Category: Reviews

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Five Productivity Tips for Your Work Day

Nancy McCord
Nancy McCord – my tips for productivity improvement.

I am an avid reader and have am currently working my way through this book “Level Up Your Day – How to Maximize the 6 Essential Areas of Your Routine” by S.J. Scott and Rebecca Livermore. I have changed my entire work and exercise schedule and am now feeling much more productive, on task, and energized throughout the day.

Here are the simple things that I have done to improve my own productivity:

1. I no longer workout in the morning. This hour was stealing time from my work day and setting my seriously back in my schedule. After breakfast I now get ready and get right to work. I can blaze through my schedule with laser beam focus. I moved my workout to 7:00 pm on my own time. I found my workout was taking a spot when I was at peak energy and focus throwing off my rhythm for the day.

2. I screen nearly all of my calls when I am working on a intense project. Even if my phone rings, I force myself to stay on task to finish as I found the interruptions of calls set my attention back; particularly when I had to really use brain power to analyze a trend as part of a report.

3. I started using Calendly for my conference call scheduling. I will typically have 20 or more calls a month and the back and forth via email along with client’s missing calls was really squelching my productivity. Now I let my clients choose when they want to chat based on their schedule. I even opened my schedule up to some evening calls in order to be more responsive. Calendly does the work of reminding the client and even shows the appointments in their own time zone. The app will even remind them of the upcoming calls on the schedule I choose and automatically adds the appointments to my Google Calendar which syncs to Outlook and my devices.

4. I now review my calendar at the end of every day, assessing what went right and what went wrong. Then, I plan and print out my schedule for the next day, after I have made adjustments from what I have learned. I have learned that I do not need as much time as I booked in my calendar for certain tasks and that there are some things that I should not do, but rather task my assistant to do to be more productive and profitable.

5. I shrunk and moved my planning time to late in the afternoon on Monday and Friday. As the tasks I do in these categories do not require intense brain power, I can be winding down or tired from my day and still be able to make a good decision. I do my blog writing for the week in this time and several other social media functions. Now I don’t feel pressured or that I have to work on the weekend to stay caught up. I just balanced my workload better over the times when I am working at the highest energy levels.

You may want to check out the book I mentioned too. There are great tips, some I have not tried such as meal planning which I actually think may make my personal and family time more productive. Thanks S.J. Scott and Rebecca Livermore, I am enjoying your book and changing my work habits with it!

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Google Gets Serious About Building Business Reviews for the Web

Two women
Google is going after building local business reviews by real people.

Just this last week I joined the ranks of Google’s local reviewers. Google has quietly put the word out that it wants to enlist its own approved writers to start building reviews on local businesses. Google calls their program “Local Guides”.

You too can apply to be a writer. I am not sure what their criteria is to be approved, but as I am already reviewing local businesses and write regularly for many venues, I was approved the same day.

Here are the perks you’ll get based on the amount of reviews you write.  There is no money involved, just bragging rights, really.

That being said, what is interesting is to identify is that Google considers reviews done by real people to be important. So important that it is enticing a wide variety of individuals to beef up the number of business reviews in the Google Places arena by creating a special program complete with enticements for 5, 50, and 200 review levels.

If you need help with reviews for your own business and you are not getting the action you need from Google’s Local Guides I invite you to review our Brand Booster program to help build online reviews and web visibility.

 

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MamaBear App – Teen Driving Tracker

MamaBear App Icon
MamaBear App Icon

I love to use technology and now that my kids have a new car, because the old one had been totaled, I felt that I needed to have a little better oversight on their driving habits.

I have triplet 18 year olds who are all three brand new drivers. They love the freedom and so do I, but I worry about their safety. With a new car, I felt that there should be some accountability on being a safe driver so there’s be no more wrecks. And no speeding tickets as the new car has much more power and coolness factor.

I have searched high and low for a smartphone app that would allow me to know how fast they were driving right when they were driving. I found MamaBear. This is one of the few apps for parents that is for Android (that’s me) and iPhone (that’s them).

It is easy to set up and although you can get very stalkerish with your kids on this app – monitoring them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, I opted to only know where they were and to get an alert if they were driving over 55 mph.

In the app you can add multiple kids and multiple guardians. You can set what speed you want to get warned about. Where we live 55 mph was good. You can even set safe zones. For example I set up home and school as safe zones so I can be notified when they come home and when they are at school.

I don’t want to get too crazy about monitoring, and so am really only using this app for safe driving accountability, but I can see for some parents it may have way more uses.

So far so good. My kids can even see on a map where all family members are including Mom and Dad – that’s kind of cool. In fact that’s one of the things they liked.

You may want to check MamaBear out too. Oh, by the way, it is free. You can move to a paid version to get reports and more tracking and it is not too expensive if you felt you needed that. For me free is fine.

Get it at the following places:

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.geowaggle.mamabear

IPhone App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/ke/app/mamabear/id542203931?mt=8

P.S. I am not being paid for this review, I just found the app, am using it and wanted to share it with other parents of teen drivers who may be just like me.

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Calendly – Fast and Friendly Appointment and Call Scheduling

Wow, I love this app!
Wow, I love this app!

OMG I love this calendar scheduling application. A prospect asked me to schedule a call with him this last week using Calendly. I thought it was such a cool online productivity tool that I jumped right in to use it for my own business.

First, it is important to know that Calendly is not paying me for this blog post. I have just started using it and really like it so far. For me, I schedule between 6 to 10 conference calls a week. Some of my clients have Outlook and I can do meeting invitations and others don’t. Sometimes I am stood up for my call and sometimes I have to chase a client around for a few days to either pin them down or hook up with them by phone.

Calendly looks like it is going to solve most of my problems. Here’s specifically what I like:

1. No more “What’s your time zone again?” or “Was our call Eastern or Pacific?” Calendly talks to your customer/prospect in their time zone. You enter information in yours and Calendly translates it to theirs. – Excellent!

2. You can set up all types of calls 15 minute, 30 minute, and 60 minutes are defaults in the Premium Level, but the free will just have 15 minutes or one custom sized call. I like 20 minutes for my calls but have some clients that need 30 minutes. I have full control of setting the appointment time. – Excellent again!

3. Reminders are sent to you and the client and you decide the frequency. I set mine up for 24 hours, 2 hours, and 30 minutes out. I am hoping that this will help my conference call attendees be on time and minimize being stood up on my call. – Loved this option.

4. It integrates with my Google Calendar which I sync to my desktop and all devices either with Google or with Companion Link for Outlook. Now here’s my tip. Outlook typically will take your appointments or things you put in your calendar and mark your time as busy. I found that on set up I had not times available as I have many repeating work appointments in my calendar. I opened them and set them as “free” availability – I did this in Outlook and double checked in my Google Calendar, and now I have tons of spots for clients to select from. – This is one of the best features!

5. With Calendly I feel that I am providing better customer service. Instead of me choosing a conference call time that works for me, I am letting my client be in the driver seat. I’ve even opened up evenings for chats as with my conference calling capability I can be on the road myself and call in for a conference call while on the go.

I am still trying to decide if I want to stay with the free level or upgrade to the Premium level, but so far I consider Calendly a real find and wanted to encourage you to check it out too if you live on your phone and calendar like I do.