Secrets of Personal Effectiveness in a Digital Age

Secrets of Personal Effectiveness in a Digital Age

Copyright (c) 2008 Escape The Matrix LLC

There are three stellar books that have made a major impact in my personal effectiveness: 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People (Dr. Steven R. Covey), First Things First (Roger Merrill), and 4 Hour Work Week (Timothy Ferriss). I am going to share three principles from this study that I hope will make a huge difference in your personal effectiveness, as it has mine!

Principle 1. KNOW WHAT YOU SEEK. According to Dr. Covey, human beings are comprised of four different fundamental areas: mental, physical, spiritual, and social/ emotional. Take a sheet of paper, write down the four things, and ask this question: What one thing could I do, that would bring the greatest positive improvement in this area?

Next, identify the different “roles” you play in your life. Things like wife, husband, father, mother, daughter, member of a community, church or club, entrepreneur, cyclist, etc. Then ask the question for each of these roles as well. You now have a list of goals that cover every important area of your life.

Principle 2. DEVELOP A DAILY AND WEEKLY METHOD OF OPERATION. (MO). First, throw most of your long range goals in the trash. They’re meaningless. Why? Because they delude you into thinking that it doesn’t matter what you do TODAY. But today is all you have. Is it possible to reach a five year goal if you aren’t taking the daily steps to achieve it? Yet not everything has to be done on a daily basis, some thing are best performed weekly. For example, in the role of “husband” I try to have a date once a week with my wife. Weekly makes more sense than daily. But monthly isn’t near enough! Very few goals outside of daily or weekly make sense. So take all the goals determined above, and develop your daily and weekly method of operation. Write them down on a single piece of paper, and display it where you will see it often.

Principle 3. REDUCE AND SIMPLIFY. Think you don’t have enough time? Think again. You have just as much time in the day as Mother Teresa or Bill Gates. One major difference between highly effective and dysfunctional people is simply in the use of time.

Every morning, look at your daily and weekly MO. Start into those most important activities you have chosen, and stay on task until they’re all done. Do not let ANYTHING distract you from each item. And don’t multi-task. Do one at a time through to completion.

There are four things you will have to manage if you want to do this effectively: e-mail, the telephone, media, and other people.

E-mail. Many experts tell us that e-mail wastes more time than any other business practise. And very few e-mails are mission critical. Here are some steps to take in killing this time sucking, income reducing monster: 1. Turn off the “you’ve got mail” sound on your computer.

2. Only check your e-mail twice per day, once per day if possible. The best times are noon and 4 PM. If once only, then do it at 4. If you need to, set up an autoresponse letting people know that you are only checking your e-mail at 4 PM, and if it’s an emergency item to call you on the phone. When I started checking e-mail twice a day I thought I would miss out on opportunities or cause grief to colleagues. Surprisingly, within a week I was down to once a day, and my personal effectiveness was through the roof.

3. Be aggressive in eliminating e-mail, and be quick to hit delete. If you have dysfunctional friends that think they need to send you stupid “pass this on to 10 people and…” e-mails, politely ask them to stop sending them. Unsubscribe from mailing lists. Don’t feel obligated to respond to every e-mail you receive. The delete button is your friend.

Telephone. Do you feel like a ringing phone is an emergency? It’s not. Believe it or not, the world will still function just fine without you for a few hours. Learn to ignore the phone while working on your priorities, and let voice mail do its job.

Media. Kill it. Cancel your newspaper. It’s only filling your head with negative crap anyway. Stop watching the news, reading magazines, and celebrity gossip at your home page. Do not surf the internet idly. It’s a good idea to change your home page to a plain one without any media or news, like google.com, or a site that helps you achieve one of your major goals. Think you’ll miss out on something big if you cut media out of your life? Nope. Trust me, if a major earthquake sinks a continent, you’ll hear about it real quick.

Other people. This one you have to be careful with. What’s the point of life if not for the relationships we have? At the same time, if you implement these principles, you’ll actually have MORE time for those you care about most. The key is to not let others invade your sacred space when you are working on your MO’s. Use the “do not disturb” button, warn your family before you go into your office, and take care of interruptions quickly. That will help you eliminate casual, time wasting interactions, saving time for the important, planned people time that you create through being more effective.

The 80/20 rule dictates that 80 percent of the results are achieved by only 20 percent of the work. By using these principles you can eliminate the 80 percent, work only on the 20, and cut your work time down while increasing your effectiveness and creating time for those things that matter most in your life!

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SEO Strategy – Building a Personal Brand

SEO Strategy – Building a Personal Brand

One of the latest buzzword expressions in the exciting world of Search Engine Optimization is “Personal Brand”. For all of those business owners and consultants unfamiliar with the meaning of Personal Brand, it is pretty much self explanatory. Developing your own personal brand instead of signing onto a familiar online company brand has numerous recognized benefits and will make you definitely stand out from the crowd.

New clients are always looking for cutting-edge and innovation. With your own independent products and brand, a solid SEO strategy and targeted marketing, your online reputation will be unstoppable and will land you even more customers.

Climbing the Google rankings is much easier for entrepreneurs with a genuine personal brand. They do not get lost in the big melting pot of related namesakes and their uniqueness is more recognizable when participating in social media networking campaigns.  Indeed, working the crowd is not only profitable for pop stars, but even the smallest business can expand its horizons drastically by taking advantage of social networks such as YouTube, Twitter, Blogger, Flikr, My Space and Facebook.

If you carry a personal brand, portray yourself in a positive light. As part of your SEO strategy, identify your strengths and capitalize on them. Utilize every media available to you to spread the word about your enterprise and, remember, some of the key social media networking websites are free. 

The sooner you make it into the spotlight, the quicker your search engine rankings will improve. If you are uncertain on what to get your personal brand highlighted, continue to read on.

Blogging

A weblog or blog is a website where events, products, ideas, or thoughts are described and revealed through written content, graphics or videos. Blog websites can be hosted by a company or personal domain and are updated frequently. Signing up with them is a great way to build a strong reputation fast, or to get known in specific industries, which are related to your business. Blogging can strengthen your company, attract customers and, through your profile page, show who you are.

Guest blogging

Having your personal blog may not be enough, even if you update the content regularly and keep it fresh. Posting additional articles on similar and related websites can be even more beneficial. You can expand your audience of readers and enhance your online reputation.

Twitter

Twitter and blogging are based on similar concepts. While blogs have no set length, text-based Tweet posts cannot display more than 140 characters. Blogs can be read by most everyone, while Tweet followers need to be subscribed to the tweeter’s profile page.

Business networking

LinkedIn and Plaxo are two key business networking sites. They are often used by smart business people to display their professional profile and career history. Through these, and similar sites, old contacts can reconnect and new ones can be found.

Presentation uploads

Workshops, seminars, and conferences are a great way to impress potential business partners and clients. Uploading your presentations on sites, such as SlideShare and Scribd will allow viewers to download and review your speeches and supporting documents. It will also give them a chance to share it with others, which is a great way to continue optimizing you and your company’s name.

Video presentations

Although not much different from seminar speech uploads, video uploads can highlight a variety of life presentations and increase your online exposure, especially if you use targeted headlines, specific keywords and title tags. Most people today are familiar with websites like YouTube and Vimeo, virtual markets where creative and topical videos frequently enjoy viral growth and draw millions of hits.

Whatever strategy you finally decide on, make sure to let the social networking force work for you. Use all venues available online and keep adding to your repertoire as much as you can. Sign up for profile pages on prominent sites such as Facebook, Digg and StumbleUpon, and contribute to social media communities any chance you get. The more exposure you have, the quicker your personal brand will become a major hit on all key search engine ranking pages and lift your profit margin to new heights.

Visit Shout SEO Services to find out more.

Add The Personal Touch To Blogging With Video

Many people spend so much time dedicated to typing about the latest things in their lives. For some, this takes up time that would be spent missing the ones they love.
As millions of people are in the world, many are experiencing the hardship of being able to keep consistent communications open with the ones they love when they are far from their families and friends. I have seen this time and time again.
I have watched countless friends who rely on the modern day blogging to send updates on their lives to the ones they love. The costs of phones are way too high now days and emails are well enough if only you didn’t have to reiterate all the time. Now, people are using blogs for a whole new purpose. To reduce the time that they spend blooging, many people have taken to video updates.
I have seen some women use this to upload messages to family as they move after they get married. One woman posted her birth on a page so that her family can just go online and view for themselves rather than using the money to make the DVDs that she would have had to send had blogs not been invented. And postage just increases just like everything else in the States!
Barriers are being knocked down by this new method of blogging as well. It sends a personal touch to the things you are talking about. Family members and friends can see the true emotions that stem from the things that are taking place. For some individuals with disabilities, this is a way for them to communicate. They can’t tell their great news over the phone like one of my friends whose deaf so she tapes herself signing the news.
What a thrill it is to have a way to get news quickly! It has allowed soldiers who have minimum time on their hands to be able to get messages to those who are waiting at home, anticipating an update and as a daughter of a soldier I know how important those moments are. When you might not be able to get a call due to low power but you can go online and hear their voice.
Or see the face that at times you think you have forgotten. Those moments that happen come and go so quickly and now thanks have been giving as people are being united to be able to share in events that some people just shouldn’t miss.

Nokia N93i: Make your Personal Film

Nokia has brought a new phone, the Nokia N93i – a digital camcorder and multimedia device that allows users to capture quality videos or can make short films on the move. Endowed with film making features, the Nokia N93i offers a wide range of advanced features including a 3.2 MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics, 3x digital zoom, auto-focus and more.

The Nokia N93i has been designed and featured to shoot DVD-like videos in MPEG4 format. The device captures videos with a speed of up to 30 frames per second – enabling stereo audio recording combined with digital stabilization. As far as phone memory is concerned, the Nokia N93i comes with up to 1GB of miniSD card that can accommodate up to 45 minutes of DVD-quality videos and up to 1250 excellent images.

The device comes with a metallic finish keypad and a mirror effect cover. Boasted with a large 2.4” main display with 16 million colours, 160 degree viewing angle, dedicated camera button – its very easy to shoot pictures and videos on the go. The Nokia N93i also comes with video and photo blogging features – making it easy to share with the world. Built on S60 3rd Edition Symbian OS, it also comes packed with Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 software.

Endowed with 3G mobile technology, the Nokia N93i works on WLAN, EDGE and GSM network. With excellent voice and data connectivity features, this high profile phone offers broadband speed mobile Internet. In addition, you can also enjoy browsing features like MP3 music playback, podcasts, stereo FM radio and mobile TV video streaming.

The Nokia N93i also comes with direct TV out functionality – allowing users to watch phone videos and images on a large TV screen. Moreover, users can also use an integrated wireless LAN technology to connect to UPnP enabled device. Start shooting videos and pictures and enjoy watching on a compatible TV screen. Nokia N93i

some personal reviews on how to share classic movies, DV clips with a video to flash converter?

1. Most of us must have watched some very classic movies like “Gone With the Wind”, “Titanic” etc, some astonishing, romantic scenes just impress you so much and every now and then you can’t help thinking of them. Why not cropping those classic scenes and turn them into smaller, safer Flash movies, which you can insert into your webpage or email to others. Don’t worry that would be a tough task, just add video – choose favorite scene – edit it – publish as HTML or .SWF file.

 

2. You may have taken a lot of home videos of different occasions with your DV. Watching those videos is fun already, why don’t you add more fun by turning them into a complete, stunning flash movie? Each Flash movie can tell a full story! You can adjust the size of videos, add background music and also apply special effects, make them entertaining and even touching. When you watch those amazing home-made Flash videos, every movie would remind you those precious times: Birthday parties, families gather-together, wedding anniversaries…Everything is just like yesterday once more.

 

3. After finishing your Flash movie, looking at those stunning creations, you must feel proud of yourself. Why not let others share your works together? You can convert them to FLV or SWF for emailing with ease, or publish to HTML for sharing on the Internet; you can also upload them to a free web space up to 100M to store and manage.

Now,action is better than just thinking.Free download wondershare video to flash encoder today!

Related article:hwo to convert mpeg to flv/swf

How to Watch Satellite TV on Personal Computers

No one could have thought that this is the decade when we can watch satellite TV on personal computers. Tell that to someone about 10 years ago and people will jeer at your somewhat out of the world imagination. But the truth is digital technology has seen many new frontiers being broken and re-established with new gadgets such as digital photography, skype and now the equipment to watch satellite TV on personal computers. It is the intention of our article to discuss the two ways to do so.

There are already websites online that allow you to watch satellite TV on your personal computers. Of course, there is a variety of tradition television channels as well as some hip entertainment programs like MTV and so on. More importantly, more foreign channels are getting on board to broadcast television in foreign languages other than English ones. If you have fond likings for home videos, you can even watch some home-made videos at sites like YouTube, Google Video, Eye Spot and so on.

Another more popular way to watch satellite TV on personal computers is to make use of software called PC satellite TV software. This little piece of application can be downloaded online via retail sites and enables your computer to access more than 3000 satellite TV stations worldwide. Trust me, 3000 satellite stations is a lot. You probably will take one whole year to watch all the channels available. But in case you get so overwhelmed and start thinking that it is going to be challenging to find what you like, it is not. The search features and tagged description of each channel makes the whole channel search and management a breeze.

But there are quite a number of software providers out in the market which provide different versions. All allow you to watch satellite TV on personal computers instantly. The only differences are in the number of channels, the pricing and the customer support. Oh yes, be sure to check out the software specifications to ensure that it is compatible with your PC. I forgot to mention one more important thing. To optimize the transmission of the TV feeds, it is best that you have broadband at home. Other than that, the requirements are quite simple and minimal.

Conduct simple research to find out which is the most popular software that most TV viewers are using to watch satellite TV on personal computers. There are also forums and blogs that discuss about this so be sure to check them out. The beautiful thing about this software is that you can practically install it on any computer be it a laptop or desktop and start using anywhere in the world as long as there is internet connection.

The PC satellite TV software usually costs lesser than $60 and is a far cry from the monthly bills we are used to getting from the satellite TV providers. Talking about value for money, we are getting way more channels using software than subscribing for TV packages which can be quite limited in choices. And many TV viewers including myself simply hate the pay-per-view concept.

This is the latest development in satellite TV entertainment. So why not check out my satellite blog to get more information on how to watch satellite TV on personal computers?

How to Publish Flash Videos in Your Personal Home Page

Do you like taking home videos yourself? Have you ever thought of publishing your videos in your personal home page to personalize your space, or share them with your friends in your blog and internet space? Do you have problems of uploading the video in a specific format?

This tutorial is to show you the way to make your videos acceptable to your home page, and gives you a path to make your page unique.

What format should we have?

For playing on websites, you have many choices, such as FLV, SWF, and HTML, or WMV, AVI (as YouTube accepts).

WMV and AVI files are much larger in size, so here we are using FLV, SWF, and HTML.

How to generate these files?

 

There are many converters which can convert home videos into those formats. Here we introduce you Flash Video MX Pro.

 

It can generate Flash movie (SWF) as the FLV player embedded in an HTML page for easier sharing and promotion.

 

How to convert and edit your video?

 

Install and launch Flash Video MX Pro.

 

Step1 Open Files

 

In this interface, you can follow the instruction as follows:

 

 

 

1. Import video. This program supports videos in any possible format, such as DVD, MPEG, AVI, MPG, WMV, RM, RMVB, MOV, ASF, MP4, 3GP, etc.

 

Click on  to input videos.

 

2. Edit. You can either fill in the exact time in the time box and click, or drag the control bar to set the start time and end time. And things are similar with cropping the border of the video.

 

3. Effect. You can set brightness, contrast, and volume of the video. Deinterlace to avoid the artifact, degradation of DVD video. And flip, if the video is upside down. To quit all your settings here, you can click “reset.

 

4. Watermark. If you want to add image or text as watermark to your video, you can set in this section. Press, and select the right material. Then you can drag the bar to set the start time and end time for showing the watermark.

 

 

5. Snapshot. In this section, you can capture a picture as the first frame of the output SWF file.

 

6. In CuePoint section, you can add subtitle to the video.

 

Click “Next to the next section.

 

Step 2 Export

 

In this section, you can edit the output folder, output format, and video & audio settings.

 

If you would like to combine this video with one or two others, you can add them by “Video prelude and “Video curtain. You can also change the proportion of the video, but you’d better keep the original size for a better quality.

 

Step 3 Player settings.

 

 

 

Here you can add many personalized effects to your flash. Such as control bar, preloader and some special effects.

Press “Next to continue.

Step 4 Review the parameters.

 

This is the second part from the last. You can review some relative parameters here. If you find something wrong, you can press “Back, to reset.

 

 

Step 5 Convert

 

After the settings above, you can start to convert. The output folder will pop up as soon as the conversion is finished.

How to embed SWF file into an HTML page?

 

You can code the page like the following:

–>

 

Well, have you noticed the mflvplayer.swf in blue?

 

The width=”400″ height=”300″ in black indicates the width and the height of your video.

 

The playerOpts=targetClip*demo.flv*s in bold indicates the name of the FLV file to be played while demo.flv is your video. You might be curious about targetClip, the asterisk separator and the “s” in the end.

In fact, playerOpts is not that simple. PlayerOpts consists of several segments, each of which is separated by “||”, and each segment contains a property of the control bar. One segment is divided into 3 parts by the asterisk (*). The first part is the property name, the second part is the property value and the third part is the data type of the property. For instance, targetClip*demo.flv*s is a segment, targetClip is the property name, demo.flv is the property value and the “s” is the character string type of this property. This segment is to specify the path from which the control bar can play the video. There are also other properties. You can set multiple properties at a time, using “||” to separate different segments, code like the following:

playerOpts=targetClip*demo.flv*s||panelColor*255,0,0*c

 

In this way, when you are setting the targetClip property, you are also setting the panel color property. The panel color is the control bar color, the data type is color “c”, and 255,0,0 is the RGB color. Please notice that the property name and data type are case sensitive.