Keep track of contract dates in ACT!

One feature I love in ACT! (and use diligently!) is the Activity Series, using a future date as the ‘anchor’ date. This allows me to schedule reminder activities leading up to an important date, such as a contract renewal. Here’s one way I put that into practice:

Our Synthesis Executive Assistant program runs in 3-month increments. Renewal is not automatic. I like to give our clients a week’s notice by email, sending them a new contract as an attachment; then I follow up in 3 days with a phone call. If the client does not renew, I also want to be sure to inform our Project Manager so she can stop working on their behalf, unless we have hours available to complete a project.

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5 Ways to Declutter Your Office

No one can be - or stay! - productive for long in a cluttered environment. I believe there is an incremental increase in stress the longer we allow our environment to remain chaotic.

Whether it's constantly stopping a project to check email, answer the phone or hunt for that ONE piece of paper necessary to continue, we probably lose 10% of our day's progress due to clutter.

Clutter is more than objects stacked together, it's allowing distractions to keep you off-point. If you want to regain that 10% of time (48 minutes a day / 240 minutes per week - a whopping 26 days a year!) here are my top 5 methods to declutter your office space:

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Why Your Website is Like a Car

Though it’s called your ‘home’ page, your website is more akin to your car. Here’s why…

It requires regular maintenance

If you ignore a car it eventually gets reclaimed by its environment – the air seeps out of the tires, the paint job oxidizes and the body is eaten away by rust.

What does this look like on a website? Well, the code of your website stays the same – but the environment might change. Every website is viewed through a browser (Like Internet Explorer or Firefox) – and browsers often upgrade how they read information. A new browser may read deprecated (or outdated) code differently – therefore displaying your page differently.

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Go to the Source for the Solution!

Recently I had to hard-boot my computer due to a power outage in my area – OUCH! It’s always a miracle to me when things boot back up and run correctly and a terrible frustration when they don’t.

When this re-boot occurred, everything seemed to work okay until I tried to email out of ACT! and received an error message saying it could not map the extension. When I Googled the error message (my only hope!), I found extremely technical solutions that involved going into the Registry. This to me meant a call to my trusty IT person (and big bucks flowing out the door!)

But before I could make the call, I attempted to email an invoice out through Peachtree and received the same error message! Got me to thinking – the common denominator was my email program - Microsoft Outlook; so I went into Outlook and chose Help | Detect and Repair and let it do its thing. I didn’t have anything to lose…

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