If you have ever bought an e-ticket for a flight, then you have probably at least heard of Cheap Tickets. Basically, they aggregate available flights from a number of different airlines based on the search criteria you specify, and you can sort the results by price, etc. It’s a really useful service as you don’t have to go to each individual airlines website to search for flights, and they usually can get you a deal on a flight (although you might have a five hour layover). Also, you can usually pick the seat you want on your flight right when you make your reservation. Sounds perfect, right?

Well, just as a warning, when you pick your seat through Cheap Tickets, it’s not always guaranteed. Pick up your jaw, I was just as surprised when I found out. What happened was I called the airline I booked on regarding a different question, and just happened to ask about my flight details. Lo and behold, my seat was NOT what I had picked online. I changed it to what I wanted then called Cheap Tickets. Surprisingly, the customer service rep told me that the only way to actually guarantee your seat selection was to book it through the airline. I was shocked! Apparently, they pass on your seat SUGGESTION to the airline.

The lesson here is that if you book your tickets through a site like this (there are tons online), double check with the airline you booked on to make sure you get the seat you want. Otherwise, you could end up in the dreaded middle seat between the 400 pound guy and his twin, the 401 pound guy.

As you climb higher and higher on that precarious corporate ladder, you’ll eventually get to the point where you are depending on other people to get work done for a deadline you are responsible for. An example of this would be if you are leading a team doing software design, and you are responsible of having all of the designs done by a certain date. You are responsible for the end result (all of the designs done), but you need your team to actually write the designs for this to happen. What happens if your team doesn’t make the deadline? Who gets the blame? This is a simple answer: You.

With this idea firmly in mind, how do you prevent missing a deadline? This is another simple answer, and yet many people don’t follow it: Be proactive. What does this mean? Well, I find that a good amount of the time a deadline is missed because the team lead does not check to see if their team is on track until the last minute. Finding out that three designs aren’t going to be done the day before the deadline is due is not going to do you any good, as it is too late to do anything about it. However, if in this same situation you were to check a week or two before the deadline was due, the outcome might be different. This is being proactive. For our purposes, we can define it as taking action with enough time before your deadline is due to correct any problems.

The following are three things that you can do to be proactive on your projects as a team lead:

• Have regular meetings - Not just every once and awhile on the fly, but scheduled meetings. This means that your team knows that you have a meeting at a certain time on a certain day every week. For instance, you could have a 10:00 AM meeting every Monday to kick off the week and make sure everybody knows what they should be working on. Also, you could have a meeting at 3:00 PM on Friday to wrap up the week. You don’t have to go overboard and have a meeting everyday (unless you’re in really deep trouble), but I’ve found once or twice a week to be effective. Make sure that you have a structure to the meeting as well, and it’s not just everybody standing around randomly talking. You need to conduct it and have a clear agenda when you go in for what you want to get out of it.

• Keep a tracking spreadsheet - This is another important organization tool: The tracking spreadsheet. Yes, it is a pain to maintain. However, it will save you from a lot of problems in the future. With this spreadsheet, you can see your team’s progress at a glance. This makes it easy to go into a meeting with them and ask questions about who is slipping or who is going to be ahead of schedule and why. This can save your deadlines by allowing people who are ahead of schedule to help pick up the slack of those who are falling behind. Also, this is good for meetings with your boss so that you can give them an easy to understand overview of how your team is progressing. The key point to remember here is to make sure your tracking spreadsheet is up to date. It does you no good if you have one, and yet nobody has updated it for a week. If your team is responsible for updating, remind them to update at the end of everyday (or whatever works for you, I just find the end of the day to be effective). If you are responsible for updating it, make sure you set aside a certain amount of time to do it everyday.

• Check in individually - Even if you have regular meetings, you should have informal progress checks with each of your team members. This doesn’t mean that you have a schedule a specific time for this, this can be as simple as stopping by their cube and asking them how they are doing. This way you don’t have to find out about a problem that happened on Tuesday at your regular Friday meeting. By performing these progress checks, you relay a message to your team that you are right there with them in the trenches, and that you are there to help if they have any questions. Also, as stated above, this allows you to take action immediately on a problem instead of having someone waste their time working on it for days at a time. Linking to the point above, if you find a change in someone’s progress as you talk to them, update the tracking spreadsheet immediately after you get back to your desk. This way you can see how that change is going to impact the rest of the team and your final deadline.

These are just three ways I’ve found that help me to be Proactive. There are probably lots of other ways specific to your work situation that can also help you out. A good way to think about your deadline situation is this: Whoever is holding you responsible for your deadline probably looks at your project as something of a black box. They don’t want to know the fine details, they just know what they want to see come out of it. With this in mind, you want to deal with any problems that arise inside that box, rather than outside of it, so that when your finished product comes out the end result is what this person is looking for.

We’ve all heard countless times from our parents that we need to get enough sleep each night. However, how often do we actually listen? This came to mind because recently I haven’t been able to get my usual amount of sleep (about six to seven hours per night) for a variety of reasons, and I’ve seen a noticeable decrease in my effectiveness at work and home. I found it harder to concentrate, harder to get the motivation to work out, and other differences that I wasn’t expecting.

I used to be able to run on just a few hours of sleep a night, I guess that isn’t the case anymore. I’m not saying you need to get eight hours every night, I suggest finding the number that allows you to be at peak effectiveness. For me, this is about six hours. Interestingly enough, if I get more than this, I also find myself being less effective, so I guess it operates like a bell curve.

Experiment with how much sleep you need, but remember this: You’re not in college anymore, you may actually need to sleep each night =p.

Raise your hand if you use your Out Of Office assistant when you go on vacation (I hope your hand is raised). Now, keep it raised if you also check your email while you’re on vacation (probably a good majority of you still have your hand raised). Here’s the big question: Keep your hand raised if you respond to email while on vacation. Hand still raised? Half raised? This is a dilemma that many people face when on vacation: Should you respond to your email? There’s no simple answer for this, but there are many things to consider when making this decision.

To start, sometimes you don’t have a choice. If it’s something urgent, and you don’t see anybody else taking the lead on it, you may have to send out an email. Hopefully, you’ve left a contact person who is competent enough to take care of this for you. However, if a decision needs to be made and you’re the only one to do it, even the most competent person in the world won’t be able to make it for you. On the flip side, if you don’t have access to your email, then obviously you won’t be responding to anything.

Most of the time, you won’t run into either of the above situations. You should have a choice whether to answer it or not. In my opinion, if you take the time to leave a good person as your contact person, you shouldn’t have to answer it. This is my preferred path when on vacation for the following main reason: Everybody knows you’re out of the office (hopefully you’ve communicated this to all your clients as well), so they should not be expecting back an answer from you. By answering, you open yourself up to the possibility of having to work for the rest of your vacation as people know you are checking your email. Obviously, this defeats the purpose of your vacation.

The most important piece of advice I can give here is to leave someone competent in your place. This will solve the problem 95% of the time. For that last 5%, you are probably going to have to do something about the situation. However, one way to mitigate the impact of your vacation is to funnel your answers through your contact people. Call them up and explain what needs to be done. If they can handle it, then all you might have to do is monitor the situation instead of having to get directly involved. Another way to lessen the impact could be to suck it up and solve the problem immediately. Call whoever needs to be called, spend all the time to solve the problem in one shot instead of stringing it along. This way, maybe only one day is devoted to work instead of everyday.

Overall, try to enjoy your vacations as much as possible. If you have to put any work in, try to do it in such a way that the amount of time you need to spend working is minimized. Also, the better qualified your contact person is, the less likely it is that you will have to step in and solve a problem.

When you create a document, do you include a cover page? Formal header and footer? Appendices? This sounds pretty standard, right? However, do you actually need to include all of these things in EVERY document? Probably not.

I’m not advocating lowering the standards of your work products. The point I’m trying to make is that before you create a document, you should determine what you need to include based on what you are trying to accomplish. Why does it matter? What harm could a few extra pages do? Here are some of the possible consequences:

• Miss your deadline - If you get caught up too much in extra sections when you don’t need to, it is easy to miss your deadline. Before you know it, your work is due and all you have is a table of contents and a cover page.

• Your point is missed - By including unnecessary sections in your document, you may make your main point unclear to your audience. This basically defeats the purpose of writing the document in the first place.

• Forget important content - This is another pitfall; You might forget important content that you didn’t have time to focus on because of these unnecessary additions. You need to make sure all of your base content is there and then worry about the extras.

Now that we’ve established the consequences, how do you go about avoiding them? This is a tough question as the answer is very dependent on your situation. However, here are some questions to ask yourself when creating your document:

• Who is your audience? - This can be the deal breaker. Are you writing for a co-worker or for a client? In general, you want to keep it very formal when writing for a client. If it’s a co-worker, you might not have to get so formal. This isn’t always the case, but it’s definitely something to consider.

• Is it really necessary? - This is a question you should ask yourself before you include a section (such as an appendix). A good example of this would be a table of contents. If you’re writing a two page document, do you really need a table of contents? Most likely not. If you can’t answer a definitive “Yes” to this question, you’re probably better off leaving this section out.

• Does it make your point clearer? - Another big concern of yours should be to make sure that everything that you add to your document makes your point clearer. Using the table of contents example above, if you add it, will it make your document easier to navigate? If you add an appendix, does it make your information easier to understand? These are the questions you should be asking.

Remember this: How much you should have in your documents is highly situational. Sometimes you may need to put in what you think are unnecessary sections just because that’s how your company does it (if you disagree, you should suggest a change). However, when you have a choice, try to keep the above tips in mind.

I’ve been driving around the block for 20 minutes, trying to find a parking spot. I’m flying solo on this one as my co-pilot (read: fiancé) had abandoned ship to get a table at the restaurant we were going to. Losing hope, I resign myself to paying $1,000 to park in a garage (ok, maybe it wasn’t $1,000, but it wasn’t 50 cents either). Suddenly, hot cakes! A spot opens up! Swerving across three lanes of traffic, I slide my 95′ Corolla (yes, a vintage year) into the spot like my wheels moved sideways. Reveling in my victory, I saunter out of the car.

Casually, another car slides up on my six (I’m pretty sure that’s the right), and parks in the No Parking zone in front of the parked cars. The car’s emergency blinkers go on, and this guy rolls out and starts to go about his business. In total, he probably spent about 1 minute of effort to my 20. My victory deflated, I trudge off.

This is a classic case of what I’ve dubbed the Invisible Car Syndrome. People who suffer from this terrible disease think that just because they put their emergency blinkers on, their car becomes invisible and the normal laws of traffic don’t apply to them. Fire hydrant? No problem. Handicapped space? No problem. No parking? Please, with the invisible car, anything is possible! These are just a few symptoms of this disease.

How does this affect those not afflicted? For one thing, you can lose an entire traffic lane. The ICS sufferers LOVE to stop their car in the middle of a lane, put on the blinkers, and then proceed to sit there. This mostly occurs during rush hour, or when you’re actually trying to get somewhere on time. Honking, name calling, the infamous “bird”, none of this will sway them to move.

Another example: Stopping in a turn lane. This is great because, hell, you didn’t want to turn their anyway, you probably should have just taken another route. Who are we to complain when they might actually have to LOWER themselves to the common man’s level to find a parking space. Once again, this seems to happen mostly when you can’t afford it to.

Does this sound familiar to you? If you’re starting to get angry, I have third example that will put you over the edge into rage: Stopping in a one way, one lane street. I can’t contain it anymore, WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH THAT? They obviously realize that no one can get by them, and yet they don’t seem to care. Is it against the law to bulldoze a car if you rent the bulldozer? This is how angry I get when this happens.

If you haven’t noticed, the tone of this article has gotten progressively angrier as I’ve been writing. This is because I’m getting angry just thinking about these things. Now imagine when they happen. Indescribable. If you have this disease, you better lose it quick, otherwise a rented bulldozer might just show up one day with a driver foaming at the mouth, and I can’t guarantee if there’s going to be anything left of your Mini-Cooper when I’m done with it.

Are you considering quitting your job? Would you know if you are even ready to quit? This is a very important decision to make, and should not be taken lightly. However, you would be surprised how many people rush into this decision and then almost immediately regret it afterwards.

With this in mind, I’ve come up with the following three questions that you should ask yourself BEFORE you quit your job.

• Do you DREAD going to work every day? - Let’s clarify this: There is a big difference between “Dread” and “Not feeling like it”. The second option is what most of us feel on an occasional basis. Maybe we’re tired, hung-over, or what have you. However, dreading going to work is a whole new ball game. Every day, you hate going to work. It might even make you feel a little bit sick to your stomach. Sometimes, you call off sick because you just can’t stand going to work that day. This is dread. If you’re feeling like this, then that’s a good sign you might want to get a new job.

• Does your attention constantly wander at work? - Most people cruise the internet every once and awhile at work, just to take a small break from whatever they’re working on. However, in this case, you are constantly doing something, anything, besides working. You know you have deadlines, but you just don’t care (more on this in the next question). Excessively long lunch breaks, wandering around the office constantly, cruising the internet all the time, these are all symptoms that you might not be satisfied with your current job.

• Do you care about what you produce? - This is another big one. If your work comes out great, good for you. If not, no big loss. That’s how this kind of attitude works. Basically, if you don’t care about the outcome of your assignments, then you probably need a new job OR a new role on your current job (big “OR” here). The “OR” here is important because this might just signal that you need a new project or task to work on. Before you take the drastic step of quitting, you should investigate whether or not there is something else you could be doing in your current job that would be more satisfying.

The thing to keep in mind here is that you don’t necessarily have to answer “Yes” to all three of these questions to show that you’re ready to quit your job. Maybe only one of these apply, maybe only two. Conversely, just because you answer “Yes” to one or all three of these questions, it also doesn’t mean that you have to quit your job. Keep in mind that only you can end up making this decision, these questions are meant to act as more of a guide to help you make it rather than making it for you.

Determining how to break your document into sections can be a very tough task. On the one hand, you don’t want to create too many small sections. At the same time, you don’t want to have one big run-on section. This brings us to the pivotal question: Where do you draw the line?

The following is a list of three ways that you can tell if you have too many or too few sections:

• You have a Section 1.2.3.4.5.6 - We’ve all seen documents with way too many sections in it. This makes the document very hard to read as you have to keep skipping around all the time to gather all of the information you need. In general, I never go past the fourth level when breaking down my documents (ex. Section 1.1.2.3), and I don’t even use the fourth level very often. As a rule of thumb, you will usually end up having more sections in longer documents than in shorter ones.

• You have one Section - This is the opposite of the first point. Instead of having too many sections, you have too few. Unless your document is only a few pages long, you most likely will need to break it down into more than one big section. Just like with a run-on sentence, a run-on section will quickly lose the reader in a sea of information. This doesn’t mean you have to go hog-wild (as demonstrated in the first point), but for a medium sized document you probably want to go to the second level (ex. Section 1.1).

• You get lost reading it - Huge point here. After you are finished with what you think is a solid draft of your document, you should read it the entire way through (better yet, have someone unfamiliar with the document do it). This way, you can make sure that it is both informative and easy to read. If you are having trouble reading it, think of the problems the audience will have. If you find yourself in this situation, take another look at how you’ve broken down the information in your document. You may be able to fix it by simply restructuring the number/content of some of the sections.

It’s not always easy to get a good section layout for a document. However, as long as you put some time into planning the layout, you’ll end up with a quality product.

Ladies, I’m not sure if this happens to you, but I’ve definitely seen and heard it in the Men’s Room. This event I’m referencing is talking on your cell phone in the bathroom. I can’t even begin to imagine how someone would think that this is ok. The amazing part is that I’ve heard people have entire conversations with their boss or client WHILE IN THE BATHROOM! How rude is that, not to mention a tad gross. I think you can see where this tip is going: If you get a phone call in the bathroom, for the love of god, WAIT until you get outside of the bathroom to answer. If they have to wait a minute for you to call them back, I’m sure the world won’t end.

It seems like everyone and their brother has a BlackBerry today. I think this might be one of the most annoying inventions in the last 50 years. Why? Simply this: Every time that I’m at a meeting with someone who has one, they inevitably start checking their email with it. This is extremely rude, and I have no idea how people see this to be acceptable. Hence this tip: When at a meeting, treat your BlackBerry just like it was your cell phone. You wouldn’t start talking on your cell phone in the middle of a meeting would you? By the same token, don’t check your email either, it’s just as rude and unacceptable.