Are you chronically late for appointments? Do you find yourself rushing to be on time? Regarding appointments, simplifying means eliminating unnecessary stress.

Following is a real life scenario about getting to Toastmasters officer training on time this past Saturday morning. I was a co-chair and responsible for doing the “Welcome” and introducing the presenters. The night before the presentation, I itemized all the factors leading up to the training and guesstimated time limits for each one. This let me know how to keep on track, calm, and arriving with a smile. Tips for simplifying prep time are sprinkled throughout.

Appointment: July 29th, 9:30am Toastmasters Officer Training. Continental style breakfast served.Goal: Arrive prepared and on time. Arrive calmly and with a smile lighting the way.

Plan: I knew I wanted to arrive at least 15 minutes early to check-in, troubleshoot, and ask my last minute questions. It’s a 10 minute drive from the carpooling pick-up point. It’s about a 15 minute drive from my house to the pick-up point. Add an extra 10 minutes for unexpected situations. Added up, 50 minutes.

8:40 am Leave house (meaning, in the car pulling out of the driveway)

Actuality: This is exactly how it happened! One of the great things about this group of Toastmasters is that they are On Time. So even though I had 3 carpoolers, they were all at their pick-up points on time. I was on the ball the night before—I noticed the car was low on gas, so I filled up the tank. Then on the way home I stopped at a DIY carwash to wash my embarrassingly dirty metal chariot in 5 minutes for 6 quarters (great deal!).

Plan: Pack up car, clean stuff out of backseat for passengers. Make sure there is room in trunk for people’s stuff since backseat isn’t very big. 10 minutes.

8:30 am Tidy-up and load car

Actuality: Good thing I left a little extra time here because I also used this time to download directions to the training onto my PDA which I had forgotten to do last night!

Plan: I bought fruit at Farmers Market the night before. The plan was to cut it up into serving bowl in the morning (serving bananas, which brown quickly, so I didn’t want to cut the night before). Made carrot bread the night before, it needed to be cut up and placed, somewhat attractively, on serving plate, and figure out how to transport safely. Allow 20 minutes to be safe.

8:10 Prepare fruit and carrot cake for serving and transporting.

Actuality: I thought I was being overly cautious on the time necessary for this one, but it turns out I was right on. I had even thought about which serving dishes to use the night before. Good thing I did because one of them really needed to be washed before being used. Saturday morning it was clean and dry in the drying rack..

Plan: Get myself ready. I usually don’t leave enough time for this, continuing to insist that I’m “low-maintenance”, which is, of course, still true. :-) Even so, it takes more than 15 minutes to get all this done. I gave myself 30 minutes.

7:40 Shower, dress, get pretty.

Actuality: As it turns out, I did get ready in 16 minutes, though not as calmly as I would have liked because I actually didn’t start until 7:52. Yikes! This was because of my completely unrealistic prep plan (next).

Plan: Allow 10 minutes to review the introductions of each of the 8 presenters and the Welcome presentation.

7:30 Review Intros and Welcome

Actuality: What was I thinking? This may have been adequate if I was fully prepared, which I wasn’t. Up until last night, I thought the Training co-chair was going to do the Welcome. Between going to Farmer’s Market, the gas station, the car wash, and the late night carrot cake baking adventure, I chose to leave reviewing my notes (same notes as last year’s training, with slight modifications) until the morning when I’d be fresh in mind and thought.

Plan: I thought I’d give myself half an hour to wake up, sit quietly, read, and write. Waking up and hitting the floor with a bang is not all that conducive to any morning, let alone a big morning in which I’ll be speaking.

7:00 Wake up!

Actuality: I did read (Kahil Gibran’s The Prophet) and I did do a little writing. Lovely way to start the morning.

Summary
Big kudos: I printed out what needed to be printed, gathered papers, timer, clipboard, nametags and pen the night before. I also made sure the PDA had full battery charge. Filled up gas tank the night before. Also, car washed the night before. (Bad form showing up in dirty car. This is something I need to keep up on because I don’t have a garage to help keep the chariot clean.)

Room for improvement: Load the directions and hostess contact information on to PDA the night before! What a super disorganized faux-pas to have been the carpool driver who said, “Does anyone know how to get there?” Also, breakfast! Yes, we provided a continental breakfast for everyone, but why did I think I, as co-chair and introducer, would have time to eat? By the time I got home at 12:30, I was starving! Fortunately, the adrenaline rush of speaking had overshadowed the blood-sugar dip.

The big question: Is all this detailed breakdown necessary? I mean, couldn’t I just have said, leave at 8:45am and get up an hour before that? Sure. But even though I feel it is extremely important to be on time, truth is, sometimes I’m late. I know that:

preparation time is, perhaps, the most commonly misjudged factor for getting somewhere on time.

Therefore, this detailed breakdown is necessary until I’m consistently and calmly (key word here!) on time for my appointments. By then, I’ll have presumably internalized the times I need for preparation and won’t need to spell it out, step by step. If, however, I find that I need this tool in order to be on time, I will continue to use it.

The final word: Doing a detailed breakdown of the time leading up to an important appointment can work wonders in eliminating unnecessary stress!

—
Shawn Tuttle is founder of Project Simplify.

4. This Week’s Simplification Tip

Keyboard Shortcuts That are Worth Learning

contributed by Lance Brown

I used to think that people who used keyboard shortcuts were a bunch of big stinky showoffs. “Ooh, look at you!” I would wail, while prancing around the room and pointing at them. “You do stuff without touching the mouse! Aren’t you just Mr. Fancy?!”

And they would try to explain how it’s not that fancy, and start to point out one of the shortcuts. And I’d growl back, “Oh, sure, like I want to learn some foreign keyboard language, when I’ve got a perfectly good mouse for that stuff!” Then sometimes, I’d start pinching them just out of spite, screaming, “I’ve got your Control-Alt right here, buddy!”

I lost a lot of friends that way…and after all these years, it turns out the big stinky showoffs were right! Using the keyboard instead of the mouse for some of the most common computing tasks can save you a lot of time. Let’s break it down:

Let’s say it takes you two seconds to scroll down a little on a web page that you’re reading. You’ve got to position your mouse over by the scroll bar, and find the right spot to click. Maybe you’re really into tedium, and you use those little arrows to scroll rather than just clicking in the open space on the scroll bar. Add another half second if so. Now, the keyboard alternative – hitting the space bar – takes about 2/10ths of a second. Using the keyboard could save you 1.8 seconds each time.

Multiply that savings times the number of times you have scrolled down a bit on a web page, and pretty soon you’re saving some real time. And that’s nothing compared to the savings you can make with more complex tasks like copying and pasting text. Here are a few easy keyboard shortcuts adopt just these, and you could reclaim hours each month, and days every year.

(In these examples, I will use the Windows “Ctrl” key. For Apple users, the “Cmd” key does the same thing.)

Select All – Cut – Copy – Paste
Ctrl-A, X, C, and V
In the lower left of your keyboard you’ll find this combination of tools for moving text around. Hold down Ctrl and hit A. All of the content on the page will be selected. Now keep hitting Ctrl and hit C instead of A. You just copied all that stuff to the clipboard. To paste it into something else, use Ctrl and V. That only leaves “cut”, which is Ctrl plus X. If you think of A for “All”, C for “Copy”, and X for “Cut”, then that only leaves V as the one that’s hard to remember. Thankfully, it’s right there next to X and C, and remembering that it equals “Paste” isn’t that hard, since paste is the only one remaining of the 4 functions.

Moving around on the screen
Tab and Enter/Space Bar
These are probably most handy for filling out forms and using instant messenger tools, which covers a lot actually, since forms come up all the time on computers (think: Address book, web signups, installing software, etc.). I can’t even imagine how much time these have saved me.

The tab key is not just for indenting the beginnings of paragraphs. Just about everywhere else on your computer, the tab key is used for moving from one selected item on the screen to another. In forms, that means from one field to the next. If you go around clicking in each text box so that you can type into that field, then clicking in the next one, etc., you could save big time by just flicking one of your leftmost fingers onto the tab key instead. Bam – you’re in the next field.

It works at the end of the form, too. That last tab-ing will (99% of the time) move the selection to the “submit” button. That’s where Enter or the Space Bar come in. Either of those will basically “click” on whatever’s selected—in this case, the form’s submit button. (It could be the “Next” button while installing software, or the “Save and Close” button in your Address Book, etc.).

Experiment with those two tools – use Tab in places other than documents, and see how it goes from one selectable item to the next. It works in almost every program, and on your desktop too. Depending on the situation, Tab may just bring you from one area to another, and you can use the arrow keys within that area to make a specific selection. Example: on a Windows desktop, Tab will take you from the Start menu to the Quick Launch toolbar, then to the task bar, and so on. In each of those spots, the arrow keys will move you around (further into the Start menu, or from icon to icon on the desktop). And then once you’re on your selection of choice, Enter will open that item (the Space Bar doesn’t seem to work there.)

And of course, the space bar will scroll down a web page in most browsers, as I mentioned in the intro. That’s about the easiest keyboard shortcut there is.

Next week – mouse shortcuts!

——————————————————————————————————-
Spread simplicity – forward The Weekly Simplifier to your friends and colleagues!
——————————————————————————————————-

5. In the News & On the Web

If you know of something in the news or on the web that should be featured here, let us know!

In The News

Professional organizer helps increase workplace productivity (The Reporter – Vacaville, CA)
URL: http://www.thereporter.com/business/ci_4086074
Excerpt: [The satisfied customer] added that while some people may view calling in a professional organizer as frivolous, “It’s not frivolous if you value your time as much as your money. If you are challenged by organizing, then you would be better off with someone to assist you, or you can languish in the self-imposed limbo that you’re in.” It’s like landscaping a home without any experience, he said. “If you have an idea what you want your landscaping to look like, you can choose to go out and start digging or you can hire a professional to come in and do it, make it look really nice and do it much quicker than you can,” he said. “This is the same thing.”

On The Web

A Balancing Act: Julie Morgenstern (Modern Mom)
URL: http://www.modernmom.com/content/2171
An organizational guru talks about being a mom, author, speaker, organizer, columnist, and businesswoman all at the same time.

6. Featured at ProjectSimplify.com

The Best of July

July was hot, hot, hot here at the Project Simplify world headquarters in Nevada County, California—but that didn’t stop our fearless leader from making some quality posts on our blog. Here are some of the best ones:

(Click an entry’s title to read the full entry.)

Appropriate solutions

Simplify by slowing down

More adventures in yoga

July 19 workshop recap

The relationship between ideas and writing

Independence Days I’d like to celebrate

7. Keep Smiling

Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments

There are a lot of reasons to smile about Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz’s bizarre fountain choreography:
1. It’s funny and weird
2. It’s amazing (in its own way)
3. The two “mad scientists” made nearly $30,000 from ad revenue on this video, which has been seen a zillion times across the Internet. (You can smile for them, or just smile about how the Internet makes the strangest opportunities possible.)

Either way, it’s worth watching if you haven’t seen it. It’s unlikely you’ve ever seen anything quite like it.

Here’s the URL: http://eepybird.com/dcm1.html#featured-video
(Work warning: the video has a music accompaniment, which is part of the effect.)

——-

Thanks for reading – see you next week!

Publication Information
————————————————————————–
The Weekly Simplifier is published by:

Project Simplify
P.O. Box 597
Nevada City, CA 95959
phone: 530.205.5775
web: www.projectsimplify.com
e-mail: newsletter@projectsimplify.com