How to Perk Up Organizational Skills?

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:14:26 EST

Organizational skills - the one vice that so manyof us struggle with, and continually keeps us living at mediocrity.It's a skill we can all improve. In days of old there were no tools toassist you in organizing and running an efficient life. You werelimited to your good ol' memory and at best a paper calendar.

Then along came the ‘day-timer'. Beyond theoriginal expense of the binder you could organize your whole life inone tiny little book. But there was one problem with this approach. Canyou conceive the horror of a lost-damaged-stolen center of your life?

And then Microsoft developed ‘Outlook'. An excitingand fantastically automated digital calendar. Complete with a fullcalendar, pop-up appointment reminders, color coded categories, contactmanagement, and email! Quite the improvement over the day-timer, andworked magnificently unless you had to leave your computer at whichtime you'd have to print out your calendar and essentially you wereback to your day-timer.

Today though we have many new options and we strongly suggest using "The Cloud".

What is this magical tool?

Some call ‘The Cloud' the Internet, some Web 2.0, or those on thecutting edge - Web 3.0. The idea is to forget the ‘day timer', put yourdata up ‘somewhere' on the Internet, and be able to access it fromanywhere. Of course there is Google, and about 999 other options todaythat you can pick from. Outlook has even gone mobile. Here are a fewoptions you might want to consider.

Google offers a complete office solution with their http://www.google.com/calendar and http://docs.google.com for free. You can access your calendar and important documents fromanywhere with these tools. You can even share documents with clients orpartners.

Suppose you don't ‘trust Google' and you're afraid they will be"taken out" and your data will be gone forever. Do you think Microsofthas enough cash to hang around for a year or two? If you answer yes,then consider http://www.officelive.com and http://calendar.live.com.

You get 5GB of storage for free, but for the heavy-duty types thatwant to say, "Oh, well Microsoft doesn't offer enough storage for me,"you can add to your free storage at OfficeLive with http://skydrive.live.com for 25 Gigabytes of storage (free, from Microsoft). Some say, "Not goodenough, I need to communicate with my small business." OK. Thenconsider http://smallbusiness.officelive.com. Here you can build a website, then select a domain name, add emails as well as store and share office documents.

Ultimately, like we said there are an unlimited number of free andpaid solutions online to help keep you organized today, but the key is you have to want to be organized.If you keep coming up with excuses to not put out the effort to do itnow then, that is solely between you and your inner-self to work out.

Our clear point is it is easy to find excuses why something does notwork. The issue becomes do you (or not) have the courage to stop hidingbehind excuses and start using the tools that are available now, andfor free?

At the end of the day, you can pretend you didn't read this. And wewould not be doing our jobs if we didn't say the tools exist for you,at no cost, to perk up your organizational skills. There is no excusewhen you can have them always accessible from anywhere. Even being‘offline' is no excuse when "cloud day-timers" can live offline and‘re-sync' when re-connected to their computer. Heck, today with Apple'sMobileMe application you can sync your Google or Outlook calendar withyour iPhone wirelessly!!

How to Perk Up Organizational Skills article originally appeared at JennAndAlbert.com

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How to Perk Up Organizational Skills?