I don’t know about you, but I use my Outlook calendar to remind me of any number of things, not just work meetings and deadlines. For example, if I have a dentist appointment scheduled during normal working hours, I’ll put an appointment reminder on my calendar for 4:00 PM the day before. That way, right before I leave it will remind me of that appointment the next day. However, I also use it for tasks that I need to do but that I tend to put off. I’ll set it up to remind me every X amount of hours so that I’m constantly bothered to get it done. This cuts down on my procrastination time, but that doesn’t mean it still doesn’t take me a while to get it done. A great example of this is an upcoming airline reservation I have.

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Three little dots. That’s all that they are, just three little dots. However, I can’t figure them out. To give a little background on this conundrum, I received an email today and the sender kept using these dots in-between their sentences. For example:

“I’ll pick up that later…it shouldn’t be a problem. Let’s meet tomorrow to discuss it…3:00 works for me”.

Now traditionally, these dots can be used to indicate that more is to come, cliff-hanger style. For example, the conclusion of a mystery novel “And the killer is…..”. They are also used as a common convention in software such as Microsoft Office to indicate that further action is required. One example of this is the classic “Open…” option. The problem is that I don’t think the above sentence fits into either of these categories.

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Everybody has their pet peeves. For some people, it’s the sound of a pencil tapping repeatedly on the table. For others, it’s the constant sniffling of a nose. Whatever the peeve, it is unbelievably annoying to us. One of my biggest pet peeves happens to be unnecessarily rude email. I just cannot stand it. I’m not talking about somebody sending you an email outright insulting you, I’m talking about those one line emails with no greeting or salutation or any personal touches at all.

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People are always looking for better ways to deal with the massive amounts of email that circulate through our inboxes everyday. It can definitely feel sometimes that you are overwhelmed with email, and that you’re actually spending more time with your email than doing actual work. In the article below, Sharon Sarmiento discusses seven tips that she thinks will help to tame the savage beast that is your inbox. I don’t agree with them all, however read the article and judge for yourself. You can find my comments immediately following the article in the My Comments section.

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Ah, email: The ever tricky and immensely popular form of communication that has spread like wildfire through almost every industry around the globe. It is so popular, that many times the only way that you communicate with your clients is through email. This makes it even more important that you take extra care when writing work emails. With this in mind, here are some of the things I keep in mind when writing emails to my clients.

*Note: While the main topic of this article concerns writing emails to your clients, this can also apply to emails you write to your boss or other people who are influential where it concerns you.

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Ah summer, one of my favorite times of the year. The weather is usually nice (unless you live in one of those extreme places, but I digress) and everybody’s thoughts turn to vacation. However, before you take a vacation, you need to let your work know. Not only do you have to let them know, you have to let them know WELL in advance.

Does this sound simple? I think you would be surprised at how many people suddenly come into work one day and say “Oh yeah, I’m going on vacation next week, is that ok?”. Obviously, this is not enough heads up time for your job. What is enough time? If I can, I like to give at least a month notice. It may seem like a lot, but I’m of the opinion that you can never give too much notice, only too little.

One last note, make sure you send your notification in writing as opposed to just word of mouth, just in case you are questioned about it later. Also, a few weeks before your time off is to occur, make sure to drop your boss a reminder note about which days you will be gone.

I took a look at the Email category and realized I’ve been a little slack in updating it =p. To freshen it up a bit, I’ve written a new article on one problem we all face: Should you answer your email on vacation?

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.

A lot of you might already know this, but I’ve found that Gmail from Google is the best webmail service around, hands down. What is it? Well, for all intents and purposes it’s an email account available from Google that gives you pretty much unlimited storage. All of your connected emails are put into one slot so you can view all of the replies together. Also, they just recently introduced an integrated chat service (like IM), so you can chat with other Gmail members while you peruse your email.

There are lots of other features that I don’t even use, but you can check them out when you sign up. At the moment, I’m not sure if it’s still in its beta phase, so you might need an invite from a Gmail member in order to get an account. This should be easy, however, because each members gets six invites (last time I checked), and a ton of people have it now.

You can find more information at Google, or directly through the Gmail website.

How do you enjoy your time off? Do you go to the beach? Lounge around all day? Sleep in (if you don’t, you should start)? There are many ways to spend your time off, but are you actually enjoying it? This may seem like a no-brainer, however take a step back and really think about it. How many times have you been on vacation, having a great time, except for one thing: You just can’t get rid of that nagging voice in the back of your head worrying about something at work. While you may be enjoying your vacation 99% of the time, it’s that little 1% that stops you from both physically AND mentally taking the entire time off.

To this end, there are three things that you can do to fully maximize your time off.

• Leave effective points of contact - This is very important and will go a long way to keeping your mind at ease while at the beach. Before you leave, you need to make sure that if any questions come up about what you’re in charge of, there is somebody available to answer those questions. Even more importantly, you need to make sure they are familiar enough with what you’re doing to intelligently answer these questions. In other words, don’t leave the new guy as the main point of contact for the CEO of your client company.

• Clearly define tasks to be accomplished - Even with the best people covering for you while you’re gone, they’re not going to know what needs to be done if you don’t tell them. First, you need to lay out what needs to be accomplished for you while you’re gone. Once you have this in place, divide the tasks among the people covering for you. Then, brief each person individually. Make sure they fully understand what they need to do and how they need to do it before you go. This might take a bit of time, but it will save you tons of heartburn in the long run.

• Let your clients know you’re gone - This goes for people internal to your company as well. You have the right people, they know what they need to do, but not everybody knows you’re gone. That’s when you get a call on your cell phone at 6:00 AM. “Oh, you’re not in the office? I didn’t know, I’ll just make this quick….” (read: 2 hour question). Make sure your main clients know the exact time period you’ll be off and who’s covering for you. A great way to do this is to leave an auto-message with an Out of Office Assistant. Beyond that, try to let people know in person or with individual email messages, so they have a reminder that you won’t be there.

There might be other things you can do specific to your job, however the above three tips will go a long way in helping you make the most of your time off.