Greetings,

This week, Patricia Deere Ring highlights a common problem many face in this age of highly specialised knowledge - how to communicate this information to others who know little about it. It's easy for you to do whatever it is you do well - but sometimes it's much harder to try to write about it for others - read Patricia's tips.

Don Wetmore focuses on five of the biggest time wasters we encounter and shows you how to beat them.

Thank you for your kind comments (and contributions) for the Travel Bug site. It's called, funnily enough http://www.e-travelbug.com  (don't forget the hyphen!) You can still send me some snippets, some snaps and some stories about your sojourns ... Click here to send email.

Remember, all past issues of this newsletter are archived on site - feel free to browse :) and if you'd like some help with your writing, you might like to subscribe to my other, free weekly newsletter, the Write Way  mailto:WritingTips-subscribe@yahoogroups.com  

You can also post any questions relating to writing on the new forum. Here's the perfect place to go to settle any office arguments about whether it's 'the Jones' job' or 'the Jones's job,' how to punctuate your letters, the correct word to use etc etc. http://www.write101.com/letters/fota.htm 

Regards,

Jennifer 

Anyone Can Be a Writer...But
© 2001 By Patricia Deere Ring

How many times have you seen it in ads, ezines, and
articles? ANYONE can be a writer! Right. But the question is
do you want to read what they write? I was not always an "A"
student in school or college, but I do know how to hit
*spell check* on the computer or typewriter. I also know how
to use a dictionary to check the meaning of a word. Anyone
ever try looking in a reference book to learn how to use
commas or quotation marks properly?

There are many people in the world, especially the Internet
world, with brilliant ideas and huge warehouses of knowledge
within themselves. But not all of these people can express
these ideas to others in a way that is informative and
easily understood.

As a *newbie* I don't know and understand a lot about HTML,
but I realized my need to learn it, so I recently checked
out two different sites with free courses on the subject.
The first one I looked at (I will be nice and not mention
the name!) was so technical I couldn't find my way out of a
paper bag if I didn't already know how. The second site had
a printable ebook (free) of the same info that appeared on
the site. Needless to say, I printed out the ebook, which
was written in *everyday* language that I could understand.
(You have to realize that I'm the Dummy those books were
written to.) I learned more in five minutes than I thought
possible.

So, its not always WHAT you know, but whether you can TELL
others what you know! Having a head full of knowledge
doesn't help anyone but yourself, if you're not able to
relate it to others. If you don't know how to spell, use
*spell check* to correct your writing. If you don't
understand the rules of punctuation and grammar, find a good
proof-reader to look over what you have written. Let someone
else check your writing, someone not as knowledgeable in the
subject as you, to see if it's easily understood by others.

There are ways to make your writing something to be read and
appreciated by others. Good luck and better writing!

Patricia Deere Ring is a freelance writer living in
Tarkington Prairie, Texas with her retired husband. She runs
two businesses of her own and can be contacted by email at
mailto:pring@contentbuilders.com or on her Web site at
http://www.contentbuilders.com

One area of your writing that must be as perfect as you can make it, is your sales material. If you don't have the time to follow Patricia's advice and learn how to write effective material yourself, you can always take advantage of the work done by professionals. It only takes a few minutes to add your personal details to these templates and you have professionally prepared letters for any situation: http://www.write101.com/letters/sales.htm 

Here's something everyone should be able to relate to - haven't we all "been there, done that?"

There are two major kinds of meetings:

1. Meetings that are held for basically the same reason that Arbor Day is observed - namely, tradition. For example, a lot of managerial people like to meet on Monday, because it's Monday. You'll get used to it. You'd better, because this kind account for 83% of all meetings (based on a study in which I wrote down numbers until one of them looked about right). This type of meeting operates the way "Show and Tell" does in nursery school, with everyone getting to say something, the difference being that in nursery school, the kids actually have something to say.

When it's your turn, you should say that you're still working on whatever it is you're supposed to be working on. This may seem pretty dumb, since obviously you'd be working on whatever you're supposed to be working on, and even if you weren't, you'd claim you were, but that's the traditional thing for everyone to say. It would be a lot faster if the person running the meeting would just say, "Everyone who is still working on what he or she is supposed to be working on, raise your hand." You'd be out of there in five minutes, even allowing for jokes. But this is not how we do it in America. My guess is, it's how they do it in Japan.

2. Meetings where there is some alleged purpose. These are trickier, because what you do depends on what the purpose is. Sometimes the purpose is harmless, like someone wants to show slides of pie charts and give everyone a big, fat report. All you have to do in this kind of meeting is sit there and have elaborate fantasies, then take the report back to your office and throw it away, unless, of course, you're a vice president, in which case you write the name of a subordinate in the upper right hand corner, followed be a question mark, like this: "Norm?" Then you send it to Norm and forget all about it (although it will plague Norm for the rest of his career).

But sometimes you go to meetings where the purpose is to get your "input" on something. This is very serious because what it means is, they want to make sure that in case whatever it is turns out to be stupid or fatal, you'll get some of the blame, so you have to escape from the meeting before they get around to asking you anything. One way is to set fire to your tie.

Another is to have an accomplice interrupt the meeting and announce that you have a phone call from someone very important, such as the president of the company or the Pope. It should be one or the other. It would a sound fishy if the accomplice said, "You have a call from the president of the company, or the Pope."

You should know how to take notes at a meeting. Use a yellow legal pad. At the top, write the date and underline it twice. Now wait until an important person, such as your boss, starts talking; when he does, look at him with an expression of enraptured interest, as though he is revealing the secrets of life itself. Then write interlocking rectangles like this: (picture of doodled rectangles). If it is an especially lengthy meeting, you can try something like this (Picture of more elaborate doodles and a caricature of the boss).

If somebody falls asleep in a meeting, have everyone else leave the room. Then collect a group of total strangers, right off the street, and have them sit around the sleeping person until he wakes up. Then have one of them say to him, "Bob, your plan is very, very risky. However, you've given us no choice but to try it. I only hope, for your sake, that you know what you're getting yourself into." Then they should file quietly out of the room.

Aah yes ...

Is this "the most important business event of the new millennium?" (Seth Godin)  You be the judge: http://www.roibot.com/gmbc.cgi?R390_campaign

Quick Tip

Big Time Wasters

By Dr. Donald E. Wetmore

You may be well intended about getting things done during your day at work or during your personal time, but there are big time wasters that will conspire against you to take your productive time away. It has been said that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. In conducting my Time Management Seminars over the last 20 years, I have identified five Big Time Wasters that you can attack. 

1. Poor planning. “People don’t plan to fail but a lot of people fail to plan.” Without a plan of action for your day you tend to direct your attention to the most urgent thing that may not necessarily be the best use of your time. Often, the day will be filled with wheel spinning and “busy-ness”, rather than business. When I was in the military, we referred to the “Six P’s”: “Poor planning produces pretty poor performance”. (I recall that some used a different word for “pretty”, but I’m sure you get the point.)

2. Procrastination. Taking the time for planning is great but what if you don’t execute on your plan? You tend to put off doing what you know you ought to be doing when there is little or no pain for not doing it and little or no pleasure to do it. Procrastinating the unimportant things has a positive value in your day. The problem for many is that they are procrastinating the important items.

3. Interruptions. You can do a great job of planning and not be much of a procrastinator, but interruptions will come your way and rob you of productivity. An interruption is an unanticipated event. That’s what makes it an interruption. They come to you from two sources, in-person and electronic (telephone, email, beeper, pager, etc.) Interruptions are both good and bad. There are A (crucial) and B (important) interruptions that you receive without reservation. By definition, they have value to you and are welcomed. But then there are the C (little value) and D (no value) interruptions that only take you away from being as productive as you might otherwise desire.

4. Failure to delegate. “If you want a job done well, you have to do it yourself”. Have you ever said that to yourself? The problem is you only have 24 hours in your day, 7 days a week for a total of 168 hours. Subtract from that the time you sleep (perhaps 8 hours per night, 7 nights per week, or 56 hours in total) and you are now down to only 112 hours each week to do everything you need and want to do. Delegation is plugging into someone else’s time stream when you don’t have the time or the expertise to accomplish a particular task.  Delegation is how you can leverage your time through other people. A lot of time is being wasted by doing what ought to be delegated to others.

5. Attending meetings. In a typical day in the United States, there are 17 million meetings. A meeting is when two or more people get together to exchange common information. What could be simpler? Yet it surely is a major time waster for many. They are particularly wasteful and unproductive when there is no agenda or time frame and the meeting then drifts out on one tangent and then another without concrete results.

Receive your free Timely Time Management Tips on a regular basis to increase your personal productivity and get more out of every day? Sign up now for your free “TIMELY TIME MANAGEMENT TIPS”. Just go to: http://www.topica.com/lists/timemanagement and select “subscribe”.

If you have friends who would be interested in this newsletter, please invite them to subscribe and send them this link: mailto:Specials3-subscribe@yahoogroups.com 

To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to Specials3-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com or go to the  web site, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Specials3 This menu will also let you change your subscription between digest and normal mode.

Home | Contact | Order | Site Map |Subscribe   

Copyright 2006 Jennifer Stewart Write101.com