Top Five Tech Tools You're Probably Using - but could use BETTER: part five

Calendar/Task Management

Microsoft Outlook

I had a client a few years back - an office with about five people working in it. You could stand up at your desk and turn around 360 degrees and see the entire company in the sweep of your glance.

While I was there working on low-level installation and configuring, I couldn't help but overhear something occur more than once: an important meeting scheduled with a client had to be rescheduled because one or more staff members had a scheduling conflict. What?

Everyone that worked in the office was in view of each other, and within earshot. Even more puzzling, everyone had Microsoft Outlook installed on their computers. What, I finally asked, were they using to manage inter-office scheduling. Answer: NOTHING!

I'm not a shill for Microsoft, but Outlook is the corporate standard for good reason -- in addition to being an email client (which is all they were using it for) it's a contact manager, a task scheduler, and has individual and group calendar capabilities. Don't think I'm picking on Small Businesses, though -- most of the larger firms and corporations I've worked at and for didn't use Outlook for anything but email either.

Outlook isn't the only viable candidate for task scheduling and shared calendar management: Google Calendar, leveraging the iCal standard, is a great FREE alternative, which interacts natively with almost any Smartphone, making it an even better mobile solution than stationary desktop-based Outlook. As I often say in situations like this, "It's not the tool you choose, it's the tool you USE".

Google Calendar

Task management and calendar (appointment) management about more than just making checklists. Making sure that appointments are kept and tasks don't fall through the cracks are essential aspects of providing superior customer service. They're also areas in which Small Businesses tend to fail miserably since, if they manage them at all, they usually depend on memory or old-fashioned, 20th Century pen and paper methods.

Managing your appointments, tasks and to-do lists manually, by some paper-based method is a non-starter in the 21st Century business environment.

• You can't copy and paste
• You can't search
• You can't import or export email addresses, phone numbers and website URLs
• You can't easily categorize or prioritize your activities
• You can't share your schedule with multiple co-workers
• You can't see, at a glance, available free time to schedule the activity of several people

Let's face it: most Small Businesses still aren't in a position to increase their staff or budgets. Increasing efficiency and eliminating wasted time and effort are simple, accessible ways to step up your customer service game. Google Calendar allows you to create alerts for your scheduled appointments that will send you reminders by email, popup messages or SMS text messages delivered to your cell phone.

I use Google Calendar's alerts to help me not "airhead" important meetings. I create email reminders five days, three days and one day before each appointment. Two hours and one hour before each appointment, I have text reminders sent to my cell phone number. It's like having the most efficient executive assistant constantly shadowing me, keeping me on track with my schedule.

So I can concentrate on the important things: attending the meetings on time, and providing superior customer service to my clients. To-do lists that track to my phone keep the "what I have to do next" literally at my fingertips. So very little falls through the cracks. And tasks that are tracked in a system like Outlook, Google Calendar or some other computer-based/online system, roll forward until they're cancelled or completed.

Thus, fewer important things are overlooked or fogotten. And I don't double-book my time anymore, which used to happen when I managed my schedule on paper or, even worse, by "remembering" them. Because a mind IS a terrible thing to waste -- on the trivial details of task and time management.

Let you computer and you Smart phone do the grunt work -- so you can focus on the stuff you get paid for.

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Related articles

• ClickMeeting Introduces Plug-In for Microsoft Outlook (prweb.com)
• Why I moved from Microsoft Office 365 to Google Apps - Part One (tubblog.co.uk)
• Latest Zoho Calendar Updates: Sync for Google Calendar, Birthday Calendar (zoho.com)
• Two-way Gmail Outlook Sync by CompanionLink (sys-con.com)

Top Five Tech Tools You're Probably Not Using - but SHOULD BE: part one

Instant Messaging

If you're like most Small Business owners or operators "of a certain age", your view of Instant Messaging, if you have one, may be similar to one of the following statements:

• Instant Messaging is for kids
• I have an email account - what do I need messaging for?
• It's too complicated
• I don't have time for that nonsense
• What good could this messaging stuff do for my Small Business?

I'm sure most of you reading this can relate to at least one of the statements above; the last one asks the question which is, in fact, the topic of today's post.

Business, as I've mentioned in the previous series, is about relationships. Relationships, in turn, are about communication. I'm sure it's no secret that email is an essential Small Business tool -- if nothing else, it has allowed Small Businesses to save on postage and shipping costs once required to provide instant communication. Where it once took a special delivery or overnight package delivery (and still took at least a day) to ship critical documents to a business partner, vendor or client, we can now attach a PDF or word processor file to an email, and the relevant party receives it almost instantly.

Thus the "instant" in instant messaging -- "IM", as it is commonly known, combines the quickness of a phone conversation with the permanence of text. This second component is not to be overlooked, or taken lightly. How many times have you spoken with someone about a previous conversation, struggling to recall an important detail that neither of you can remember now, because you weren't recording the call or taking notes?

IM-ing is nothing but taking notes, real-time, as you engage in conversation. Even with a stenographer on hand, you would still probably miss much, and usually only capture your side of the call. With IM, the transcription IS the conversation and, in addition, you have the benefit of:

• Including links to relevant websites
• Transferring electronic documents and digital images
• Copy-and-pasting information from emails and existing documents
• Creating a "paper trail" for reference and auditing purposes

In addition to these benefits, IM helps reduce the occurrence of  "foot-in-mouth disease": since you type your responses before you transmit them, you have a few seconds before you click "Send" to decide if you want to forward what may amount to an emotional outburst, rather than a well-chosen response.

Google and Yahoo! have standalone chat clients and clients built into their emails; Facebook and MySpace accounts have built-in chat as well. Blackberry, Android and iPhone smartphones all have apps that aggregate all your chat clients into a single location, allowing you to appear online to all your various chat partners.

In addition, there are stand-alone chat tools such as Meebo, Citron and ICQ that do the same thing from your desktop. Being able to communicate with your Small Business clients, partners and vendors as quickly as a phone call, with the permanence of text, the ability to embed web links and transfer files may be a novel concept to you, but you must certainly appreciate the possibilities it presents.

Consider it from the perspective of business objectives, not just technology. The strategic business advantages should be quite obvious -- if you're getting the message.

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Related articles

• Top 10 Web Based Instant Messaging Tools (brighthub.com)
• Facebook and LinkedIn - The Modern Age Lead Generation Tools For Your Business (smedio.com)
• How to Block Unwanted Instant Messages (brighthub.com)
• Instant Messaging Lingo: Shorthand Terms for IMs (brighthub.com)