I was talking with a physician this past week about health care. I mentioned that HSAs seemed like a step in the right direction for dealing with health insurance. He gave me a blank look and I realized he didn't know what I was talking about. If a doctor doesn't know about this wonderful new tool, some of my readers would probably benefit from a 5 minute explanation. An HSA is a Health Savings Account. Most people are familiar with "flex spending" type medical savings accounts where you set aside money pre-tax in order to pay for health related expenses throughout the year. If you don't use the money for health care, you lose it at the end of the year. So if you are healthy you … [Read more...] about HSA – Why You Need to Notice These Special Accounts
Archives for September 2007
Tuesday’s Tip: File Folders – Hanging or Traditional
Some productivity experts suggest that you shouldn't use hanging files because they take longer to just whip out a new folder for something. They suggest using regular plan folders, so you can grab one and make a new folder when ever it is needed. This makes sense, but I think I've reached the best compromise with my hybrid approach.I use hanging folders for major categories and then put regular folders in for subcategories. For example, I might have "Education" as a hanging folder and then individual normal folders for each year or each class, depending on how I'm organizing things. I have a hanging folder for "Taxes" and then a regular folder for 2006, 2007, and 2008. By using … [Read more...] about Tuesday’s Tip: File Folders – Hanging or Traditional
Testing Testing
Sometime back, I was helping a client add some new domains to their email server. Once the changes were made, I started sending test messages to make sure everything was working properly. None of my test messages showed up. Strangely though, other messages were coming through just fine. In fact some of my messages were coming through--just not the ones were I was intentionally trying to test the system. A little digging revealed that their "network administrator" had created a rule to delete any message that contained the word "test". Since all of my test messages explicitly said that they were tests, they were immediately deleted. After querying the staff, I found that someone … [Read more...] about Testing Testing
Tuesday’s Tip: Turn Off Message Notification Sounds
Boing! You have another email. Boing! Boing! There are two more emails to deal with. Right as you get ready to leave for lunch Boing! Boing! Boing! Arghhh! This is not what email is for! If you want to get more done, turn off the audio notification for email. You can turn it back on if you are waiting for an important message, but leave it off while you are trying to do normal work. The whole point of email is so you can communicate quickly but asynchronously. That means it is ok to wait a few minutes before typing a reply. You can't let every email be an interruption. Go ahead and check your email every 15 minutes if you must, but spend those 15 minutes in between getting … [Read more...] about Tuesday’s Tip: Turn Off Message Notification Sounds
Visual Voicemail Confusion
My wife and I have used Vonage for our home telephone service for several years. Overall we've been very pleased with the service. It was especially useful when we were living in Mexico. One of the great features is the way that voice mail shows up with your email as an attachment. I use a Blackberry that isn't capable of playing a .wav file so when I'm on the road this feature is only useful to help show me who called so I can call them back. Recently they introduced a feature called "Visual Voicemail" where for $0.25 they will transcribe your voice mail and add it to the message along with the .wav file. This seemed like a great idea, so I signed up for the service. I'm not … [Read more...] about Visual Voicemail Confusion
Tuesday’s Tip: Using a Feed Reader
If you have more than one website that you check on a daily or weekly basis, this tip will help you. You probably don't realize how much time is spent checking a website only to discover that nothing has been updated. You can reclaim this time with a feed reader. Most website (including Productivity501) publish something called RSS feeds. These contain the text (or sometimes just summaries) of each article in a special format that is easy for another computer program to read. Programs that read these feeds are called RSS readers. There are two types of feed readers. One is a program that actually runs on your computer. The other are web based programs like Google Reader. The … [Read more...] about Tuesday’s Tip: Using a Feed Reader
Tuesday’s Tip: Asking Yourself Questions
I was reading the book "The Leadership Challenge" and ran across a story about how to improve the productivity of your team that I wanted to share.The authors of the book ran a workshop to help people focus on continuous improvement. One of their suggestions was to have managers ask their team what they had done in the last seven days that would make them more productive in the next seven days. The idea was to keep people focused not just on being busy but on accomplishing more. Here is a quote from the book: About a month later, we heard from a participant in the workshop who had done what we recommended. He told us that the first time he asked the question, people looked at each other … [Read more...] about Tuesday’s Tip: Asking Yourself Questions
When to Buy a Faster Computer
Computers are so closely tied to our efforts to be productive that it is valuable to take some time to think about how to maximize our use of these complex devices. There are many factors that impact one's productivity with these machines: The speed of the computer. (the raw ability of a computer to do tasks) The configuration of the computer. (settings, memory, physical placement, etc.) The software being used. (wordprocessor, spreadsheet, email, etc.) The training of the user. (informal, formal, software training, etc.) The maintenance performed by the user. (removing spyware, keeping things organized, doing backups, etc.) Each of these areas deserves their own post or … [Read more...] about When to Buy a Faster Computer