So, I'm scrounging today - first time in a while I haven't had a post lined up and ready to go ahead of time. And I'm thinking of things I did today, since it was the first work day (for me) of the month, and I thought of something very useful. Stationery in Eudora! Stationery is a great way to save yourself from having to retype the same, or similar emails over and over again over time. Read on...

This is a basic post, but sometimes it surprises me the number of people unaware of the computing resources available to employees off campus, so I thought I'd catalog them over the next few posts. Today's post is about email.

Yeah, the title doesn't make sense unless you are picking up on the John Lennon lyrics. But, this is a continuation of last week's post about resources available from off-campus "getting you through the night".

The rest of the resources are a little more self-explanatory.

I recently cleared my desk and it feels great. For those of you who don't know my office, let me step back.

There are three types of offices in my opinion. The sterile office, the trashed office, and those in between. I fall in between for sure. I won't suggest what's best, because what's best is what works for you. Permit me a story about retired professor James Lombardi. (Not the current Lombardi, but his dad.) He got a call from security one night saying that Carr Hall had been broken in to. The intruders got into his office and absolutely trashed it. James hurried over that night to inspect the damage to his office, looked at the horrified security guard, and said something like "What? It looks fine to me!"

I have been bad at posting again - this past week has been very hectic, really ever since I cleared my desk before my last post.

It's very easy to slip into bad habits and my worst habits are:

1. Letting work pile up on my desk with no organization.
2. Letting email pile up in my inbox with no organization.

When these two things happen, I start to spend more time trying to figure out what I need to do than actually doing it again. Not good. And what is the point of staying organized when if the chips are down and it's crunch time, it doesn't help anyway. However, I find myself falling back on one BIG tip that keeps me sane during the very disorganized times, and that's free text search, Ctrl-F, either in Eudora, MeetingMaker, on web pages, or big documents (Word, PDF). When I'm in a hurry, I press Ctrl-F and search for a word in what I'm looking for. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people panic and search through their email, email by email, instead of just using Ctrl-F and searching for a key word.

I've even found something similar in Datatel that unfortunately won't apply to 99% of the people reading this post, but maybe take an opportunity to think more about how you can quickly find things in the programs you use, instead of hunting and searching line by line, or screen by screen.

Yep, this is a repeat idea, but I wanted to at least post something to prove I hadn't forgotten about you guys.