Out of all the things that could happen when you’re walking home from work, what do you think is the LEAST likely out of this list:

1. Dog attack
2. Splashed by a car
3. Bird crapping on your head

Oh wait, is one of those choices HIGHLIGHTED? Yes, that’s right, highlighted. Why? Because it is so improbable that it is the obvious choice. Do you see where I’m going with this? Let me spell it out for those who missed it:

Walking home from work today, a bird crapped on my head

I’ll set the scene: I’m walking home from work, enjoying the nice day outside. It’s about a 15 minute walk from my work to my apartment, so it’s not too bad. I’d also like to point out that I usually snag a ride from my fiancé to and from work (feel free to boo me at this point, but it’s on her way =) ).

Anyways, I’m strolling along like a sucker, about five minutes into my walk, when IT happens. Now, it’s important to realize that when you get crapped on by a bird, you may not realize it immediately. It can almost feel like a drop of water hit you. The last thing you think just happen is that you got crapped on. What are the chances I ask you?

Back to the story, I get this feeling and the first thing I do is reach my hand up and see what’s going on. To my horror, it comes back wet and slimy. Oh yes, wet and slimy. Stunned, I keep walking. It slowly dawns on me what actually happened. If this has never happened to you, it’s pretty hard to describe how disgusting it feels. You’ll just have to take my word for it. Here’s the worst part: I work right outside of Washington DC, in a busy little town called Arlington. What does this mean? It means there were more than enough people to witness this happen. Even better, I still had a good 10 minute walk ahead of me.

When something like this happens, it feels like everybody is looking at you, even if they aren’t. Old ladies, babies, cab drivers, it felt like everybody knew of my misfortune. Waiting at a crosswalk became unbearable. I’m pretty sure that I’ve never made it home faster than I did today. Needless to say, I washed myself as quickly as possible.

Do you want to know what the worst part is (nope, haven’t gotten to it yet)? The worst part is that this is not the first time I’ve had this happen to me. When I was about 12, I was helping my dad work a sidewalk sale at our store and as I’m ringing up a satisfied customer, the same thing happened. Here’s my theory: I think that the birds decided to lay low for a while, just to throw me off my guard. Then, when I least expect it, they strike with the quickness. What’s the solution? Obviously, I’m not going to divulge it on the Internet, as the sly bastards have spies everywhere. However, I will give you one hint: It involves a hat.

It’s that time of year again, when all of those eager, wide-eyed college students storm offices across the globe. I’ve dubbed it the “Intern Rush”. Being new to an office setting, they really don’t know what to expect coming in. With this in mind, try to treat them as a regular new employee.

What does this mean? For one, they shouldn’t have to list on their resume that they fetched your coffee all summer. They’ve come to learn, try to teach them something. If all they do is meaningless tasks, they won’t get anything out of it and next year you could be facing a drought of interns. Also, try to be nice to them. It’s ok to rib them a bit, like you would do with any of your other co-workers, but be mindful of how far you go. They are probably pretty nervous, and it’s easy for someone in that state to take something said in jest the wrong way.

To sum up: Help them to get something out of their internship, and you will get a lot of value out of them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Straight from Saturday afternoon, here’s a brand new article on creating an executive summary. Harder than you might think, but one of the key skills in most jobs.

You’ve been working on a project for the last few months, and your boss wants an Executive Summary from you as to what you’ve been up to. Does this sound easy? How hard can it really be to summarize your work? Believe it or not, this can be one of the hardest tasks to take on.

An Executive Summary is basically a high level description of a subject (such as the results of a test you ran) that summarizes this subject without providing all of the little details. It’s usually created for someone such as your manager or a client, or someone who does not need to know the details, just the main points.

On the surface, it’s not hard to create an Executive Summary. You put some bullet points in, splash in some text, and bam, you have a summary. What IS hard is accomplishing the following two goals:

• Putting enough detail in so that your audience comes away with a good understanding of what you did.
• Not putting so much detail in that your audience feels lost in a sea of information.

With this in mind, here are the key components to writing an effective Executive Summary:

1. Create an opening statement - This could be a short paragraph on what this summary is about. It can also include any notes that you want the reader to keep in mind as they read the summary. One example of this would be putting a note in saying that these are the results up to a certain date, and that further testing will be conducted on another date.

2. Create high level categories - The next step in creating a summary is organizing all of your information into high level categories. For example, if you are creating a summary based on the results of your testing of five software modules, each software module could be a category. These should be easy for the audience to pick up on right away. In other words, they should make logical sense without having to be intimately familiar with the subject matter. These categories will be your main bullet points.

3. Put your details into the main categories - Now that you have your main categories, place all of your detailed information into one of these categories. Using the above example, this could be how many steps passed and failed for each test and additional comments. Don’t worry about compacting the data now, you’ll be doing that in the next step.

4. Condense the details - Under each category, condense your detailed information into a more compact form. An example of this would be combining multiple comments on one step into a sub-bulleted list under one main bullet. You’ll also want to abstract this information into high level details. For example, say you have five comments, each one saying how a certain step was tested and passed. Instead of five comments, you could combine this to say “The following steps passed: “. The key here is to think about what your audience cares about and will understand. Small details on how each step was exactly tested is not necessary, they probably only care about what passed and what failed.

5. Summarize your categories at a very high level - Does it sound like you’ve already done this in the previous steps? Well you have, except you want to go even one step higher. Take all of your results from the high level categories and summarize this into a paragraph or even a table. For example, you could create a table with which of the software modules passed all of their test cases, and which failed. You want to make it so that somebody could read this summary and take something away from it without having to even go into the details under your high level categories.

Probably the most important thing to keep in mind is what your audience is looking for, and who they are. Who will be reading it? Do they know anything at all about your project? What are you hoping to get them to come away with after reading it? These are all questions that will help you determine the level of detail you need to go into and what format your summary should take.