A traveler’s best friend
Determine which restaurant, manicurist or dry cleaner in any city is worth a visit with Yelp.com. It’s the leading destination for local reviews.
Year: 2011
Cell phone turning your brain to mush?
The jury is still out on whether cell phone radiation has a negative effect on our brains. Regardless, most health researchers recommend that you hold a cell phone an inch or two from your ear. Their top tip?
Stay on top of the news
Stay on top of the headlines, even when you’re short on time, by scanning “Today’s Papers” on Slate.com. It gives a concise roundup of the major national newspapers’ front-page stories. You can also have it sent to your inbox daily.
How rude! Advice for the chronically late
Elizabeth asked how to help her tardy directors get to meetings on time. Many Forum readers agreed that enforcing punctual start times has to come from the top. “If the lead director is always late, then he’s setting the precedence that it’s OK.” Some techniques readers use to stop the rudeness include: scheduling “buffer time” between meetings, noting arrival times of participants in meeting minutes, emphasizing the amount of salary dollars wasted when meetings start late and even locking the conference door at start time!
Your network falling off? Reconnect
Reconnect with someone in your network with these two steps: 1. Don’t pretend that no time has passed. Instead of ignoring the elephant in the room, give the time lapse some rationale. 2. Explain the “why now?” Include the event that prompted you to get back in touch.
Sound knowledgeable
Sound knowledgeable about a potential employer’s business, during an unexpected call. Whenever you send out a resume, print pages from the organization’s web site and keep them near the phone, so you can quickly access it.
9 tips on writing effective surveys
What do your customers think? The answers are often uncovered through a survey. But writing a customer survey is more complicated than most people think. If you’re ever tasked with finding out what people think, use these tips for writing survey questions:
Crave a new role?
Pitch the idea to your manager, explaining how the change will benefit both your manager and the company. Then ask him to pilot the idea for 90 days. “Piloting is a great way to test out the new role and show results,” says career coach Maggie Mistal.
Rewarding great work? Don’t forget the fanfare
Question: “I have a small sales agency with only two employees. Both have been with me for more than ten years. Last week, I learned that our agency had qualified for a substantial bonus, which I decided to share with the staff. As they left on Friday, I gave each one a check worth about three months’ pay. I was disappointed when neither one called over the weekend to thank me. Do I have a right to feel hurt or am I taking this too personally?” —Ignored Manager
Making the leap to the ‘cloud’
If something happens to your computer, you have a backup drive. But what if something happens to the backup drive? That’s one reason many people are turning to “the cloud,” or remote computers that encrypt and store files.