StopReadingNothing: 5 books you should have read by yesterday

If you are over the age of 10 here are 5 books I see right now on my bookshelf that you should have read by yesterday. These will give some great perspective on life, and give you the basic rules to handle just about anything that is thrown your way. Enjoy being smarter and getting more out of life. Smart people make me smile !


How to Win Friends & Influence People – I have read this book time and time and time again and I love it every time. The title sounds corny and fake, but I promise you that the information inside is not. This is just a good basic set of rules when dealing with other people. How to get people to talk, how to get people interested in what you are saying – all great stuff. If you abide by these rules and are sincere in your efforts you cannot help but get along with people. Isn’t that what we were put on this planet for anyways ?
How to Lose Friends & Infuriate People: Leadership in the Networked World – Yeah – I know. Kind of the opposite of the last book. But this book is about going against the grain and doing your own thing in business and in management. By doing that you are bound to isolate people and piss them off. After all – you will be making some great progress in life and they will be tooling along living their same old live by their same old rules. Break the mold. You might lose some friends and piss them off along the way. But it is all about you anyways right ? :-)
What Matters Most : The Power of Living Your Values – There is a reason that Hyrum Smith and Franklin-Covey got involved together. When you have million things that you have to get done this book (to me) is a calming reminder of some very simple processes you can use to define yourself and what you want. It is not the least bit complicated. When you are done you will have learned alot more about yourself.
The Speaker’s Handbook – If you have a pulse then you have to communicate. Personally I love the verbal kind and I am pretty good at it. Whether you are great or looking to get there this book is always good to have around for reference. And… now that I am looking at it again… it is not bad for reference when writing also. It gives advice on humor, presentation, timing and other things to make your speech memorable. Get it and refer to it often before and presentation – verbal or otherwise.
The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion – You are good at something – everybody is . Sometimes however it is a challenge to figure out how best to convince other people that information and advice that you have is valuable and worth listening to. This is a book that I bought right after I started my own company in 1998 and it has served me well. It gives you some great ideas on how to find your place and how to make sure that what you have to say is understood and accepted. It may not always be agreed with, but the important thing is to make sure that your clients get what they are paying for. Your goal is should be to convince them that your advice (whether they use it or not) is worth paying good money for.

Your Friday StopDoingNothing links of the day!

Here are some pick me ups that should help get you off your butt and STOP DOING NOTHING.

Lifereboot wrote a decent article about not waiting for the perfect timing to take action in your life

ChangeThis posted a very cool happy at work Manifesto

Steve Pavlina on good fast decision making

And finally ZenHabits tells us about being in the moment -

Have a most excellent Friday. I am going flying in the morning. There is never a bad day when you are a pilot in the sky.

StopDoingNothing: My quest for the ideal business email solution

For several months now – probably closer to a year – I’ve been on the hunt for the ideal business email solution. I have emails all over the place and I’ve come to realize that I need to STOP DOING NOTHING, pick a solution and run with it. Managing all of the email is starting to make grey hair shoot out the sides of my head.

I am the leader of my company Focus Consulting (http://www.allaboutfocus.com) and we do serious large scale web development. Growing the business means being out and about. So the first thing I concluded was that I needed to get a webmail solution. After that my criteria was pretty loose. Here is what was in the the running:

Outlook Local (PST): This has been my default solution for years – and I love it. Outlook is the only application I have found that has the ideal management of all three components of my email/contact/calendar management. It also syncs up with every mobile device I buy perfectly. Every cell phone or PDA I buy has a complete copy of all of my Outlook data as soon as I get the device home. In my ever so humble opinion if you are someone who does not need any mobility in your solution this is the best option.

Outlook with Exchange, Local: I’ve had some suggestions from friends that I should install and run my own Exchange server from my house. Since I am trying to get out of the software running and maintenance mode of my life this is one of the worst options for me. I have little to no skill in managing an exchange server. And what would happen to my marriage if there were Exchange problems and my wife or daughter could not get to their email? That might actually be listed as the primary reason for our divorce in the paperwork. I can see it now: “Reason for dissolution: Failure to adequately maintain and supply sufficient email services as head of household”.

Outlook with Exchange, Hosted: Companies like Intermedia who are alot better at Exchange than I am offer this service. They run the server, and you connect to it from anyplace. They also offer OWA – Outlook Web Access – which is a very nice web version of Outlook. It looks and feels just like the desktop client. Since there is only one copy of the data there is no ‘mirroring’ that has to be done.

Gmail: At some point in time I ‘drank the KoolAid” and signed up for a Gmail account. I cannot really remember why – it might have been the javascript chat they use which allows me to chat with people with no windows client install. Over the months I have become addicted to my gmail. Oh baby have I become addicted. The mail and the google calendar are the two best features I like. The fact that I also have other Google features and I can use them all from a single sign in is very nice. With the calendar it takes a single click to get an event on there. As a matter of fact most things only take a single click. That was not one of my criteria, but it is a nice bonus. The contact management is not their strongest feature in my opinion. And of course no syncy syncy with me phone :( Also: a HUGE problem with this solution is the “From” address. They say that you can set up other accounts to send/receive from. However I noticed I started getting people replying to my address@gmail.com. Not cool, and not professional. More investigation showed that gmail sends the header as “From yourname@gmail.com on behalf of yourname@yourdomain.com”. Depending on the email program you are using you may get the reply at yourdomain.com or at gmail.com.

Google Apps for your Domains: This is an interesting option. All of the functionality of Gmail, except it runs at my domain. I think they might have also fixed the ‘Send from’ issue in the paid version. Needs more investigation.

Webmail at my hosting company: Very easy simple solution. Almost no contact or calendard functionality. Cheap – already paid for! Boring too.

I’ll post soon about my experience and what I ended up doing with. Until then – STOP DOING NOTHING.

Have a great weekend.

Love,

Patrick

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