Laura’s Winning Ideas

Itzy Sabo’s EMAIL OVERLOADED has a good suggestion:
You can use numerals or puncuation as a prefix to sort your folders in your preferred order.

For example:
Proposal Bangor
1 white
2 pink
3 red
4 final

Proposal: Tangier
1 pending queries
2 responses ready to include
3 editing
4 final draft

Itzy is a blogger associate from the LinkedIn Bloggers group, and offers tips about how to organize folders that would work for many other email programs as well.

Once I finish a project, I archive the folder and any subfolders right away to that year’s archive.

One of my favorite guilty pleasures is the Scout Report.

I don’t hang around the fashion sites (though I did cruise through the spring collections last week before I went shopping). I have just a few meaty blogs subscribed by RSS. There are just not enough hours in the day to keep up with the world on the web.

But I continue my subscription to the Scout Report. It is a “Best On the Web” listing of sites with a few sentences about each, so you understand why they think it is worth a visit.

These folks have be scanning the web since 1994 and have several lists to which you can subscribe. The email comes every few weeks. Sometimes I get to it right away, sometimes not. These are not cutting edge announcements that might disappear as soon as their ISP gets wise. They are the thoughtful, interesting and worthwhile sites on a broad range of topics.

The Internet Scout Project is located in the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under a grant from the NSF, provides information about the Internet to the U.S. research and education community.

“How do I manage multiple outstanding queries with multiple SMEs (subject matter experts) who may/may not reply to my original message? Keeping track is a nightmare.”

I’m beta testing one solution: a free, secure weblog.

This just moved from Alpha to Beta, so you may encounter some glitches. But I think we are close to having everything critical fixed, and next, the developer will be tweaking the usability issues we brought up during our tests.

Wideblog allows you to post and view comments, just like a regular blog. The format makes it easy to pair answers with questions, and keep everything in one place instead of strung throughout your email folders. (Read on …)

I have some ways I make sure no proposal misses delivery. The first priority is to always know what your backup delivery mechanism will be. Things go wrong. The weather grounds FedEx, once a truck broke down on its way to deliver our proposal and the carrier couldn’t deliver by deadline. I always have another way, just in case.

Back up delivery: Kinko’s prints your proposal

When you come to rely on overnight delivery for your critical documents (who doesn’t?) bad weather, a broken down delivery truck (on either end), and misplaced cargo can ruin your efforts. (Read on …)