Well, I’m going paperless with my user manuals because they’re all going into my iPad.

Just imagine this: all (or most) of my manuals in one portable device, searchable, and including a dictionary and ability to write notes. Here’s how to do it:

• Download the PDF to the computer that you use to synch and back up your iPad.
• Drag the PDF to your Books collection in iTunes
• The next time you synch your iPad, voila!, the user manual is now on your iPad

This means I can get rid of the ugly stacks in my house and I never have to worry that a manufacturer will remove a user manual for an aging device.  Want to learn more? This article from MakeUseOf shows you how to paginate, bookmark and annotate in iBooks. Love it!

So I visited the website (TheseComeFromTrees.com) and ordered a bunch of stickers for Matrix Group. Jessica, who is on the “green team,” put stickers everywhere we use paper: in the bathrooms, the kitchen, all the printers.

Curious to see if the little stickers would make a difference, I started paying attention to the amount of paper waste in the women’s bathroom. Here’s what I found: in the women’s bathroom, the trash bin for paper hand towels used to fill up before lunchtime. Today, the bin does not fill up at all during the day. This is consistent every day. The women of Matrix Group are absolutely using fewer hand towels in the bathroom. Could the little sticker really be making a difference?

We haven’t reduced the number of female staff, so that couldn’t be the cause. And I can’t imagine that we’re using the bathroom any less. So I started talking to my co-workers and they all agreed that because of the sticker, they are using 1 paper hand towel instead of 2. We had effectively halved our paper consumption!

This got me thinking. How had a little sticker changed behavior?

I attended a presentation last week by Don Schmincke of the Schmincke Research Alliance. He effectively articulated why management consulting doesn’t work: You can’t change behavior by changing the process. You need to change people’s beliefs in order to change their behavior. People need to believe and understand why doing something is important and necessary.

So how did the little sticker make me change my beliefs? In this case, I don’t think the sticker changed my beliefs, but it did help me connect the dots between trees and my paper consumption. The little sticker also made it easy for me to do good: just think about where paper towels come from and use fewer!

This reminds me of signs that remind us that stormwater drains go into a nearby river or bay. Even though I already don’t litter, I’m extra careful when I see that a gutter or drain will dump into a body of water.

Or how about the gauge in my Honda Hybrid that tells me how many miles per gallon I’m averaging on a tank of gas? There is a number that I shoot for with every tank. When the gauge tells me I’m below that number, I look for ways to change my driving to up that number: I coast more, I don’t speed, I use distance to slow down, I turn off the AC, yada, yada.

The question is: in our daily lives, what other signs and reminders could help us be more productive, healthier, greener, nicer? What labels and signs have helped you make a difference in your life?

P.S. I hope you’ll consider ordering stickers for your home and office. Heck, I’m thinking of buying a bunch and plastering them in bathrooms of bars and restaurants all over town! Won’t you join me?

Inventory and audit everything. During the move, I was amazed at the stuff that I “found” and the junk that I ended up tossing. It makes me think of a content audit we completed for a client recently. After delivering the Excel spreadsheet that listed all of their website’s content, the client said, “wow, there’s so much stuff that we didn’t realize we still had online.”

Don’t just hire movers to move everything. A neighbor recently moved and she hired movers to pack up her entire house and move the boxes and furniture. Me, I prefer to do my own packing because it gives me a chance to edit, sort, and toss. With a redesign, I recommend that clients not ask us to just migrate everything because inevitably, we’ll migrate content that should be archived or we’ll put content into the wrong place and it gets “lost” forever.

Use a move to re-organize the flow of your house or website. When Maki and I moved into our old house, the garage was pristine. Over time, the garage became a dumping ground for everything: old notes, out of season equipment, holiday decorations, overflow storage for kitchen items, yada, yada. Pretty soon, the garage was a mess and it was hard to find anything. With this move, I’m taking the opportunity to re-organize the garage so that everything has its place, the shelves are properly labeled, and like items are grouped together for easy access. Same with a redesign: don’t just dress up the pages, use the redesign as an opportunity to make it easier for your customers to find information and services. And label everything properly!

If you haven’t used it in a year, toss! My mom always tell me to toss clothes that I haven’t used in a year. While this advice is not always practical (think winter coats and specialty items), I think it makes sense to put into storage, donate or toss things that my family no longer needs. Same with your website. Check your usage reports to see what content is just not getting visited. If the content is no longer relevant or out of date, you’re better off archiving the content offline or simply deleting it. In fact, old content can be a bad thing because Google can index it and serve it up to visitors, which can cause confusion and misinformation.

Organizing takes time. This process has taken more time and energy than I had originally budgeted. So the moral of the story is to allocate enough time to do your content review, then double or triple your estimate.

Get professional help. I’ve blogged in the past about how I worked with a professional organizer to get my house into shape. For the new house, I’m involving C. Lee from SimplifyYou early. She is going to help me figure out where to put mail, how to store kids’ games for easy access, how to organize supplies in the garage, etc. She can tell me what other clients have done and she can recommend products and solutions that would take me hours to research. With a website redesign, I recommend that clients work with us to create the content inventory, site map, migration plan, navigation and taxonomy. We’re able to do the work faster and we can draw on our experiences working with hundreds of other organizations.

Don’t just make the new house a replica of the old house. Sometimes, clients ask us to redesign their websites, but they want the navigation, content and applications to look and work exactly the same way. What is the point then of the redesign? A new website, like a new house, will have similar functions (think kitchen, living room, dining room, etc. or About Us, Contact Us, Calendar, etc.) but the new site should have updated and improved design, flow, content and functions. Now is the time to create a really great About Us page, redo the site search, roll out some new publications and rethink the online store.

The new house is a work in progress and it will take time to get it just right and feeling like home. But the time, money and effort will be more than worth it.

How about you? When was the last time you moved and how did it go? Is it time to “move” or redesign your website to clear out the garbage and create a fabulous, new space?

Once I realized what was happening, we quickly switched to e-mail confirmations and statements.I vowed to do more to reduce the paper tsunami that swallows my mailbox every week but then entropy set in and I just resigned myself to simply standing in front of the garbage can as I reviewed my mail.

Well, turns out I have another opportunity to reduce my carbon footprint and save trees. We’re moving next week, which means I get to contact all my creditors and vendors to give them my new address. In the process, I’m switching to e-statements whenever I can. I like how Schwab retains my statements for 10 years. And I love that ExxonMobil is planting a tree in my name because I switched to e-statements for my DRIP. Wherever I can, I’m receiving bills through my online banking account and paying online.

According to Matador Network, “The average person in the US receives nearly 11 pieces of junk mail each week, or 560 pieces a year. This amounts to 4.5 million tons of junk mail yearly, of which 44% goes straight to the landfill unopened and unread.” Apparently, eliminating US junk mail would be like taking 480,000 cars of the road!

So what can we all do to reduce our paper consumption? Here’s what I’ve learned:

• Opt out of credit card offers by going to http://www.optoutprescreen.com/; btw, this has the added benefit of making you less likely to be victimized by identity theft from people stealing these credit card offers and opening up accounts in your name.
• Contact the Direct Marketing Association and opt out of about 75% of direct marketers’ lists by going to DMAchoice.
• Configure your online banking account to send you e-mail notifications when you have a new bill and stop paper bills.
• Take the time to cancel unwanted subscriptions and catalogs; this is the most time-consuming because it’s easy to just pitch the unwanted stuff in the trash but think of the trees you’re NOT killing by making the effort.
• Print everything double-sided.
• Watch what I’m printing. Before I hit print, I check to make sure I’m not printing unnecessary pages. I once nearly used up a ream of paper when I accidentally printed a search results page that had hundreds of pages of debug code. Ugh, that was not pretty.

In doing research for this blog post, I found cute suggestions for ways to reuse junk mail as scrap paper, but I don’t believe that solves the problem: the trees had to be cut down in the first place. Besides, junk mail is some of the most expensive paper because it’s coated and printed in four color.

My goal is to trim the crap that appears in our physical mailbox by 50% by the end of the year. I’ll let you know early next year if I met my goal. How about you? Are you overrun by paper? What are you doing in the war against paper?

One of my Project Managers said she was having a tough time reaching a client. I suggested she try the client’s cell phone since that client is almost never at her desk but she’s almost always available via cell phone.

I have a friend who almost never answers his phone, but if I send a direct Tweet, I get an instant response.

Egads. With all of these communication channels, what’s the best way to reach someone these days?

On any given day, I check multiple devices for voice mail, e-mail or text messages: work e-mail, personal e-mail, home phone, work phone, cell phone, Twitter and Facebook. Some of these channels overlap.  For example, direct messages on Twitter, Facebook messages and work voice mail all end up in my e-mail.

But with so many devices to check for messages, I invariably favor certain methods (work e-mail, work voice mail and cell phone), to the detriment of others. Case in point: I completely missed a friend’s voice mail on my home phone because she called while I was upstairs with the baby one Sunday. Since I was home all day, it never occurred to me that I might have missed a call, so I didn’t check voice mail for several days. Eeek.

Many of my friends and staff have consolidated communications on their cell phones. They have no land line at home and do everything on their smartphone. But my husband Maki and I won’t give up our land line because in an emergency, my trusty land line phone (an AT&T Trimline 210 from 1989) that does not need a power source will still work (unless the central office is out).

I thought Google Voice would save me. Google Voice gives you a phone number that’s tied to YOU, not the device. Currently, I have a Google Voice number that rings on my cell phone and home phone; by the end of the week, it will also ring my direct extension at work. I can program Google Voice to ring on specific phones during certain hours of the day. And I can make free calls anywhere in the US and around the world to other Google Voice subscribers. Pretty cool. Currently, only Maki, my mom and the nanny have this number because they’re the people who MUST reach me when they NEED to reach me. But here’s the rub: Google Voice gives me another mailbox to check! Ick. I hope I managed to disable that feature.

All of this thinking about how to reach me and how to reach other has got me thinking. Are we making ourselves crazy by always being reachable and having the expectation that everyone should be reachable at all times? If you’re an NCIS fan, you know that Gibbs’ Rule #3 is “Never be unreachable” so I guess I need to continue diligently checking e-mail, voice mail, text messages and social media messages. <sigh>

How about you? What’s the best way to reach YOU? And how do you let friends know the best to reach you?

I had an early meeting in Hyattsville this morning.  I was armed with my Garmin GPS and printed directions from Google Maps — I still got lost.

How is this even possible?  For the last nearly 20 years (how did I get so old?), I have been in sales in the DC area.  I feel like I have driven to most corners of the region.  I know this region and I do not get lost!!!  How on earth did I get lost this morning?  And how did I get lost when I had so many tools at my disposal?

I have a hunch that all of these digital assistants are making me stupid. How and why?

Well, long before cell phones, GPS systems and Google/Mapquest maps, I would get directions the old fashioned way.  I would call the prospect or client and get detailed directions. Mr. client would ask me where I was coming from and he would give me directions that included navigational clues like:” go 4 lights then turn right; if you see the Giant, you’ve gone to far; or go about 3 miles and then get on 95 on your right.”  I would also get really helpful suggestions, like “don’t go through the City at that time of day, take the Beltway.”  I would heed these directions and almost never get lost.  And if I did get lost, I would find a gas station and ask the always-friendly attendant for help. Oh yeah, I also used to carry around maps with me, but I tossed those when I got my GPS; silly me!

I can’t remember the last time I called for directions or the last time I stopped at a gas station for directions.  Along the way, while using my digital assistants, I lost the important navigational clues that helped me successfully navigate from one sales call to another.  I have come to rely on my Jane the GPS and Google maps so much that I feel like I have lost my ability to navigate on my own! Now I wonder what other abilities I’m losing as a result of my reliance (some would say over-reliance) on these electronic devices and online services.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not giving up Jane anytime soon and Google maps is one of my best friends.  And to be truthful, I *know* I got lost because Jane could not get any satellite reception and the Google maps directions were confusing.  But perhaps next time, I’ll call for directions ahead of time and avoid giving my husband another case of navigational heartburn.

How about you? What electronic device do you rely on?  What have you given up as a result?  And how’s your driving these days?

While I’m sure most of my staff would have loved a snow day or two, as a small business owner, I know that when my staff isn’t working, we’re not generating billable time, which means a bad month in revenues, or worse.  So, since Friday, I’ve kept the Matrix Group office officially open but let everyone work from home. Here’s why:

• Most staff appreciated not having to battle the bad roads to keep working and avoid taking vacation days.
• Although most of our clients are in the DC area, we have clients all over the country; the latter expect us to be open.
• It’s precisely when our clients are not able to serve their customers and members physically that they rely on their Web sites to be open for business virtually.
• Letting staff work from home let us put our pandemic/DR plans to the test.

The results have been mostly good. With the exception of staff who lost power at home, everyone scheduled to work has been able to work.  Here’s what helped:

• The Matrix Group network administrators worked hard to give the entire staff VPN access to their desktops and the network.  In fact, until today, the network admins somehow made it to the office every day.
• We established a protocol for keeping in touch via Instant Messenger (IM).  We each announced to the entire staff when we started work each day, we stayed on IM, and we kept our statuses current to let other staff know if we were AFK (away from keyboard) for lunch, shoveling, etc.
• We used a free conference call service to conduct conference calls between staff and with clients.
• We use Webex to review documents and pages together, as well as Skype and Yahoo!Messenger to do group chats.
• Staff kept in close touch with their managers to discuss their plans, priorities and workload.

On Tuesday afternoon, I polled the entire staff and asked for their feedback re: working from home.  I learned some surprising things:

• Nearly everyone complained about latency on the VPN.  It seems we saturated our two T1 lines with all the remote access connections.
• Many staff members have cell phones only and they reported difficulties doing lengthy conference calls on their cell phones or were worried about running out of minutes.
• Most people missed the energy of the office, being able to conduct business face to face, and the convenience of nice computers, multiple monitors and fast access to the Internet.
• Several people complained about missing their chairs!
• Many staff members reported greater access to their managers (although I suspect it’s because managers were less likely to be on the phone with so many clients not working!).
• By Day 3, many staff were experiencing cabin fever in a big way.
• Those of us who are parents tended to take longer breaks AFK to take care of the kids.

All in all, I’m pleased with the Work From Home experiment.  If we do have a pandemic flu, we’ll be ready.  I’m grateful to have such a hard-working and committed staff; I feel like they’ve stayed in good spirits and have been very productive.  As for me, I miss the office, I miss my staff, I miss my chair, I miss my quiet office and I’m ready for my five-year old to be back in school!

How about you?  Did your company stay open or close during Snowcalypse?  How are you dealing with all this craziness?

This afternoon, the MatrixMaxx team at Matrix Group held a Town Hall meeting with clients to get feedback on about a half dozen features slated to go into the 10.1 version

Instead, we decided to crowdsource the specifications.  Crowdsource?  What does this mean?  Wikipedia defines “crowdsourcing” as the “act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an “open call” to a large group of people (a crowd) and asking for contributions.”  Wikipedia also uses this definition: “the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.”

In the past, Tanya (the Director of MatrixMaxx) and I would sit down, discuss requirements, maybe make a few calls, and then decide on the specifications for each release.  This time around, we decided to get immediate feedback from as big a group of clients as possible to validate our ideas and generate new ones.

The Mechanics of the Town Hall Meeting

• We sent an e-mail invitation to all MatrixMaxx clients, inviting them to an hour-long, online Town Hall meeting.  The e-mail provided details on the half dozen topics under consideration, with a general discussion of the options available.
• Clients were invited to provide feedback in real-time during the meeting, before the meeting via phone and email, and after the meeting via phone and e-mail.
• About 60% of the clients registered at least one person to the Town Hall meeting, which was conducted via conference call and Webex.
• Tanya ran the meeting, leading the discussion and taking notes, which were shared out via Webex to all participants.

Immediate Benefits of our Crowdsourcing Experiment

I don’t think the meeting could have gone any better.  Even I was surprised at the level of engagement from clients, as well as the thoughtful feedback on our proposed changes.  Here’s what we learned:

• A bunch of brains are definitely better than 1, 2 or 3. In one hour, we explored topics and prevented duh! moments in February.  For example, we proposed making the CID (the security code on credit cards) required on all meeting registration forms, but several clients correctly pointed out that they have already sent out paper forms for many meetings. If we require CID and they get back a bunch of reg forms back without the security code, they’ll have to call members and cause a lot of extra work. So, could we require the CID on the WWW side but not the intranet side? Honestly, we had never considered splitting the requirement between WWW and intranet.  What a great idea!
• The Town Hall meeting got the attention of clients we rarely hear from, despite regular outreach. When we have little contract with specific clients, that’s a red flag because we don’t learn about their issues and problems, which means we don’t have the opportunity to fix them.  The meeting was a great way to re-connect with clients and show them we want to hear from them!
• Clients liked hearing other client perspectives. In the past, when we decided to implement a feature one way, we made some clients happy and others unhappy.  Today, clients didn’t all agree, but they seemed to appreciate hearing about why another organization didn’t share their point of view.

The biggest benefit to the software team?  We got resolution on a bunch of requirements and the developers can plow ahead with their coding.  We are definitely going to do this again in the future, maybe even do a Town Hall meeting prior to the planning meeting for each release.

How about you?  What do you think of our experiment?  Have you participated in a crowdsourced event or project before?  If you participated in the Town Hall meeting, what did you think?

Okay, so this does not make any sense:  discounted parking costs Union Station more money because a real person is needed to process the transaction. (Besides that, it’s just not right to advertise a discount and then not tell consumers how to actually get the discount.)

So it turns out that a lot of companies spend a lot more time processing charges from people who pay less.  Here are more examples:

• The meeting registration system that can’t process discounts properly so you have to call the organization to get the discount.
• The discount code that you can’t use on the Web, only by phone.
• The publication that gives you a quantity discount, but you have to call.

My take on discounts is this: you’re getting less money already from discounted transactions, so figure out how to automate the processing. The more you need people to handle the details, the less money you actually make.  Talk to your vendor and eliminate the extra staff time.  You’ll probably also get a bump in sales because more people will take advantage of the discounts!

How about you?  Does your company have a process that makes you work more for less money?  Run into any good (ahem, bad) examples?

Multitasking is everywhere.

But can we really do two, even three, things at once?  Research shows that we can’t really multitask.  Not well at least.

Way back in 2001, researchers at the American Psychological Association set out to find out if multitaskers are more efficient.  Their findings: multitasking isn’t more efficient; shifting mental gears wastes time. More recently, a group of researchers at Stanford University found that “(p)eople who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time.”

While I’m tempted to multitask on a regular basis, I’m trying really, really hard to break myself of the habit. For example, I don’t check e-mail on my phone anymore.  It turns out that when I’m away from the office, I’m usually in my car or in a meeting.  I know I shouldnt’ check e-mail from the car, so I don’t.  And clients typically pay me to pay attention during their meetings, so I don’t check e-mail then, either.  I will take detailed notes on my laptop during a meeting but the note taking helps me process and organize the discussions and information.

And I try not to check e-mail while talking on the phone.  Talking on the phone requires a lot of my concentration, especially if I’m taking notes.  It’s really obvious when someone is not paying attention during a call and I don’t want to be that person.

I’m guilty of multitasking like any other busy professional, especially as a working mom.  But I’m trying really hard to just say NO! to multitasking.  How about you?  Are you a multitasker?  How does it work for you? How do you react when people around you multitask?

But then I got to thinking. Gmail is a seriously good e-mail service.  Google Analytics is so ridiculously good that yes, I would pay for it; in fact, I would pay lots of money for it (don’t get any ideas, Google.)  And before Google bought Postini, it was already a best of breed, commercial anti-spam service.

So I did a little more research on Google apps.  It turns out that the Google apps, terms and conditions I’m familiar with are for personal use.  But Google also markets its services to companies and schools.  Google offers the same services (Gmail, calendar, docs, Web site hosting, and Postini) to companies for a really low price ($50 per user, per year).  So why is the corporate version of Google Apps not free?  For the money, you get a 99.9% uptime reliability guarantee (for Premier Edition users), mobile device support, 25 GIG of storage, and the Google promise of security and compliance.  Phone support is supposedly also available, but I can’t find reference anywhere in the Terms of Service to back-up and retention of data.

So now I’m intrigued and impressed.  Google apps look great, work great, are easy to use and are super reliable. But I still remember how my Magnolia bookmarking account just vanished last year.  And  while I wasn’t out any money, I was out all my bookmarks.  Thank goodness I was able to recover some of my data from an RSS feed!

So are Google Apps truly ready for the corporate prime time?  Would I trust Google with my most important and mission critical data and functions?  How about you?  Would YOU trust Google with your calendar, e-mail and docs?

Here is our Office Move To Do List at the start of the day on Saturday.

• Jaime, the Director of Administration, was the SCRUM Master. She was in charge of managing tasks, answering questions, and making sure people didn’t have any impediments to getting a task done.
• I was the Product Owner since I am ultimately responsible for the office.  I was consulted on priorities and tasks that affected the entire office, like the kitchen set-up, where to put up posters, etc.
• We set-up a SCRUM board in the reception area. As staff arrived, they were told to: go get a doughnut, set-up your work area, then grab as many tasks as you can to help complete the move.
• The SCRUM board was covered with tasks written on Post-It Notes.  Jaime and I populated the initial tasks, but we invited other staff to suggest more tasks to the SCRUM Master.
• When a staff person completed a task, they initialed it, then put it on the DONE board.
• Since Jaime and I were the leaders of the project, we didn’t have as much time to unpack our own offices, so we asked for help by putting up tasks on the board.  We got a lot of help as a result!
• We didn’t have people milling about, wondering how they could help, and feeling frustrated for lack of direction.

Everyone who came in on Sunday helped.  Some people completed a lot of tasks, while others completed just one.  What mattered was that so many tasks that normally get delegated to the admins got done.  The Director of Client Services wiped all the white boards clean then distributed them.  A senior Developer wiped down the credenzas in the conference room.  A Project Manager put up the bulletin board in the kitchen.  Three staff members unpacked the kitchen.

Here is To Do List next to our Done List by Sunday evening.
Nearly all remaining tasks were done by Wednesday afternoon.

The results were unbelievable. By Sunday evening:

• Pretty much everyone had their workstations working.
• The dev sites, network shares and printers were up and running and tested.
• The kitchen was unpacked and the coffee maker functioning.
• The new VOIP (voice over IP) phones and Internet access were working and tested.  (It’s taking a few days to get used to the new phones, I think transferring a call is taking too long, and the hold music needs to be updated — but we’re getting there!)

The best part?  Instead of the move being a drag, we had a party! (Doughnuts, pizza, music and beer helped!)  And I didn’t hear complaints about how things weren’t working as planned because everyone helped and knew how hard the admins and net admins had been working to ensure a smooth move!

We’re now trying to figure out how to use a similar process for other, non-technical projects at Matrix Group.  How about you?  How have you used SCRUM in unique ways and situations to get a project done and done well?

There’s no question that we can fritter away hours reading Twitter posts, watching random videos on YouTube, updating our Facebook status, yada, yada.

But for organizations that have made the decision to incorporate social networking into their communication, conversation or marketing strategies, how can we be sure that social networking sites aren’t just a sinkhole of time?

As someone who is fairly active on different SN platforms (I tweet and update my profile on Facebook regularly, I browse sites on StumbleUpon, and I certainly watch my share of YouTube videos), here are my top time management tips:

• I set aside time during the day to read blogs, tweets, Facebook status updates, etc.  Typically, I set aside a half hour in the morning and a half hour at night.

• I may update my status on Twitter and Facebook during the day, but I don’t do a lot of reading.

• I don’t read everything.  I’m really good at skimming.

• I use Tweetdeck to manage the tweets from people I follow.  I set up groups for the people whose tweets I really want to see:  family, friends, clients, CEOs, thought leaders, research orgs. Love Tweetdeck!

• If I find something I like, I either read it right then, or I save it to my Delicious account (social bookmarking) site for later consumption.

• Do the important stuff first.  For example, I try to blog a couple of times a week.  On the day I want to blog, that is my priority, not other SN sites.

• I don’t feel compelled to reply to direct tweets and blog messages in real-time. I set aside time to read, reflect and reply; I figure nobody’s going to die because I didn’t comment fast enough on their question about Facebook URLs.

• As a company, we have developed a content strategy that delineates the type, tone and frequency of our updates and tweets.  Which means we’re clear on what we need to do, when to do it, and the content we will provide.  Finally, we don’t tweet all day long; once a day is fine.

Will you catch me doing random surfing every once in a while?  Some days, and we all have them, I just need a brain break and I want to look at pretty photos on Flickr, catch up on my favorite blogs, and scan the cool URLs and mindless tweets from people I follow.  But hey, a recent Australian study says that “people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not.”  Imagine that.

David Allen from Business Week says that social networking is worth the time if you organization has an agenda that is supported well by social networking, you are doing research, or you need to know how social media really works.  Beth Kanter has some additional tips for using your time wisely and not getting in trouble on SN sites.

How about you?  How much time do you spend each day or week on social networking sites?  How do you manage your time?  And do you think time management is an issue for you and your staff?

Under the law, 65% of COBRA premiums will be subsidized by the federal government, with the remaining 35% paid for the former employee.  After receiving the reduced premium from the former employee, the employer or health plan offsets its payroll tax liability by the other 65 percent. If the offset amount does not cover the subsidy, the employer files paperwork with the government to get a refund.

Lots of employee benefits companies are covering this issue, including The Segal Group.  Everyone is talking about the requirements, but did anyone consider the true impact on businesses, especially small businesses? And just think about this: small businesses will be responsible for new paperwork and fronting the COBRA premiums for former employees until they get reimbursed by the government. Yes, employers can offset their payroll tax liability with the COBRA amount but if the offset doesn’t cover the COBRA premium liability, employers are liable for the amount until they get reimbursed, which will probably take months, if we’re lucky.  Dear Mr. Congressman, for a small business that is cash-strapped, this could mean hundreds or thousands of dollars every month!

I’m lucky.  I haven’t had to lay off anyone but I can certainly relate to the small business owner who will go nuts with all this new paperwork and potential liability — during a time when cash is tight.  Could this new law actually lead to more layoffs?  Sheesh.

Neal, my insurance agent said that of the 100 phone calls he’s made to business owners and plan administrators, not one person has said, “oh wow, what a great idea, I’m excited about these new requirements.”

• Here’s my favorite: 10 New Year’s resolutions for geeks from Wired, including keeping an open mind about the new Star Trek movie.
• Jenny Cruise resolves not to do a bunch of stuff.
• About.com’s Albrecht Powell has compiled a list of the most common resolutions.  Yeah, yeah, we all know that we need to get in better shape, do more for others, learn something new, yada, yada.
• Veronika from Prague wants to brush her teeth every night even when she’s tired.
• Here are a college student’s resolutions, written from a professor’s point of view.  Number 1?  Attend all classes!
• Beliefnet has a list of suggested resolutions for celebrities.  Dear Britney: please assess if you and K-Fed are right for each other.
• Here are some resolutions for the gaming industry.  No more holiday avalanches, please!
• American Spectator has resolutions for other people.  For President-Elect Obama: Don’t alienate the many independent and moderate-to-conservative Democrats.  For Governor Palin: Re-introduce yourself  re-introduce yourself to independents and moderate Democrats.  Is there a theme here?
• Okay, every list has to have a green New Year resolution list.  This one is by SEO by the Sea.  Yeah, we already know we should use less energy and water, but it’s always good to get a reminder.

I’m sure many of us break our resolutions within a few weeks, but it feels good to set personal goals and strive to be better.  My resolutions:

• Eat more lean protein.
• Get back on the treadmill.
• Do one cultural thing each month(okay, maybe every quarter) with my family.
• Make date night with Maki happen more often.
• Get CJ into the right school.
• Start playing the piano again.

Happy New Year!

When I ordered a new laptop three months ago, I asked for Vista as my operating system.  I figured it was time to get Vista; it’s been out for ages and resistance is futile, it was time to upgrade.  Alas, my brand new Sony VAIO laptop with 2 GIG of RAM was slooooow to boot up and slow to shut down, it took 5-10 minutes to recognize an ethernet or wireless connection, it crashed a lot, and hibernating almost never worked.

Maki finally got sick of my whining and asked me to hand over my laptop one day so that the network admins could downgrade my OS to XP. Wow,my laptop is now super speedy and I’m online within seconds after plugging in.  I’m still in hell because you know how it goes with a new system: you have to re-install all your favorite plug-ins, you need to set-up your Word templates, you have to re-synch your phone with your Palm desktop, yada, yada.

Now for my phone.  My beloved Palm Treo suddenly stopped working in August. It kept trying to synch with my laptop, even when it wasn’t connected to my laptop and it would crash often.  So I got the latest Palm phone, which I love.  It’s lightweight, it synchs with my laptop nicely, and I love the built-in apps.  Trouble is, the phone mysteriously stopped ringing. No, I didn’t drop it on the ground or in water.  It still vibrates, it’s just won’t ring.  I guess I’ll have to make a trip to the Verizon store where I will wait in line for an hour for the privilege of being poorly treated by a snarky sales rep.

I’m lucky.  Maki is an absolute wizard with hardware and he can make anything work.  At work, I have HT, who has the patience of Job and the skills of a Jedi.  I ask myself how people who don’t have network admins working for them deal with all these crazy technology issues. Do they buy Macs?

For the not-so-power-users like me, it doesn’t make sense to pay hundreds of dollars for programs that are overkill for my needs. Luckily, I’ve found a host of free (or ridiculously inexpensive) programs that are just right for my needs.  Here’s a list of my favorites:

Gimp is an open-source graphics program. It’s a small download, easy to use, and it lets me resize images in three steps (select Scale, type your preferred image size, then press Scale).  Since I write and post my own blog posts, Gimp lets me be self-sufficient and not bother the busy designers and webmasters at Matrix Group.  Price: $0.

Neevia is a super-easy PDF creator that installs as a print driver. I can make PDFs out of anything, including Word, Excel, Powerpoint files and Web pages.  All I do is press Print, select docuprinter, and enter the directory where I want the PDF saved.  Price: $19 (less if you buy a site license)

Pearl Crescent is a free plug-in to Firefox that lets me take screenshots of any Web page. I can capture just the visible portion of the Web page or the entire page, even if it goes below the fold.  The PNG files can be easily inserted into Word or Powerpoint files.  Price: $0

Filezilla is a free and easy to use ftp (file transfer protocol) program that support secure ftp, the only way to connect to Matrix Group Web servers over ftp.  I also use it to download large files from sites that offer ftp downloads of their software.  Price: $0

Firefox Web Developer Toolbar is a free plug-in to Firefox. Using different components of the toolbar, I can: see what a page looks like with graphics or javascript turned off; change the style sheets (temporarily, of course, and only on my computer) so that I can play  around with the html styles and not bother the webmasters (also called front-end developers at Matrix Group); and check the alignment of a page.  Note that the geek factor is a little high on this plug-in. Price: $0

I’d love to hear about your favorite free (or nearly free) software tools!