Handheld Wisdom
Using the Handheld PC and Windows CE operating system to increase your personal effectiveness
By Rich Hall
Managing Editor, Handheld PC Magazine
Make the most of your time: Group your Tasks list by activity
Use time-cues to stay on schedule with visitors
"Boilerplate" saves hours of paperwork
Keep boilerplate in a database
Remembering a person's name
Make the most of your time: Group your Tasks list by activity
Effective time management means avoiding unnecessary repeat actions that waste time and money. With a busy schedule and a long list of Tasks, it's easy to find yourself running in circles -- going back to a store to buy forgotten items, or calling someone two or three times when once was all you needed. Grouping your Tasks by activity can solve this problem.
ON THE H/PC
Open any task and you'll notice a field called "Project." This field was designed to enter the project a particular task is associated with. You can also use it to enter the type of activity you are going to do. For example, my Tasks tend to fall in a number of distinct types: CALLS I need to make, things I want to READ, items I want to BUY, places I need to GO, etc. When it was time to go to the store, I used to waste a lot of time scrolling through my tasks list to find the things I wanted to buy. Then I started entering BUY in the Project field of a task associated with an item I needed to purchase. Now, when it's time to go shopping, I open tasks, tap on the tasks pull-down menu at the top of the screen, and select BUY. Only the items I have to buy are displayed in my Tasks list.
Use time-cues to stay on schedule with visitors
Leaders like to be "accessible" to employees or visitors, yet still get everything on their Tasks list done. B. Eugene Griessman's Time Tactics of Very Successful People (McGraw-Hill, 1994) suggests expanding your "time-cue" vocabulary. Time-cues signal to others how much time you really have for them. For example, you can signal the close of a meeting in your office by standing up and moving towards the door, or saying, "John, before I have to take my next appointment, I need to ask you,..."
ON THE H/PC
Used with discretion, the H/PC's Calendar alarm can signal the end of a meeting. In Calendar, as a meeting begins, tap your meeting appointment record twice (or select it and press (Ctrl)+(E) ) to edit it. Replace the "Starts" time with the time you wish to end the meeting, then make sure the "Remind Me" box is checked so that the alarm will ring. You might set the reminder alarm to go off at least five minutes early so you can finish a point. At the appropriate time, you and your guest will hear the cue and wind the discussion to a close.
The technique of using a Calendar alarm as a time-cue can be used for regular staff meetings that tend to go on longer than is useful.
"Boilerplate" saves hours of paperwork
"Boilerplating" is an efficiency lover's dream, ideally suited to Handheld PCs or any computer. Whenever you insert a standardized block of text into a document, you are taking advantage of this time-saving technique.
ON THE H/PC
For example, let's say you are a tax consultant who likes to correspond on-the-go using the H/PC. In your letters you find yourself giving the same answer about capital gains tax to many different clients. If you're smart, you save the answer and paste it into each new document, rather than rewrite it each time. First save the answer as a Pocket Word document (name the file "CapGains").
Whenever you get the question again, open a new Word document, type in: "Dear John, Thanks for the question on capital gains tax...."Then tap on File to get the pull-down menu and tap again on Open to get a list of available documents. Tap twice on "CapGains" to open a separate Word document.
Finally, you need to cut and paste between the two documents. In the CapGains document, press (Ctrl)+(A) to select all the text. Next, press (Ctrl)+(C) to copy the text to the Windows "Clipboard." Exit the CapGains document and you should be back in the original document you were creating. Make sure the cursor is where you want to add the boilerplate and press (Ctrl)+(V) to paste in the capital gains information. Look over the boilerplate to make sure it fits the letter. You may have to change tense to make it agree with the letter. Then save the document.
Keep boilerplate in a database
You can create databases for the H/PC with software products like AllPen Mobile Database (800-526-3977) and Visual CE (617-497-1300). Or you can use the built-in Contacts database for this purpose. The idea is to keep your boilerplate in the database, with a descriptive title in the Name field and the actual text of the boilerplate in the Notes field (Screen 1).
Screen1: You can use the Contacts database to keep boilerplate. The Last, First Name field identifies the document. Place the word "boilerplate" in the Company field and the actual text in the Notes field. When you tap on the Company header in the main screen, the list is alphabetized by company name and all the boilerplate is grouped together in the list.
ON THE H/PC
We'll use the built-in Contacts database for this example. Let's say you're a sales professional and you need to keep boilerplate for the benefits and features of the products you sell.
- Open your Windows CE Contacts application and tap on the New Contact icon on the Toolbar at the top of the screen to add a new contact card. Tap on the Business tab to the left to make sure you're in the portion of the card that records business information.
- Then in the <Name> field enter the name of the product (for this example, we'll call the product the "Widget1"). Since you're already using Contacts for address and phone information, you'll want a way to group the boilerplate in the list so it doesn't get mixed in with the names and phone numbers of people. Contacts alphabetizes the list by last name. If you enter a two-word product name (i.e., "Widget One") Contacts assumes that the second word is the last name. You could enter the names of all your boilerplate followed by a space and the letter "z" (i.e., "Widget1 z"). Contacts would assume that "z" is the last name and alphabetize all the entries at the bottom of the list.
- Another way to do this is to put the word "Boilerplate" in the Company field for the contact. When you go to the main Contacts list and tap on the Company button at the top of that column, Contacts alphabetizes the list by company name and all of the Boilerplate is listed together. (You can place additional important information in other fields. For the above example, you could place the part number for Widget1 in the Work Tel field, the unit price in the Home Tel field, etc.)
- Finally, go to the entry's Notes field and enter the boilerplate associated with that product. It may be a description of the product, its features and benefits, a more complete pricing list, or any information about the product you end up putting in a memo or letter over and over again. If you have this information in a word processing document on your PC or company computer network, you can convert it to MS Word format, transfer it to your Handheld PC, open it in Pocket Word and copy and paste the information from Pocket Word to Contact.
Now the boilerplate is easily accessible. Say, for example, you are writing a follow-up letter to a prospective client about a product. You open up Pocket Word, type in the introductory material (i.e., "Sue, I enjoyed meeting you at the Consumer Electronics Show..."). You then open Contacts, tap on the "Company" button at the top of that column. Find the appropriate boilerplate. Tap on the entry and tap again on the Notes tab. Highlight the desired portion of the text in Notes. Press CTRL-C to copy the text into the H/PC's clipboard. Go back to the Pocket Word document, make sure the cursor is in the place you want to insert the boilerplate, and press CTRL-V to paste in the boilerplate.
Edit the material as necessary to make sure it doesn't sound like boilerplate, then save the letter.
Apply boilerplating to other uses -- you can boilerplate any material you write, over and over again. Any expert consultant can receive hundreds of requests for information. Stock answers kept on the Handheld PC as boilerplate save time and let a consultant answer more requests for information.
A real estate investor or agent writing a contract can pull out a database of standard clauses for modifying a contract. A professor with 100's of essays to read and give feedback on, can store an assortment of often-used comments and cut them into his or her written feedback quickly and easily.
The concept of boilerplating can be used with spreadsheet templates or database files as well as text documents. In any case, the trick is to identify blocks of text, formulas and formats that you use over and over again, and save them as a boilerplate for future use.
In both friendship and business, remembering a person's name can play an important role in establishing trust in the business and personal relationship. A common way to remember names is to put a list on your bathroom mirror or your car dashboard. Some people will associate key words with the names on the list to help them remember. The problem is that after a day or two, we usually don't notice the list again.
ON THE H/PC
You can set a repeating Appointment in Calendar to help you remember names fast. Set up an appointment with the person's name (and a key word or two if you want) in the Description field of the Appointment. Tap on the Recur tab and enter the desired frequency you want the appointment to come due. The more often, the quicker you'll learn the name. But it can get annoying.
Now each time your alarm goes off, the person's name you want to remember (and any key words you have with it) will appear in the Alarm screen of your Handheld PC. Read the name and key words to yourself, preferably out loud. You can press the "5 min snooze button" to repeat the name a little later. Doing this repeatedly should ensure that you remember the person's name. You can also use repeating Appointment alarms to remind yourself of affirmations, new words for your vocabulary, or key phrases or equations for an upcoming exam.