3 Tips for Getting Organized on Outlook/Entourage

This economic climate is all about doing more with less. Being organized is about the best way I know to do that. Saving time on clerical tasks means more time with clients, or more time marketing to get new clients. So who wouldn't want to be better organized? And it's easy.

I've given tips on getting organized to a number of my small business clients over the last few weeks, so I now realize that the software you already have can be used to save time and effort. [I'll be using Entourage for my examples, but I'm sure Outlook is very similar. And even if you have different calendar/email/database software, these tips will still apply.] Here are my favorite tips:

1) Put in "To Do" items for the future. You want to create a "Task". Click "NEW", then "Task" in the drop down menu. You can schedule a reminder for any date, and it will pop up to remind you just when you need it most! For example, I use it to remind me to call the contractors if I haven't heard from them by 'x' date. You can also set up recurring reminders. Mine include changing the kitty litter weekly, all the exercise classes I like & my monthly bill-paying session.

2) Put today's "To Do's" on an ever-evolving list. This is a "Note". I used to keep my "To Do" list on a scrap of paper, to which I'd add new things to do, phone numbers, emails, urls, etc. as time went on, as well as crossing off things. It got to be a mess, plus I'd have to copy the updated version onto a new piece of paper every few days. Yes, I got to throw out the old one with all the crossed-off stuff, but then I'd have to keep some of them because of all the phone numbers. Not satisfying -- and a mess. What do you do with all those odd-sized pieces of paper? Where do you keep all the odd notes for the long erm?

Now I keep mine in a Note, entitled "To Do List", which I update and print daily. I 3-hole punch them at the end of the day, and keep them in a notebook, so I can easily find notes later if I need to. Plus they'll make a great record of the year, along with my gratitude and success journals. Click "NEW", then "Note" in the drop down window.

3) Keep a folder for form emails. Remember form lettters? They're great for things you have to say to a zillion people, one at a time, aren't they? In the past, you photocopied a form and just hand wrote names in. Later, they were Word documents, into which you'd insert names and other appropriate info. Well, you can do it with emails, too! I do it for receipts, and welcomes, etc. Here's how:

• Highlight the "Drafts" Folder by putting your cursor on it.
  
• At the top, click "New", then "Sub-folder" in the drop down menu. Then go to the new folder and title it "ReUse Drafts". This is the folder you'll keep all those form emails in.
  
• When you get the text of an email you send a lot exactly the way you want it, put it into the body of an email.
• Title the email "Draft of -----".
• Save it -- it will automatically go into a 'Draft' Folder.
• Click on the 'Draft' Folder, so you see the contents.
• Highlight the "Draft of ----" and drag it into the "ReUse Drafts" Folder.
• Then, when you need to thanks someone for their inquiry, click on the ReUse Drafts Folder, highlight the draft you want, and copy the text into a new email, inserting the appropriate info into the new email.
  

Yes, consciousness affects water

Entangled Minds: Water crystal replication study

Entangled Minds: Collective consciousness and the inauguration

Entangled Minds: Collective consciousness and the inauguration

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Everyone has intuitive abilities. No matter what level you’re starting from, you can develop your innate abilities and learn new skills. You'll learn easy-to-use techniques to access deeper level information and you'll get answers for yourself and others. You'll

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This is a safe environment to explore your issues. You'll even make new friends, as you'll be trading readings.

This method is completely different from any other way of teaching the development of intuition; all other training teaches standard techniques, which may or may not work for you. Here, you'll identify your natural talents; then turn these talents into skills, using my unique method. This intuitive method does not use any sorts of external divination tools, like tarot or runes. This has several advantages:

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Who should attend:

Everyone!

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For fees and other info, please click here.

It really IS a new day!

I left yesterday morning's schedule empty so I could watch the Inauguration -- and like most people, stayed until I watched W's helicopter disappear. I guess I wanted to be sure he was really gone...

Then I went for one of my usual walks, to the library, though much later than usual. What surprised me was how many strangers and bare acquaintances all said the same thing -- "I'm proud to be an American again." I don't know that I've ever been actively proud of my country (I was a little kid during the Viet Nam conflict, another time where pride was dubious), but I sure have been ashamed for the last 8 years, and feel I can hold my head up again.

I did have clients scheduled in the afternoon. The first time I got into the appropriate state to do a reading, I had an amazing experience. Normally, when I ask my guides to be with me, to help me help my client, humanity and the earth, my palm chakras open up for 2 of the guides and I see beams of light in different places for the others.

Not yesterday. Yesterday, each of them showed up in a sort of light body, all standing in a ring with me. When I asked why, I 'heard' that Obama's inauguration was a big step in humanity's ascension, big shift in our collective consciousness.

In case you missed it: Obama’s Inaugural Address

In case you missed it -- or even if you didn't, because it's even better reading it the next day:

Transcript - Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address - Text - NYTimes.com

He manages to put everyone on notice that things are going to be different, from the Republicans to other nations to Wall Street to you and me. He invokes our ancestors as well as future generations -- with hope, and a call to hard work.

I put it here so I can always find it, because I think I'll want to refer to it often over the next few years.

Persuasion is...

...the art of showing someone exactly how it is in their best interest to do what you want them to do.

The way I got the owner of the property with the neighbor from hell (NFH) to give me power of attorney to get rid of her, was that I showed him his liability for keeping her there, and then made him an offer he couldn't refuse to let me do it for him.

The way I got rid of the NFH was to have the attorney tell her that if I even filed a suit for unlawful detainer (the technical term for eviction lawsuit), it would be follow her around for the rest of her life, regardless of the disposition of the suit. It's amazing how fast people can move when they're motivated!

The way I'm hoping to convice the lender to sell to me cheaply is to point out that if they don't, they become liable for the myriad problems on the property, and that the Homeowners' Association can foreclose judicially at any time, which would wipe out their interest entirely. Wish me luck!

What is the difference between a vow & an affirmation?

A friend of mine, who definitely enjoys her wine, was talking about a vow she'd made recently -- "No more hangovers!" And a funny thing happened: she was at a business/social event, drinking moderately, when she felt nauseous. She left the party, went back to her hotel room, had a glass of water and fell asleep, only to dream that she was milking a rattlesnake, symbolically pulling the poison from her system. And she hasn't had a hangover in the months since making the vow.

So obviously, vows can be powerful. They tend to be simple. declarative statements, structured in absolutes. Sometimes, they're stated in the positive, though they're usually stated in the negative, such as "No more..." They're often stated in the future tense, such as "I'll never... again." They are often stated in the third person, such as "This ____ stops now!" And they're generally made just once.

Affirmations, on the other hand, are positive, present tense, first person statements, which are repeated over and over till they become true. They're powerful, too.

So how can these two opposite ways of expressing a clear intention both be so effective?

My guess -- and it is just a guess -- is that an affirmation comes from a superficial part of the self, which desires change, while a vow comes from a deeper part of the self, which recognizes an internal change has already happened, and just needs to manifest in the exterior world. An affirmation is a declaration of what you choose, as if it already exists. A vow is a statement of what already exists on the inner planes, declaring itself to the outside world.

Oh, Happy Day!

The neighbor from hell is GONE!

Hormones' complex role in human sexuality

Hormones' complex role in human sexuality

8 Business Lessons from the "Neighbor from Hell'

I worked really hard to get rid of the 'neighbor from hell' at a condo I own. (More about that here.) She left, finally, all because I got the owner to give me power of attorney to do it. As I look back on it, though, doing this has taught me a number of lessons which are much more widely applicable:

1) Have a clear intention (don't take no for an answer) -- The neighbor from hell (NFH) had been negatively affecting my life for years now. Because of her, I had a much harder time finding an acceptable tenant for that unit than for any other unit I own (and a few are in the neighborhood, so it really is comparing apples to apples). Further, the tenant in that unit turns over immediately at the end of each lease (if they even paid the rent on time, so that I didn't have to get rid of them earlier -- and this is the only unit where I've ever had to evict anyone).

When my wonderful current tenant gave me 60 days notice, despite acknowledging the fact that she has a lease which at that point lasted another 6 months, I got desperate. And desperation turned into determination that this ends now. And somehow, when I get determined, the universe lines up behind me. (This is most defiitely a vow, which seems to be a variant on the Law of Attraction.)

2) Be nice -- My first step was to contact the owner. Of course, I'd been trying that without success for over a year. She wouldn't answer my phone calls or emails. So what I did was pay her a visit. How did I have her address? When she bought the property, back in 2006, I was nice. I called her up (got that number because the former owner was a friend -- see, I'm nice), and said, "If I can help you in any way, please let me know. And oh, by the way, please give me your contact info", which she did.

3) Be organized -- I'm fanatic about keeping people's contact information. If you give me a card, all that goes into my database, even if I don't put you on my mailing list. My database is over 3000 records, everyone from the plumber to the dentist to the health insurance company to my extended family to my clients and on and on. So when I needed this woman's address, there it was, easy to find.

4) Know the rules of the game -- It's important to know what you can do, and what you can't. Without the owner authorizing me to do it, neither I nor my tenants could evict the NFH, who was essentially a squatter, paying no rent, no water or sewer bill, no gas bill, putting slugs in the communal washing machine. My tenant couldn't put the stuff the NFH had wrongly stored in my tenant's half of the shared garage out on the driveway, or in the dumpster -- that would have been illegal. We could, however, call the police to keep an eye on the place, and file lots of complaints about the bad behavior of the NFH. We could call Child Protective Services to have the mother investigated for leaving her minor child unsupervised for a week at a time. And with the power of attorney from the owner, I can file an unlawful detainer suit, which will eventually get her out for sure.

5) You can't always be nice -- Some people, like like the Neighbor from Hell, don't respond to nice. You can ask a Neighbor from Hell something nicely, and she'll either ignore you, or smile, say yes, and then ignore you. With these people, you have to be tough. That means using all the resources available to you -- veiled threats, contracts, police, Child Protective Services, the courts, whatever. (NLP would say, "the most flexible system always wins". And by trying everything, I am being flexible as hell.)

6) Talk to people in terms they'll understand -- This is actually a basic principle of NLP, phrased as "The meaning of communication is the response you get." I always took this to mean that if you didn't get the response you wanted from the words you chose, you should try different words.

That's part of it. Another part of communication is not your words, it's your actions. The NFH basically lives by working the system (Section 8 & disability payments for 5 years that I know of, even though she's capable of painting apartments for extra income). So I made sure that the information came from an authority figure (attorney), who said that if I even filed an unlawful detainer (i.e. eviction) lawsuit, it would follow her around forever. (Translation: you'll have a really hard time finding another apartment for the rest of your life.) Funny thing, the U-Haul truck made regular appearances right after that.

7) Be transparent -- that is, tell the truth, and tell it to everyone who needs hear it. This is one of the wonders of email. You can easily have a one to many conversation. You don't have to say the same thing over and over to keep everyone up to date, and you don't have to wonder who said what to whom, or when. When I email my tenant about what's going on, I often cc the property owner, the attorney and the police. Same thing when they email me. That way, everyone is on the same page, and we can all go forward together. In fact, we all begin to trust each other more, too.

8) Reach out to the community -- When I told a friend my saga of the NFH, she said, it sounds like bad custody battle. And she has a point. The custody problem is directly between the parents, but it affects the children, and anyone to whom those kids act out. A people problem is therefore a problem for the community. This is why Child Protective Services exist. It's why police, aka peace officers, exist. It's why the courts exist. They are all her to provide formal community solutions to community problems. Use them.

Yet another reason to clean up your thoughts...

You think your thoughts are private, don't you? Most everyone does, and that's why people tend to freak out when I mention telepathy -- I think it's the last taboo.

I have some bad news for you -- neuroscientists are beginning to be able to read your mind using computers and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). It's surprisingly accurate, too.

Lest you think that this is only something that can be done using fMRI at great inconvenience and expense, there's more -- they expect to be able to do this using lasers in a few years, so that you won't even know it's being done to you.

I'm not eing alarmist, either. Check this out:

Reading Your Mind Video - CBSNews.com

So now, while your thoughts are still private, is a really good time to clean them up. Many of our unbidden thoughts come as a result of unconscious processing, which you can shift. If you'd like some help with thoughts that seem to intrude, that you'd prefer to eliminate, call me at 888-4-hollis (888-446-5547).