December 8th, 2009 by Brian Cors
Awhile back, I posted an article about AirSet, the free online calendar-sharing service. My wife and I have been using that service for a few years now and, with our busy lives (including a teenager and a pre-teen), I don’t know how we’d survive without it.
After having tried unsuccessfully to manage shared calendars for CorsPro within our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, we’ve recently switched to managing our calendars using AirSet. After just a few days, I’m here to tell you that it works great, and it provides an ideal blending of managing BOTH your personal calendar and your work calendar without feeling like you’re giving up the privacy of your personal life for all of your business associates to see.
Figure 1
The key to managing calendars in AirSet is the concept of being able to view multiple calendars and sub-calendars all at once, and to tag others as participants in events so that the events appear in their calendars. For example, my personal calendar for November 19th looked like Figure 1. The event descriptions are a bit cut off so that they can fit neatly into the calendar day’s square, but you can easily see the full details of each event simply by floating your mouse over the event.
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November 13th, 2009 by Brian Cors
I love my Blackberry. It’s a great phone that synchronizes nicely with my Outlook (calendar and contacts in my case), enables me to call my contacts hands-free using my voice (e.g., “call Joe Smith mobile”) and – best of all – enables me to send and receive emails wherever I am. But as a text messaging platform, it’s not so good. It takes way too many keystrokes to send a simple SMS text message. I’d rather call someone instead of texting them.
But I have a 14-year old daughter. My response hit rate is much higher when I send a text message rather than calling her (it’s embarrassing to have dad call you on the cell phone when you’re with your friends), and there are other folks in my contacts list who respond more often and quickly to a text message.
Fortunately, after much searching, I’ve found a little $6 application called QuickText that makes it fast and easy to send a text message. From the main screen, I simply press the “Q” key, then the key that I’ve assigned to the person I’m texting. Now I can immediately starting typing my text message. Two keystrokes to get to the composition screen…not bad!
If my intended text message recipient does not have a key assigned to them, then after pressing the “Q” key, I can press the space bar to bring up my address book where I can select the recipient and immediately begin typing my text message. Fast and easy, like text messaging should be!
You can download QuickText, which is made by Cannon Software, from Blackberry’s App World or from one of several mobile software websites. I downloaded mine from www.MobiHand.com.
December 19th, 2008 by Brian Cors
Everybody has a different approach to keeping track of all of the tasks that they need to accomplish, projects they need to manage and people with whom they need to follow up.
In the old days, the only choices available to us were paper-based. The best systems out there were from Day-Timers and Franklin-Covey, and they helped you to organize yourself by encouraging you to group items into different categories that were separated out into different pages. They worked well, but the planners themselves were somewhat bulky and it was a laborious process to carry forward and reorganize your tasks as you went along.
Today, we have numerous options to electronically manage our tasks. Yet very few people systematically use electronic task management tools. The most widely-used tool is Outlook, which enables you to add tasks to its task management database, then filter and sort those tasks by due date, category (if you assign one) or other criteria. To me, this approach quickly becomes overwhelming as the tasks begin to mount, and re-prioritizing and re-dating the tasks within Outlook is a time-consuming process.
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November 10th, 2008 by Brian Cors
The cost of cyber-threats such as viruses, spyware and phishing schemes is truly staggering. The Consumer Reports National Research Center estimates that 1 in 4 people have encountered a major virus attack, resulting in an average cost of $109 per incident and a nationwide cost of $5.2 billion in total damage. Spam, spyware ($2.6 billion in estimated damage) and phishing schemes ($630 million in estimated damage) have also caused tremendous financial and productivity losses.
There are a variety of measures that everyone should take to protect themselves from cyber-attacks…
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October 28th, 2008 by Brian Cors
A few weeks ago, Jeffrey Zaslow published an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal that discussed two ways that people handle their email inboxes. There are the hoarders – those who keep every email that they’ve ever been sent – and the deleters, who religiously clean out their email inboxes and delete as many emails as they possibly can (then go back to the hoarders if they need to reference an email from the past).
Jeffrey’s original article hypothesized that your email inbox strategy reflects who you are and how you handle the rest of your life. He surmises that if you’re a hoarder, then probably you’re a hoarder and untidy in other parts of your life.
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October 2nd, 2008 by Brian Cors
For the past few months, I’ve been looking for a web-based calendar-sharing service that makes it easier to coordinate schedules with others. I also needed this service to be able to synchronize with Microsoft Outlook and my Palm Treo.
After months of searching, I’ve finally found a service called AirSet (www.airset.com) that meets these needs and works great. It’s also free (AirSet makes their money by extending the AirSet functionality to cell phones).
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September 19th, 2008 by Brian Cors
About a year ago, I purchased a Palm Treo 650 with the hope that the device would not only combine my cell phone, calendar, contact list and email inbox into a single device, but that it would allow these elements to interact in ways not possible with separate devices.
I haven’t been disappointed.
In particular, I like the way I can search through my entire list of contacts to find and dial the person I’d like to call. I also like the way that the Treo uses the phone number of an incoming call to look up and display the name of the contact who is calling, enabling me to decide which calls to answer and which calls to send to voicemail.
The Treo 650 uses the Palm operating system. Relative to what I’ve seen and read about with regard to Windows-based Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), the Palm operating system is much simpler to use and requires fewer stylus taps to accomplish the same tasks.
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August 11th, 2008 by Brian Cors
Without the right tools, navigating the files on your PC is like trying to navigate a rowboat across the Atlantic Ocean. There’s simply too much information, too many files and too little time to find what you’re looking for using the built-in file management tools that Windows provides (ever tried using Explorer’s “search” function to find a phrase within a file? Might as well take a lunch break while it’s processing!).
I have two software tools that I use every day to help me manipulate files and find information: VCOM’s PowerDesk and Google Desktop Search.
PowerDesk’s single most useful feature is its dual-pane folder manager…
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May 25th, 2008 by Brian Cors
Are you stuck in a creative rut, either as an individual or as a team? Does your linear thinking stifle your capability to come up with breakthrough ideas?
Unleash your creativity using a concept called “mind mapping.” Around since the 1960s, the concept of mind mapping utilizes several elements within the brain to stimulate more creative thinking. Mind maps combine words, images, colors, numbers, logic and graphical relationships to encourage non-linear, visual approaches to thinking and solving problems. The Mind Map Book by Tony and Barry Buzan (see our review) explains the scientific reasoning behind the approach, and provides examples of how mind mapping can be used for different purposes.
Until a few years ago, mind mapping was just a curiosity to me. For those (like me) who are artistically challenged, a graphical approach to thinking presents some challenges when those graphics must be hand-drawn. Moreover, hand drawings are very difficult to modify; adding content to a mind map generally requires squeezing in the new information using teeny-tiny print. Finally, for a person like me who likes to store (and back up) every piece of information electronically, hand-drawn mind maps don’t fit well into my filing methodology.
MindManager – developed by a company called Mindjet – eliminates all of the shortcomings of hand-drawn mind maps, and provides capabilities that extend mind mapping way beyond what could be done by hand.
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March 21st, 2008 by Brian Cors
One of the applications that I’ve used for several years is a file backup utility called Second Copy, made by Centered Systems. It has come in handy several times when hard drives have crashed or disk errors have been encountered. I’ve also gone back several times to the “backed up” versions of files because I’ve made ill-advised changes to the “live” versions resident on my PC.
What I really like about Second Copy is that once you set up your file structure (more on that later) and the Second Copy backup routine, the software backs up your files automatically and in the background from that point forward. Mine are fully backed up on a daily basis, so I would never be more than a day behind if my hard drive crashed. I’ve basically created an insurance policy against a tremendous loss of productivity and intellectual assets if my hard drive was to crash.
Hard drive crashes are inevitable. The need to go back to older version of files is inevitable. Is it worth $30 to protect all of the intellectual property that you’ve created, and to save the hours and hours that you would have to spend recreating files if a crash occurred? If so, read on!
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