Speakers love to speak. They don't often like to run the office. So if the productivity portion of speaking has eluded you, learn how technology can make your office work easier and more efficient.

Follow up for Dummies

By Vickie Sullivan

One of my least favorite things to do is making to-do lists. They get lost on my desk, and I usually don't get around to transferring all the missed items to a new piece of paper, which, you guessed it, gets lost on my desk again the next day. Thanks to technology, I don't have to keep track of so many little (but important) things. It's all done for me with that handy tool called alarms in most contact management software.

Alarms are those little boxes that pop up to remind you to do something. The software assembles all these alarms in a list below my calendar; I can also see pending actions by contact. While irritating, they're great for visual people like me, who get so engrossed with a project that they need a "jolt" as a reminder. Alarms demand immediate attention, even if it's hitting the snooze button.

Best thing about alarms: they are so easy! Whenever I record an action, one click sets up a follow-up alarm. Whenever I make a commitment, or a request from someone else, I immediately set up an alarm to remind me to take action. Most of the time, it takes two seconds - tops!

From a trial and error perspective, below are a few of the tricks I learned in using this valuable tool from my Goldmine software:

• Make checking the calendar part of your "first thing in the morning" routine. I delete the alarms for those issues that have been taken care of. I change the alarm time for those tasks I want to put off until later that day. Week at a glance lets me know if I have a slow day that I can move some of the alarms to.
• If the action can be scheduled for any time that day, leave the time blank but put a time in the alarm part. This will show up in the to-do list below the calendar but not clutter up your calendar.
• Set most of the alarms for the morning, so you can decide that day if you want to wait until later to do some of the tasks.
• Every time someone responds to me, I delete the reminder alarm immediately.
• If I leave another message or email to follow up on a request, I'll edit the alarm by changing the date for the next reminder.
• If an alarm goes off when I'm in the middle of something, I'll hit snooze.
• At the end of the day, any alarms not dealt with will remain under week at a glance, so I don't have to transfer them for the next day.

Using alarms allows me to keep track of hot prospects, high priority projects and long term goals, all without hunting for that piece of paper on my desk. Now only if my office could be more organized…

About the Author

Since 1987, Vickie Sullivan of Sullivan Speaker Services has generated six-figure revenue streams for professional speakers, experts and industry leaders. She has helped her clients get high-fee speaking engagements that extend their brand and increase sales and market share in a wide variety of markets and industries. Vickie speaks internationally on speaker selection trends and strategies and is the author of Springboard Marketing™, Speak to Sell™ and Speaking in the Strike Zone™. Her work has been featured in the Arizona Republic and Home Office Computing and her articles have been published in national publications ranging from Professional Speaker Magazine to Lawyers Weekly. Sign up for her free newsletter at www.sullivanspeaker.com

©2001, Vickie Sullivan.