If you have wondered how you’re going to find time to get organized, squeeze in some spring cleaning, or get home business like bill paying streamlined you will find some answers in The Clutter Diet’s free report.  It’s titled: 30 Ways to Find Time to Get Organized.

Go to the site, sign up, and enjoy this easy read. Then find something to change right away, and something to try next week. Then, go for it. Here are some headlines to tease you into getting the report:

• Configure appointments to avoid traffic
• Trade time with a friend
• Say NO more often
• Go paperless and don’t print
• Have a ‘While-U-Wait’ bag
• Have an evening routine

Get it now a try something new today!

Hello readers ~ it’s Sunday 2/24 and I’m writing this post a couple days in advance so I can pace myself when the week begins. Thank you all for your kind thoughts, emails, and energy as I went through the death of my father and the after effects.

While the ache in my heart persists we have much to be thankful for. First is the love of family and friends who supported us through the week, the fact that Dad had his will and trust up-to-date, my sisters and their husbands pulled together to work at Dad’s house, Dad’s heart failed and he went immediately and without pain, we have now avoided tough decisions had his health declined over time, and his legacy is one of kindness and generosity.

While many blog readers are young I’m thinking there is a group of you who are in the sandwich generation, like me, and will be dealing with aging parents and estate matters for them and ourselves. So, while this topic is fresh for me I will create a series of posts aimed at helping us prepare for these issues as preparation is in synch with our themes at the Productivity Café – streamline, create systems, learn continually, use your tools and plan.

I’m glad to be back… Susan

How quickly can you add a contact to your contact list? If you receive the information for the new contact via email, you can initiate it with one click and drag, add info into a couple of fields, and viola – you’re done! Here are the steps to take:

• Go to the email in your inbox that is from the person you want to add to your contact list.
• Left click on the email and hold the button down. While still holding the left button down drag the message to hover over the contact icon in the lower left of your Outlook screen.
• Release the button
• A ‘new contact’ window will open with the information of the sender already completed. Add extra information such as her phone number.
• Click save & close.
• Double check that the person is now in your contact list.
• You’re done!

If the message is open follow these steps:

• Right click on the name of the person you want to add to the address book. A list will open.
• Left click on ‘add to Outlook contacts’.
• Complete the contact fields.
• Type ctrl+s to save the new contact information.

An alternative to this process is one of my favorite programs, Address Grabber.

Other Outlook shortcuts:

18 Outlook shortcut key combinations

A Quick Way to Copy Yourself in Outlook

Automatically Move Messages out of your InBox and Into a Folder

An Outlook Feature most of Us Should Use: Color Coding Messages

Speed Way to Adding Contacts in Outlook

The magnificently educational show "Modern Marvels" recently aired a show about 90s technology that proved this startling statistis that triggered my TiVo pause button finger immediately!

In 2007, over 170 billion email messages were sent per day. That’s almost 2 million messages every second. 70% of them were spam and viruses.

What can we learn from this and what are the next actions that make sense?

1. Make sure your virus protection is up-to-date, immediately & constantly!
2. Spam is a time thief. Work with your IT professional to solve your spam problems, whether it’s server-level filtering, software on your local computer, or a service like SpamArrest. I have experienced that Outlook 2007’s built-in junk mail filters actually work quite well too.
3. Think twice before forwarding emails and copying everybody on your messages. You’re adding to the huge email load everyone is carrying. Be selective and think about whether a phone call would be more effective and whether the recipients of your messages really need to or want to know what you’re sending.

We all should think about reducing the collective email burden before we throw  up our hands and declare email bankruptcy and close our accounts. What changes will you make toward your own email reduction?

This is the 3rd article written by Lorie Marrero as guest writer while Susan is away. She is my (Susan’s) friend and writes at the clutter diet blog (www.clutterdietblog.com) and is the creator/founder of
The Clutter Diet (R).

Have you ever been frustrated trying to schedule a meeting with multiple attendees who are not networked with you own office? Or, have you tried to coordinate even a simple family get-together with everyone’s frantic schedules conflicting?

TimeBridge is a great new tool to help busy people schedule meetings quickly. It easily handles time zone confusion and notification of the selected time to everyone involved. Many calendar applications allow you only to propose one single meeting time that either gets accepted or rejected. This service allows you to suggest multiple possibilities to multiple people and select the most commonly available slot automatically for your group.

Another tool like this is Meeting Wizard, which I have used recently for a small group trying to connect at an upcoming conference. We were able to propose multiple time slots and everyone just clicked in an email to provide their availability for the possible choices. We could see the slots that were most available and notify everyone. It was such a pleasure to view the availability on one big grid conveniently arranged!

As always, to be most productive be sure your meeting is truly necessary and that you have an agenda and a stated outcome. Let us know if one of these tools has helped you save time!

Lorie Marrero contributed this article while Susan is tending family matters after the death of her father. Lorie writes a blog at www.clutterdietblog.com and is the creator & founder of The Clutter Diet (R).

Even with identity theft as rampant as it is we still work with people all the time who do not own shredders. My first recommendation is that you probably should own a shredder. But, if that’s not feasible or your needs are truly very light I have found an alternative that may be just the ticket. Shred Station Vaults.

You stuff as much paper as you’d like into the provided envelope and as long as it fits in the slot, it will be accepted into the drop box for a flat fee (here in Austin it is $5.00). The envelopes hold about 2 pounds of paper and vaults are located in many public venues such as grocery stores, banks, and the UPS Store where I saw one just today. Their site has a locator featuers so you can find one near you. The drop boxes have a credit card payment slot and provide you with a receipt. You can enter the receipt’s transaction number into their website to receive an official Certificate of Destruction,  if needed.

My recommendation is to grab some extra envelopes to have at home so you can pre-stuff them before dropping them off. What a great way to get rid of your "To Shred" pile quickly!

Written by Lorie Marrero while Susan is away. Lorie is my longtime compadre and writes at The Clutter Diet Blog and is the creator/found of   The Clutter Diet (R) helping people put their homes on a diet and lose the "Clutter Pounds." Lorie writes more about residential organizing while I’m the productivity barista. We make a great team!

Dear Readers ~

The Productivity Café will have its lights off for the next 5 days. Dad passed away yesterday and we’re not a team of writers (yet). So, please miss us and come back at the end of next week. If you shoot an email to me with an article or idea that fits our style I’ll post it!

Susan

You can add an appointment to your Outlook calendar with just a drag of the mouse and a few keystrokes when you start with an email. This is very helpful when the email contains information that would be useful to have in preparing for the meeting.

For example: Bob writes an email to you requesting a meeting in 10 days. In the email he’s included an agenda draft. You want to keep that agenda so you can prepare well and recall the purpose of the meeting the day before. Outlook’s solution is to create the appointment right from the email. Here are the steps:

• Go to your inbox.
• Left click on the email containing the appointment details. Hold the left button down and drag the message to hover over the calendar icon in the lower left of your Outlook screen.

You can move toward achieving many of your goals by Eating In rather than Eating Out! Last week we listed why Eating Out Is Counter Productive. This week let’s look at why Eating In is the productive choice. This all starts with your goals and defining being productive as progressing in the direction of those goals. The most frequently seen personal goals related to this article are:

1. Lose Weight
2. Get Out of Debt
3. Save for something
4. Get in Shape
5. Reduce Stress
6. Eat Well

When eating in you have a much better chance of losing weight because you can make choices on what you ingest rather than eating what others put in the food that is put in front of you at a restaurant. Eating in and grabbing convenience foods or take out (for those of you defining eating in as eating anything at home) are bad choices. Having an abundance of healthy food is a good choice and easy at home. For those who don’t have time to go shopping – you don’t have to. Many grocery stores across the nation will deliver groceries including fresh produce right to your door.

This weekend take some time to visit your local library. If you’re a regular there, strike up a conversation with the library to see what you’ve been walking right past. Ask, "What’s new that I might not know about?"

If you haven’t been to the library in a year or more start with a walkabout. Look for these things as if it’s a treasure hunt:

• The music collection
• The movie collection
• The audio book collection
• Regular events schedule such as books groups, reading or story time (kids love those!), or even community groups
• The on-hold procedure
• Movie night
• The computer resources (look for classes and the like too)
• Homework Help
• Small business assistance
• Reading clubs

Tell us here in the comments of anything your library does that’s cool ~ we love sharing with each other here at the Productivity Café!

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R & R (rest & rejuvenation) are the intentions behind the Friday at 5:00 entries. Often these are inexpensive and low key because you recharging your batteries can be more easily achieved without running around and doing, doing, doing. Your productivity is rooted in your energy being high. Your energy being high is rooted in recreation!