Focus to Improve your Productivity, Kindle Top Tips, More Automation and a Little Doddsy update!

Published: Sat, 07/25/15

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Hi 

We were at The War and Peace Revival yesterday, which is - according to their website - the world's largest military show, each year seeing over 4,000 vehicles and 100,000 people. It is held less than a mile from our house and Little Doddsy's school took her to the schools' day there last year with me as one of the helpers. We enjoyed it so much that we went back with Daddy and this year took her cousins.

Granny got chatted up by 'Winston Churchill', the children got to drive miniature tanks and we got to listen to the lovely Swingtime Sweethearts who we seem to follow around, seeing them at Dover Castle regularly too.

The traffic for the show isn't helping the general traffic problems in our area with Operation Stack on though. I keep being surprised to hear that friends who don't live in Kent have no idea what's going on here at the moment.

When the port of Calais is closed due to strike action or bad weather, Operation Stack is implemented, which involves parking lorries on the M20 for miles. That then has a knock on effect on the local A roads and then the B roads too, to the point of almost gridlock.

With the recent strike action in Calais and problems with immigrants trying to 'storm' the tunnel causing closures on occasions not to mention bad weather in the Channel, Stack has been on and off almost daily for the last few weeks (and more on than off!). It's times like this that I'm glad I work from home!


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Kindle Top Tips

We were at our friends' this week just before they were due to go on holiday and they were lamenting that Archie's Kindle, that he only gets out for holidays, wasn't working.

Simon suggested we Google it to see if other people had had the same problem and found a solution, which I did and, guess what, they had and I fixed it!

So, if you've just tried to switch your Kindle on for the first time in ages and, despite charging it, nothing is happening. Just press the power button for 30 seconds and then release. And it should sort it out! 

The other Kindle tip this week is about using the 'Collections' functionality, which syncs across all devices connected to your Kindle account.  Up to now I've vaguely used Collections to 'file' books once I've read them so I can find them more easily.

At the moment I have a number of books and ebook documents that I am trying to get through by reading a little each day so I have created a .Specific Reading Collection  (using the dot so that it appears at the beginning) to 'move' those books to until I've read them. And you won't be surprised to hear that I've also got a 'To Implement' Collection for some of those that I have read!

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Focus to Improve Your Productivity

This week's main blog post (get me, posting more than one this week! Cheating a little mind you as the blog was a blog of last week's newsletter!) suggests that you 'Learn to Say No: Increase the Power of How You Spend Your Time'.

I've partly written the blog to link to the report that I mentioned last week that is now ready for download (not done that bit yet as I'm losing the will to live today...going round in circles with sign up forms and download pages). It's called 'Focus to Improve Your Productivity'.

I've also added the report to my main website sign up form so any new visitors can get access to it. To download the report if you're reading this email and hence are already on my list then please use this link Increase your Focus for Better Productivity

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Simplification, Processes and Automation

I've had another week of creating ingenious processes to speed up my work and stop me needing to remember to do stuff. Sharing in case this gives you some ideas for your own workflows.

This week's processes are:
  1. I've set up a 'track' on CapsuleCRM (basically a list of tasks, timed either from the date of the first activity or following the previous task) that 'fires' when I add a 'case' (this one being 'a new podcast to process') so that all the things I need to do then appear in my Todoist account on the relevant day. Most of this was done in CapsuleCRM using its own functionality and then the 'zap' I already have set up in 'Zapier' to add any tasks from there into Todoist kicks in.
  2. When someone books in to record a podcast interview with me using my TimeTrade account I had to then separately create a GotoMeeting link. It doesn't take that long but was just a bit of a pain. So, now I have a 'zap' that checks my google calendar for any bookings that have 'POWERtoLiveMore Podcast' as a subject and it then automatically sets up a GotoMeeting booking. Next job is to work out how to automatically email my guest with those details or add them to their calendar! 
The things that keep me happy :-)

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Blogger Babes

Since I've started this website and newsletter and got back to blogging regularly I've been really impressed with Blogger Babes. I have downloaded a few of their books and joined their mailing list and I've now also invested in their monthly programme. I'm really impressed so far. 

They're aimed at women (obviously!) and very pink with their branding, so not for everyone, but if you are a female blogger you may well be interested in taking a look. Their 'The Ultimate Blogging Binder' is a really great gift download, worth checking out.

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For Those of You Who Enjoy the Little Doddsy Updates!

Little Doddsy came home the day before the last day of the school year telling us she needed to create a script for 15 people in her class, along with a PowerPoint that she also needed to create, to give a (surprise) thank you presentation to her teacher the next day. Great! She ended up staying up until 11pm and getting up at 7am to do it all before school.

Apparently (and this is Ellie's explanation of how it went!) when they did the presentation it went a little wrong when one of the other girls got upset that Ellie was 'leading' on it and the teaching assistant said 'you're not in charge Ellie', I assume as she was being a bit bossy. She apparently coped with it fine but was a little disappointed that they hadn't quite 'performed' as planned.

My reflection was that given she had done pretty much all the physical preparation for the presentation with no help from the others save the initial discussion and ideas for it, I think she may have deserved to feel a little like she was 'in charge'! Having said that, it was a great learning experience for her on so many levels ;-)


We dropped her, this morning, at a three day summer school for Kent County Junior Singers held at a local independent boarding school. This time last year we were off there for her audition. She's even more excited this time. She's even taken Mallory Towers with her to ensure she's getting the full experience!

So it's a little quiet here this weekend!

PS My podcast recording is going well so I hope to be launching it if not in August then early September; watch this space and let me know if you want to come on it!