Personal Productivity Expert and Trainer, Organization-Time Management-Technology

You may be experiencing a lot of duplicate contacts in Outlook caused by synching your PDA. It's easy to get rid of the duplicates with the right software. Try the Duplicate Contacts Eliminator by Sperry Corporation. Use my code, NM8BMJ16, and save 5%. I am not a proponent of all their software, but this one I like.

If you put an email address on the Web, spiders that cruise the Web looking for the @ symbol will harvest it. Then spam will start to jam your Inbox. Spam-blocking technology has improved, but it’s still not perfect. This is why I no longer type my email address on Web sites.

Write your address without the @ symbol. I write mine as
peggy at pscpress.com. I use uneven spacing between words too.

Use special computer code to hide your address. Feel free to use this Java script to cloak your email address. Copy and paste the script in the body section of your document (I use FrontPage to create this Web site. Click on the HTML tab, look for the <body> tag and paste code right after it. Replace my information with yours.

There are several schools of thought about when to check email. Some consultants suggest not checking it in the morning because you’ll get distracted, look up, and your day is shot. Others say check it three times a day: once in the morning, right before lunch, and once before you leave work. Still others will tell you to check email once a day. In the real world, you’re going to have to create a routine that works best for you.

If you’re in a busy, corporate environment, your not checking email first thing in the morning might not be practical. You could miss a meeting that was scheduled; spend two hours working on a report for a meeting that was cancelled; or perhaps miss an urgent message from a major client. Not only that, you’ll have meetings scheduled, clients to see, and other deadlines to make, so you couldn’t spend all day checking email anyway. And avoiding email in the morning assumes that incoming messages are your problem. But as I outlined in my book, Conquer Email Overload with Better Habits, Etiquette, and Outlook 2003 [PSC Press, 2005], the problem with email overload is the mess that’s already in your Inbox, not the new messages coming in.

On the other hand, a small business owner with little email use could get by with checking messages once a day. But a journalist, who may need to check email all day, will have a completely different routine. Regardless of your situation, the key to managing email is to:

You have some work to do before you can establish a routine that keeps you in front of the load and in control. Things won’t get any better until you do. You work with busy people who want answers fast, so spend time now to develop a way to make it happen.

There are a handful of documents you work on all the time. Finding them in the recently used list on the File menu doesn’t always work. You can create a new menu and add up to nine documents to it.

Once your Work Menu is created, it’s easy to add documents to it (up to nine).

You’re busy, timing things down to the minute, sometimes with only seconds to spare. If you feel like you’re working longer, you’re right. Studies prove it. But what are you doing? A recent study from AOL and Salary.com shows you’re wasting a lot of time, over two hours a day. Another study proved that being disorganized wastes another one to two hours a day. When is the work being done? Here are twelve tips to help you create more time.

Gotcha! No, I’m not talking about anything that’s X-rated. Dirty email messages are the ones you receive loaded with those darn carets (>>>).

You can get rid of carets by pasting the message into Word and using the Find and Replace feature to find carets and replace all of them with nothing.

Now remove the blank spaces at the beginning of each line that occurred when you removed the carets.

If you’re sending a message to your staff, you may want the replies to go to your assistant. It’s easy to set this up.

Save Email Attachments Fast

If you receive a message with several attachments you need to keep, you don’t have to open each one and click File, Save As.

With the message open, click File, Save Attachments.
Click any file you don’t wish to save to deselect it.
Save as you normally would.

Send your vCard to someone via email, or add it to your Web site for download (your virtual business card or Outlook contact sheet)

I'm using Outlook 2003 - works in older versions too. If you don't maintain your Web site, your Web person can do this.

For Email: You can send your vCard in an email message (I have a personal vCard under a nickname and a public one using a coded name*).

First create the vCard if you haven't already added yourself to your database.
Then create a new message as you normally would. Click the Insert menu, Item, Contacts, and locate and click your vCard, click OK.

For Web site: You may also want to make your vCard available as a download on your Web site. That's easy too.

Open your vCard in Outlook, and click the File menu, Export to vCard file, browse to your Web site files.
Save the vCard as part of the root directory (or put it inside of a folder).

When you add the link to your vCard on your Web site, let the visitor know they should click the link and click Open, not Save. Once the card is open, they will click Save and Close, and your vCard will be added to their Contacts (don't know how it would work with all software, so I have a note about that on my site too). Publish your files to the Web as you normally would.

(If after publishing your vCard to the Web, you click on it and get an error 'Page not found', contact your hosting company. Ask that they add a mime type for .vcf. My hosting company had to do this for me, and it was no problem.)

*Caution about adding yourself as a Contact: If a spammer sends you a message with your name in the From or To field, the email will be trusted...depending on your security settings. When I send my vCard in email, I attach my coded vCard to a message, then open it, add my right name and my email address, then send it. The original will still be intact. Click here for Peggy's vCard.

Anytime you create a PDF, you can attach and send the original Word (Excel, etc.) file with it.

Attach the Native Word File to a PDF Before You Send It

When I send a training agreement to a client, I'll create the agreement in Word, create a PDF of it, and email both of the documents together. (I'm using Adobe Acrobat 7.0, Reader 6.0).

From the open PDF, click the Document menu, Attach a File. Browse to find the file you want to attach, and double-click it.

The recipient can open the attachment in Word if they need to make changes* (it's easier in Word than on the PDF).

Important: Once the attachment(s) are in place, you can change the PDF Options to show them by default (you'll see an Options drop-down arrow on the right side of the screen near the scrollbar where the attachments start).

If you don't set attachments to be viewed by default, your recipient will need these instructions:

If they only have the Adobe Reader:

Open the PDF, click the Document menu, File Attachments, and then double-click the Word file to open it.

If they have Adobe Acrobat:

Open the PDF, click Attachments on the navigation tabs on the left (or click the View menu, point to Navigation Tabs, and click Attachments). Double-click the Word file to open it).

Why do I send the Word file along with the PDF instead of just the Word file? Because I want to ensure the file is formatted the way I intended (the PDF).

*If the client needs to make changes, they'll do so in Word. When they return the file, I need to see, accept, or reject any changes they've made. To do this, I turn on Track Changes in the Word document before I send it (in Word, click the Tools menu, Track Changes. See Word Help for more information).

Back to Contents