Considering it’s the weekend, I thought this article from LinkTipIdea would be a perfect read: The Perfect Nap. Apparently, the ideal nap lasts 20 minutes. Based on my experience, I would say that this is a pretty good estimate. The only thing worse than not being able to take a nap when you need it is to wake up from a nap feeling worse than you did before. Personally, if I get anywhere from 20-30 minutes I’m set. Any longer or shorter, and I usually feel more tired than I felt before I took the nap.

Today’s Tip of the Day is actually a link to another Tip site, Links, Tips, and Ideas.com.  This site is run by my buddy Josh, and it showcases interesting links and tips (such as free coffee at Starbucks, for all you caffeine junkies).  It’s a nice read when you need to take a 5 min. break at work.

Ok, now that everything seems to be in order for the meeting, we will explore tips on how to actually act while attending the meeting. Let’s get started.

• Seat Selection - Generally, it is not a huge deal which seat you take at your meeting.  There are a few guidelines however.  For example, you should try not to take a seat where you think the conductor of the meeting will be seating (such as next to the projector where they will be running their presentation from).  Also, if you are meeting with clients, try to sit with your peers.  This facilitates note taking as well as helps whoever is conducting the meeting to direct different parts of their presentation to specific members of the audience.  However, this is not a hard and fast rule and is highly dependent on your situation, so it’s your judgment call.

• Posture - This sounds like a no-brainer, but most people really don’t pay attention to it.  Just like your Mom told you when you were a kid, sit up straight and don’t slouch in your seat.  Don’t put your feet up on another seat, and for god’s sake don’t fall asleep or doze off (I’ve seen this on a number of occasions).  If you think you are going to have trouble staying awake during the meeting, bring a soda or coffee with you.  Drinks are generally acceptable fare at most meetings.  You want to showcase that you are actively involved in the meeting and paying attention to what is going on.

• Making Comments/Asking Questions - This is a highly situational tip.  There are some meetings where you are just there to take notes or be a fly on the wall.  In this case, talking is usually not encouraged.  However, most of the time if you have a question or a comment to make, there are some guidelines you should follow.  For example, make sure that you know what you’re talking about before you comment on something.  Don’t throw out some “buzzword” just to make yourself look good, as most people will see through this.  When asking questions, have the question formulated before you ask it, don’t ramble.  Rambling questions waste everyone’s time.  Also, don’t just talk for the sake of talking.  This will do you no good and just annoy people who want to get things accomplished at the meeting.  Finally, make sure you are “business appropriate” at the meeting.  Don’t think you can throw out an offensive joke just because a client does, it doesn’t work that way.  Even at an internal meeting, think before you speak.

• Paper Rustling/Noise - Try to limit the amount of extraneous noise you make.  For example, don’t rustle your papers loudly, especially near the speaker phone if you are using one.  This just distracts everybody at the meeting and makes you standout for all the wrong reasons.  Another big one is loud gum chewing (you probably shouldn’t be chewing gum anyway), as well as finger or pen/pencil tapping.  You don’t have to be totally silent, just try not to be noticeably obnoxious (read: squeaky chair).

• Take Notes - Remember that pad and pencil/pen you brought? Use it, it’s not for show.  Even if it’s just to put the meeting title and date on the pad, do it.  This shows active interest in the meeting and makes the audience think that you value the goals of the meeting.  Also, these notes could be valuable if the resulting meeting notes are not up to par.  Good meeting notes can help out tremendously when dealing with follow up meeting action items.
• Eating - As stated earlier, taking a drink to a meeting is usually acceptable.  However, you should try and stay away from taking food to a meeting.  This can be distracting to the rest of the meeting attendees and is not appropriate for most formal meetings.  Once again, this is situational, so use your best judgment.

Those are pretty much the big points that I think about when attending a meeting.  Look for a future article on how to facilitate a meeting.

If you missed Part I of this series, see it here: Surviving a Formal Meeting - Part I.

Only a few updates at the moment, I hope to get a few more articles out later today.

• Check out my new article on courtesy at the workplace under the Office Life section if you care at all about your co-workers (which, although sometimes debatable, is for the most part true).
• In the latest Tip of the Day for a good way to save you a lot of money and trouble with very little effort.

Courtesy might be one of the most important contributing factors to your day to day workplace happiness.  While many people don’t think about it in this respect, it really does play a huge role in how happy you are while you work, and consequently what your level of productivity is.  There are many little things that you can do to make sure that you are being respectful of your co-workers, but I’m just going to list a few that I think are some of the more common points of contention at the office. 

And the candidates are:

• Personal phone calls - This can potentially cause massive problems at your office.  While making personal calls at work is often necessary, that doesn’t mean that you should be on the phone constantly with your girlfriend/boyfriend, or the neighbor who lives across the street.  This kind of behavior is distracting to your peers as well as frowned upon by your supervisor, who will no doubt catch you in the act.  Also, make sure that when you’re on the phone, you are cognizant of who is around you.  Repeating a dirty joke loudly over the phone is inappropriate and might offend someone.  This is especially true in today’s workplace where we work in a very open environment (read: cubicles).  If not managed, these kinds of incidents can even cost you your job.  My office has separate booths where private phone calls can be made, I recommend that you take advantage of such amenities, or even go outside or an unpopulated area to make a longer or more private call.

• Office Roaming - We all need to take a five minute break every once and awhile to stretch our legs and clear our heads.  However, you should be careful about where you take this break. If you go over to your buddies cube and start talking about the NCAA bracket, make sure you are aware of who is around you.  Personal conversations can be very distracting to the person working next to you.  This is related to the Personal Phone Calls topic above, as it can cause the same kinds of problems.  If you need to roam, take a walk to the water cooler, or maybe grab a cup of coffee at the Starbucks across the street.  The key things to remember are to always be cognizant of who is around you and how much time you are taking on these breaks.  If you’re never around, that can mean nothing but bad things for you.

• Clean Work Area - This is true not only for people who share a work area (such as a double cube), but also for people who have a single work area (such as a desk) and share some common areas with their co-workers.  If you are putting together a bunch of binders, and have materials all over the place, make sure to clean up after you’re done.  In the case of a shared desk, try to keep your materials (such as papers, folders, etc) on your side and in an orderly fashion. This is good because it makes it easier for other people to work, more often than not converses and organizes group supplies (see missing pens), and also makes your office look better if your clients just happen to stop by.

The above are just some of the ways to show courtesy to your co-workers, and they really aren’t that hard to implement as part of your regular work routine.  In summary, some easy tips to remember are:  always be cognizant of who is around you, try to contain your water cooler runs to a reasonable amount, and if you can possibly help it organize your desk into something resembling “clean”.  Additionally, try to look for other things at your workplace that you can do to make it that much better for everyone else, I promise they will all appreciate it.

 

Meetings are something that most of us engage in everyday at the workplace.  They could range from an informal chat at a cubicle to a scheduled event in a conference room.  This series of articles will provide tips more geared toward the latter type of meeting, what I call the “Formal” meeting.  A few examples of this type of meeting could be a weekly status team meeting, or possibly a review meeting with your clients.  You’ve most likely experienced this type of meeting before, but the question is:  How did you handle it? 

Let’s get down to the tips.

Here is a quick checklist to run through before you enter your meeting:

• Did you print out all of the meeting materials?  This is important, as you can’t rely on the meeting organizer to always print out copies or even have enough copies of the materials. 

• Did you skim the meeting materials?  This goes hand in hand with the first bullet, before a meeting you should take a look at the materials to see what exactly is going to be discussed. This way you can do any necessary research before the meeting on possible questions you want to ask, as well as identify any possible problems that you can head off before the meeting.  If you don’t have time to take a look at all the materials, at least look at the agenda so you have at least a skeleton of an idea of what is going to be discussed.

• Do you have all the necessary contact information?  This is crucial, as a lot of meetings now are “teleconferences” (telecon’s is a common term for them) where you either dial into a meeting system to join or start a meeting (an example would be Meeting Place).  Making sure this information is on hand before time will ensure that the meeting starts on time.  In my experience it is extremely annoying to be stuck waiting for a meeting to start, listening to elevator music.

• Do you have a speaker phone reserved?  This really applies to teleconferences, but if you are holding one or joining one, you should make sure that you have one ready and reserved for you meeting.  At my office, these things fly off the shelf like they were made of gold, so I always reserve well ahead of time.

• Do you have a room reserved?  This may sound, but you would be surprised how many times you schedule a teleconference, a couple of people get together to dial in, and they discover they have no room.  It’s very distracting to hold a teleconference around your co-workers, so I wouldn’t suggest holding it at your cube.  Get a small room if need be, it’s more private and less prone to background noise getting in the way.

• Do you have a pad of paper and a pen?  This is important, as you never know what is going to come out at a meeting.  You should ALWAYS bring something to write on and something to write with to your meetings.  Otherwise, that tidbit of important information you heard will end up going in one ear and out of the other.

• Do you know where the meeting is?  This is especially true if you are a new hire at your company and may not be familiar with the layout of your office yet.  If the meeting is being held in a conference room that you don’t know the location of, ask beforehand where it is.  This will save you the embarrassment of not only walking into the meeting late, but in the middle of the presentation.

Now that you are ready, it’s time to enter the meeting. Check back for Part II of this series, where I will discuss the finer points of actually attending the meeting.

Update: Continue on to Part II of this series here: Surviving a Formal Meeting - Part II.

What is that you say?  You already know how to create a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet?  Of course you do.  However, there is a big difference between “knowing how to create the spreadsheet that shows how much you spend on snickers each month” and creating a spreadsheet for work.  While the basic mechanics are the same, there are a few guidelines to follow that will make your Excel spreadsheets sharper and more professional looking to your audience.

Here’s a question I pose to you: What do you name your spreadsheet tabs in your workbook?  If your answer is either “?” or “I don’t name them”, then the following advice applies to you:  You should always name your spreadsheet tabs.  Even if they are going to be hidden, they should get a name.  Here are some suggestions on how to name your spreadsheets:

• Use descriptive names.  Don’t use numbers, letters, etc. A bad example would be “A”, “1″, “A2″.  Instead, make it meaningful to what the spreadsheet contains.  If your spreadsheet is an executive summary, label it “Executive Summary”.  One thing to remember is that while you want to make the names descriptive, you shouldn’t make them too elaborate.  Don’t go overboard, Excel has a limit on the number of characters you can use in a name, and this should cause no problem if you have an optimized (for both descriptiveness and length) name picked out.  This also makes it easier to reference cells in the sheet from another sheet, such as using “‘Executive Summary’!C2″.

• If you have to use abbreviations, make sure that they are common in general or common to your audience.  This is not the time to come up with your own unique abbreviation system.  A good way to test this is to bounce the names off of a co-worker who is not as familiar with your work and see if they can figure out what the abbreviations mean.

• Use proper grammar.  At least capitalize the first letter of the first word in the name.  Sometimes I will capitalize the first letter of each word, it really depends on what you’re working on and what your audience likes.

Another way to trim your presentation is to delete any tabs that are empty.  This is a very easy thing to do, but one that I’ve found most people don’t pay attention to.  You want all the focus to be on the tabs with content, you don’t want your audience having to search through empty tabs to get the spreadsheets that are relevant. 

While we’re on the subject of tab management, make sure that your tabs are in a logical order for the information you are presenting.  Don’t put a summary tab in the middle of all of the spreadsheets, nobody will find it and you will just get flooded with emails asking why it isn’t there.

Now that the spreadsheet tabs are straightened out, we can take a look at a few tips for formatting the contents of your spreadsheets.  Here are some useful tips to follow that really won’t take any more time to implement than your current process:

• Make sure that you use the same font type and size for each component of your spreadsheet.  This doesn’t mean that your headers have to be the same size as your data, but make sure that the font is consistent in both your headers and your data separately. Other formatting also applies here, make sure that it is generally consistent.  Obviously if you want to highlight some data with a different format that is fine, just don’t make a mess of all of your content.

• In line with above suggestion, across spreadsheets in a workbook, try to keep the formatting generally the same.  For example, if you use a certain font size, font style, and fill color for header information, try to use that for all header information you create in the workbook.  If you have three spreadsheets that are related because they show the results of a test against three different devices, try to make the formatting on these sheets the same.  A trick I use is to create the initial spreadsheet, and then just copy that sheet and change the relevant parts when you want to make the next one.

• Don’t go crazy with colors and font styles.  Accents are fine, but if you are using more than five colors in a spreadsheet, you are going overboard.

Remember, these are general suggestions, you should tailor them to fit the project you are working on.  However, I believe that if you implement these in your next project, not only will it cut down on the number of drafts that you have to create, but the overall work product created will be at a higher level of quality.  

If you have ever used Microsoft Word, there is a 99% chance that you have had to use the Bullets and Numbering function. I have had to put together numerous reports, etc. that use many numbered and bulleted lists, and it has been my experience that they can be pretty tricky to get just right.  Knowing this, I thought it might be useful if I shared some helpful tips that I have found along the way.

Probably one of the biggest problems people have using Bullets and Numbering is getting the indenting right.  This can be one of the most frustrating things to format when your working on a document.  Scenario: You have created a list; however you want to indent a bullet point in the middle of the list.  How do you do this?  There are a number of ways to indent, the ones that I use are the following:

• Use the Tab Key to indent the selected line.  This should indent the selected line and change the bullet point to whatever style is set for the secondary line of bullet points (you can customize this, but usually I leave this on the default setting).
• You can right click on the bullet point you want to indent and select Increase Indent.  This should achieve the same result as using the Tab key.

To decrease the indent on a line, you can either use the Backspace key or right click on the bullet point of the line you want to decrease the indent on and select Decrease Indent.  

Another problem occurs as you’re making your list, and you want to be able to make indented sub-lists (indented bullet points) but then create a point on the level of your main list.  This is the scenario: You start making your list, then you get to a point that you want to make a sub-list.  However, once you indent the point, the next point is indented as well.  One way to handle this is to just decrease that indent of the desired point as described above.  The way I do it is to keep a point at the end of the list that I call “Filler”.  That way, I can just press enter on that point and create new point on the level that I want.  It saves a little bit of time, but it adds up if you are doing a lot of lists.

This little tip you probably know already, but if you want to indent your entire list without having any of the format change, all you have to do is put your cursor on the first line in the list and hit Tab.  This time Backspace will not help you out to decrease the indent of your list, so have your Undo button ready to fly (which it does more often than not for me) as it will actually erase your point.

These are just some basic tips for using the Bullets and Numbering functionality in Microsoft Word, look for future articles on Advanced Bullets and Numbering.

With email swiftly becoming the main means of communication between many of today’s professionals, knowing how to craft a professional email has become essential.  Not only will it make you look good to your prospective clients or peers, but it will also make the contents of your message clearer to your intended audience.

The following is a list of three common professional email do’s and don’ts:

DO

• Always spell-check your email before it goes out.  If you use Outlook, you can set it so that the spell-check always runs before an email is sent.  There’s nothing that irritates me more than when I get an email from a colleague and “the” is misspelled.

• Always include your contact information in your signature when dealing with clients.  This is essential as some clients prefer to talk on the phone or meet face to face than communicate through email.  A good way to remember this is to add it to your signature.

• Always check to make sure that you’ve attached any files you want to send with the email BEFORE you send it out.  Those “Oh, here’s the attachment because I forgot to send it the first seven times” emails are extremely annoying.

DON’T

• Never use internet shorthand or slang in a formal email.  For example, always spell out “You” instead of using “U”.  This may sound like common sense, but you would be surprised how many people let this slip, especially when they are switching between writing personal and professional email.

• Never copy additional clients or peers on the email unless you are absolutely sure that it is ok to do so.  On the client side, you never know what kind of internal politics are going on, so always check with your supervisor first.  Also, internally, sometimes an email should only go to certain people on your team, so once again check with your supervisor before sending it out.

• Never send a lot of personal correspondence through your work email.  An occasional email is fine, but many times companies screen their employees email, and they don’t like to see a lot of personal email taking up much of your time.  They also might object to content sent to you by your friends.

Overall, when you’re writing an email at work, try to pretend that instead of writing you are presenting the contents to your boss.  If your email passes that filter, then it should be fine to send.  Otherwise, it’s probably a good idea to create another draft.