpack all in one spot.
I am honored that I’ve been asked to speak at tomorrow’s SCORE event, “Women in Business” Luncheon.
“Embrace Change” Tomorrow I will share how I adapted my consulting business to focus on what I enjoyed, located tools to help me work better, carved my niche and found the courage to step out of my comfort zone. Read More…
Want to collect money for your events?
Struggling to manage registrations for your event and not lose money?
Want a better way to promote your event and utilize social media to do it?
Timebridge just relaunched their website today along with the announcement of several new services to make scheduling meetings faster, easier and even fun!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBAXuOv1rbg[/youtube]
Among the new features are
Timebridge will continue to offer their awesome meeting software free to folks. I’ve been using it for over a year (since February 2008) and it has saved me thousands of dollars in time because now I just send one email and get confirmed times back. No hassle, no mess with scheduling!
They have added a new “Plus” package which gives you the ability to send SMS text messages to your attendees and hold webinars with up to 100 people attending. The cost for the plus service is $8.95.
It looks like the iPhone app is coming soon and it will connect you to essential Timebridge actions like accepting meetings, sending out reminders and giving people a heads up if you plan to be late for the meeting (I like that one!).
David Allen, the GTD guru was quoted in Timebridge’s press release today:
According to David Allen, management consultant, trainer, and best-selling author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity: “Meetings are either the boon or bane of every enterprise, depending on how well they’re envisioned and managed.
Every meeting is an opportunity to get things done, but the unfortunate reality is that most meetings are not nearly as productive as they could be. Not only is it squandered time for the team, but for the meeting organizer, a bad meeting is a missed leadership opportunity. Stepping up and acting as a meeting leader means establishing, maintaining and communicating clear goals, and ensuring clear decisions, accountabilities and actions – something that is hard to do while juggling a lot of moving parts.
Tools that help streamline the logistics and make the process easier and more engaging for all involved are essential to helping each of us rise to the challenge of leading a great meeting.”
I had the opportunity to speak with David Allen last week via phone and will be writing up my thoughts. Did you know David Allen uses Lotus Notes? I pegged him as an Outlook guy! I’ve been a fan to the GTD workflow since picking up the book in 2005. Lifehacker was the first site to help me connect the idea of technology and productivity.
So if I haven’t already sent you a meeting request through Timebridge, try it out for yourself to save time and make your meetings effortless!
It seems my tweet hit a nerve.
Today, Scott Hanselman
replied to my tweet. This isn’t uncommon but I felt so moved by the topic I needed to blog about it immediately.
Read More…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHNDm4EyoWo[/youtube]
This questions comes up often where someone says, “You’re in a different timezone. Will Timebridge know that?”. The answer is yes! Watch how you can accept meeting requests in your own timezone, even if you’re traveling.
Website: http://timebridge.com
Did you ever want to show someone an error message on your computer or how you fixed something? Techsmith has a suite of amazing tools that make taking screenshots and doing video tutorials easy!
Read More…
I was tooling around in my email today and creating a new filter so when I got a new email from Rochenhost (my hosting company) it would get starred when I saw the most amazing thing!
This means you can now setup filters so when you get an email from a particular person or with a certain subject, you can send them a reply automatically!
I’m sure Microsoft is so very jealous because Outlook has nothing like this! Microsoft Exchange, eat your heart out! Okay, back to the awesomeness of Google Gmail and Google Apps.
Canned Responses need to be enabled so you can select it as a filter option
You can now send out auto replies like Merlin Mann does which provide helpful FAQ information or whatever your mind can dream up!
I could use this to say to Rochenhost, “I have received your notice. Please allow 4-6 hours for a reply.”. This is like vacation reply but much more powerful. You can choose who gets a reply and then you can create as many “canned responses” as you want.
Yes, if you’re not using Gmail or Google Apps for your email, you’re living in the dark ages while everyone else has electricity.
We all are busy people. The one thing we can never get back. Today I’ll share with you how I was able to quickly and easily accept a meeting time from Nic for our upcoming meeting on how to find and connect with the right sponsors for our websites. Nic and I were chatting via Skype and he said it sure would be nice if Timebridge worked on the iPhone. I told him I’d seen a blurb about it on the Timebridge site. Today was a great day to test it out:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-VCQU42hEE[/youtube]
People create events, right? It makes sense to be able to send invitations to people online then. Yup.
Evite pretends to help you do this but they could care less about helping you have a successful event and College Humor’s video parody, “Web Site Story” sums it up perfectly at (3:47 into the video)
“I hate Evite. There’s nothing in emails and you have to click through to the site”
Last year, I received an email from someone who wanted to have a fundraiser for Barack Obama. They were pretty sure they wanted to use Evite. Here, I explain to them via email why Evite was not the right choice:
9/16/2008 – Adria
I am also going to contact <so and so> and <that guy> about some better ways to quickly collect email addresses and send out notices to the group than **cough** Evite **cough**.
It’s a horrible service because:
- It’s advertising based so invites are filled with crappy advertising
- The actual invite you receive doesn’t have any useful event info
- Because Evite want you to go to their site and view their ads
Unfortunately, several emails later, they were still talking about Evite:
9/16/2008 – The Folks Who Need Help
Here’s the deal: if you think you’re in, email me or <so and so>. Our goal is to get a master email list then use a centralized online invitation system like Evite to confirm numbers. We’ll have to know in advance who’s coming and you’ll need to confirm that you’re coming through that system (maybe more than once…) so we can make the best plans. I want my friends (and the people you think would love this) to have confirmed seats.
So, look for more details soon, share with friends. And give us their email addresses now if they want an Evite when it comes time. We’re working with advice from the Obama campaign, but we’re obviously total amateurs at this, so your grassroots spirit is much appreciated!
So I tried again streamline my message again about Evite:
9/18/2008 – Adria
I don’t recommend Evite for the reasons I named:
1. They use a lot of advertising which they show to your guests
2. They do not include the event details in the email as a way to force your guests to view ads on their pageI think there are better alternatives out there but it sounds like you’re short on time and very interested in using Evite.
How about the ability to tell who opened your emails? This is a feature with most newsletter services which could be used to deliver your invite. There would still need to be a service to manage the RSVP.
And I got:
9/18/2008 – The Folks Who Need Help
I will try to call you at 2pm to discuss . . . not totally set on Evite – just wanted to convey we want an efficient yet simple process given it is a one time event and we can do a little leg work with the outliers (i.e. those who want to bring 10 people, etc.) if we have to.
So what is a non technical person to do? You have 3 strong alternatives to crappy Evite and I’m sure my readers will suggest more:
Google Calendar – Create events, invite whoever you want, they can RSVP and change their availability, send updates via email to attendees, all important information comes in the email, provides a map, FREE
Facebook Events – Need to be on Facebook, easy to create event, people can RSVP and change their availability, post photos about event, comment on event, FREE
Eventbrite – Create events with a web page, create different types of tickets, send updates via email to attendees, charge money for tickets, offer coupons and discounts, provides a map, easy to promote on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, FREE for Free events
Thanks to Eric_Cox611 for the heads up on the video via Facebook 
A Vanity Facebook URL to your Page?
Easy to remember Facebok page link? You’re not alone.
People on Twitter are wanting to create Vanity Facebook URL’s to their facebook pages found out they neeed a minimum of 25 100 fans for their page and began putting out plaintive cries for help asking people to fan their pages.
You went to http://facebook.com/username only to find out you were SOL (S**t Outta Luck). Facebook raised the minimum number of fans from 25 to 100 in order to get a vanity Facebook url.
Learn in this video how you can create your own http://facebook.domain.com and not have to worry! I’m doing this example using GoDaddy’s domain manager Control Panel.
My new subdomain is already working after 30 minutes! http://facebook.freshworkshops.com
Creating and Forwarding a Subdomain – GoDaddy Help Center — Knowledge Base
A subdomain is the part of a domain that is appended to the beginning of the domain name, like a prefix. For example, if your domain is “coolexample.com,” you can add a subdomain to the front of it to make “one.coolexample.com.” As with a regular domain, you can forward a subdomain to another URL. Subdomains can be up to 25 characters.
To Create and Forward a Subdomain
- Log in to your Account Manager.
- In the My Products section, click Domain Manager.
- Click the domain for which you want to create a subdomain.
- In the Subdomains section, click add.
- In the Subdomain field, enter subdomain you want to use. Do not enter the domain name in the field.
- In the Forward to field, enter the URL to which you want to forward your subdomain (for example, http://www.coolexample.com).
- In the Redirect type area, select one of the following:
- 301 Moved Permanently
- Redirects to the site you specified in the Forward To field using a “301 Moved Permanently” HTTP response. The HTTP 301 response code tells user-agents (including search engines) that the location has permanently moved.
- 302 Moved Temporarily
- Redirects to the site you specified in the Forward To field using a “302 Found” HTTP response. The HTTP 302 response code tells user-agents (including search engines) that the location has temporarily moved.
- Click OK.
I have been getting a lot of questions on how to make short url’s on Twitter so I created this video to walk you through it. Please ReTweet it using the button if you like it!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLLinH6bWfw[/youtube]
Copy/paste of url without shortening
Manual copy/paste to tinyurl.com
Best Way – Use bit.ly urls shortening service
Today, I was asked by a client if the economy was affecting my business. I told him no when I should have said yes. I am doing great for my consulting business. I have steady clients, continue to get new leads, am trying out a lot of new applications and am really enjoying myself while being able to pay the bills!
How is that possible when people are getting laid off, companies are canceling contracts and the ECONOMY IS SO BAD?
It’s not a secret which is why I am sharing it. If you tune in to my lifestream, you know I talk about how I’m making my dreams of success a reality.
Focus
That’s right. Focus. Most people don’t think for themselves. They allow the media to penetrate their thoughts and they buy into the “reality” of what they see, hear and read. It’s a sort of mass hysteria if you will. On the other hand, there are people who seem to be doing great no matter what. You’ve met them. They seem happy, cheerful, focused on their goals and seem to be going somewhere.
There are many ways to get results but the most important thing I can tell you is to imagine where you want to be in 5 years and “work it backwards”. Imagine how you will start your day:
The problem is that most people cannot enjoy the present moment. They are either worrying about the future or regretting the past. They are wrapped up in other people’s opinions and are not truly connected to themselves. I can tell you from experience, this is an exhausting endeavor.
Why would someone stay in this sort of stressful, anxiety ridden state of mind? They don’t know any better. There is no one in their life living any differently. It’s like a bunch of hamsters on a wheel.
I was able to find out there was a different path I could take by reading how other people were dealing with goals, stress, reality, health, boundaries, organization, dreams and of course, focus. I found links, websites and books that I could identify with. The two earliest forms were David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done and Gina Trapani’s website Lifehacker. Both described how I could deal with situations in my life differently so I could have more free time. I liked that idea and began thinking about how my life would be different. I was excited by the possibility of a life that I could enjoy. Until then, I had the mindset that life had to suck at first to have a better payoff later on. I worked long hours, put up with other people’s crap and bit my tongue so as to not hurt other people’s feelings (a lot!).
Times are tough for people who buy into the hype
Here’s a recent example. I read about “Fly-in restaurants” in The Progress Paradox. Did you know there are restaurants out there that serve people who arrive on the runway in a plane? This isn’t fancy 5 star food and the people who arrive for a good meal are not rich and famous but rather people who fly their own planes and seek out this sort of unique adventure.
CJ’s Restaurant and Catering
Pilots can fly their own planes on a day trip and meet others for lunch right at the restaurant with the nearby airfield and landside accessibility.
In fact, there is an entire book devoted to the subject with over 1,000 restaurants people can fly to and grab a bite to eat.
Get started today with that vision of your life 5 years from now. Create a rich, detailed story of how things will be. Write it down, draw it, clip out pictures the reflect your future.
Reserve a few minutes each day thinking about this future of yours. Don’t worry about how it will come to be. Don’t guilt yourself for not being “perfect” or whatever. Just focus on the 5 year vision.
Eventually, you will begin to notice things happening in your life that help you get there. Puzzle pieces come in all different sizes but they all help to complete the big picture.
Remember, hope, faith and working smart (not hard) will move things along. Many people in modern society are used to being in control of things and knowing exactly every-little-detail-about-every-little-event and future event. Let that go. There’s a lot in life that you will never be in charge of.
I hope this helps someone the way I found articles and links when I started moving towards something better.
As I work to turn ideas into action, I seek to connect with non profits in the new year where I can volunteer my time and technology skills. It was fun helping in the computer lab for Project Homeless Connect Minneapolis a few months ago and would welcome another positive experience like that.
There is a problem. I am finding it difficult to find a nonprofit that runs it’s volunteer program well. One I contacted last year kept procrastinating the initial meeting. After 2 months I said I would contact them in 2009. Another I left several voicemails but didn’t hear back. One I’m trying to volunteer with now sends sent out emails announcing upcoming events with really important details missing like location. If nonprofits need volunteers so badly, it would benefit them to make it easy to volunteer. I think the Barack Obama campaign was a huge success due to the volunteer management. That said I’m providing the following as a template to help nonprofits consider what they can send out in their communications to ensure volunteers have enough info:
Date All numeric (1/20/2009) or the full date (January 20th, 2009) are both fine.
Time Please indicate AM or PM and if people are helping across timezones, indicate the event’s timezone (6pm Central)
Event All events should have a title. This will help volunteers communicate information about the event (January bake sale)
Location Please include the full address with City, State and Zip. A google map would be great!
Duration How long will the event last. If setup and breakdown time is needed, include those times too. (bake sale starts at 10am until 4pm, setup starts at 9am.)
Volunteer Activities Needed Think big. There are many activities around making an event successful including event activities, getting the word out, composing the event description, volunteer management, collecting contact information, logistics, parking, rental space, technology, press and media notices, event goal, food, photography and capturing the event outcome.
There are several ways to communicate this information and save time. One is to use a website that allows you to send out RSVP’s. EventWax, a surprisingly powerful and versatile (free, even!) event planning tool. Facebook has this functionality built in so you can host an event and only invite staff and members of the organization. Another solution is if you website is already running a Content Management System like Joomla or Drupal, you can install a module to create events and polls.
When I observe a situation where I see the potential to streamline the process, I speak up. This isn’t always a popular thing to do as many organizations are used to “doing things a certain way” or “the person who is in charge has been in charge for 15 years”. What I do know is that I have the choice where to put my time and money.
Is there a nonprofit in the Minneapolis or St. Paul area that you could recommend because you know they’re Get Things Done (GTD)?
Bridging Inc.
Serving over 130 Minnesota Families Each WeekFounded in 1987, Bridging is a non-profit 501(c)(3), operating 100,000 square feet of warehouse space in Bloomington and Roseville. Bridging was founded on the simple concept that community resources should be shared with those in need. Our purpose is to “bridge the gap” between the “haves” and the “have nots”.
Our mission is to provide the economically disadvantaged with a one-time gift of quality furniture and household items which helps to stabilize and improve their lives while effectively using community resources. Through a network of over 200 social service agencies, eligible clients are referred to our warehouse for a once-in-a-lifetime shopping experience.
